Avoid Email Campaign Chaos

Become an email marketing all-star by creating killer email campaigns that catch customers’ attention.

Avoid Email Campaign Chaos

Become an email marketing all-star by creating killer email campaigns that catch customers’ attention.

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Another email?! Your inbox may be tired and bursting at the seams, so you know just how your customers feel. As marketers look for more and more reasons to email their customers, they also need to be aware of the po-

tential effects of poorly planned email campaigns. Batch-and-blast email marketing is quickly becoming a thing of the past and customers look for communications they’ll care about. Personalize message and customers will respond by opening and clicking more.

Read how companies such as Diamond Candles and Uber are leveraging email marketing to heat up their customer relationships and motor past their competitors. Plus, go in-depth on the latest email strategies, including how to analyze email data, reawaken inactive subscribers, and write subject lines that spur opens.

By staying up-to-date on the email strategies that work best for others, marketers can adapt the ones most likely to help revive their email strategies and reignite their campaign results. —Heather Freitag

2: Introduction

4: It’s Time to Shake Up Email Marketing

5: How to Give Email That Personal Touch

6: Diamond Candles’ Triggered Emails Spark Blazing Results

7: Mobile Email Conversion Rates Grow

8: Email Marketers Are Failing to Engage New Subscribers

9: Inside the Inbox

10: The Best (and Worst) Words to Use in an Email Subject Line

11: Email Marketing Versus Social Media

12: Email and Phone Uber Alles

13: How to Activate Your Inactive Email Subscribers

14: Email Marketers Aren’t Out of the Woods [Infographic]

15: Voices from the Twittersphere

Table of Contents

It’s Time to Shake Up Email Marketing

Email may be mature, but it’s time for it to be more cougar than matron. By Ginger Conlon

Email is an effective, mature channel. Research from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that email returns $39 for every dollar spent. Even so, the time has come for email to don some stilettos and head out to the omnichannel party if it’s pop-ularity is to continue.

“Marketers have really rich, email-centric data,” Kristin Nara-gon, director of email solutions for Adobe, told me during a recent conversation about the state of email marketing. “And there’s lots of talk among marketers today about adding other channels [to their email campaigns], but it doesn’t mean much if there’s no cohesion.”

According to research by Adobe and DMA, 60% of email mar-keters say email is part of a larger cross-channel strategy, but only 36% said it’s “the central means of communication for our cross-channel marketing strategy.”

“Remaking email as the heart of the cross-channel strategy is a huge opportunity,” Naragon said.

So, Naragon’s goal is to “disrupt the chaos” and get marketers to think past an email-centric view. And based on the Adobe/DMA research, now is the ideal time to shake things up. More than half of respondents (51%) say they’re challenged by a lim-ited email-only view instead of having access to a true 360-de-gree customer view, 41% are stifled by the inability to automate email campaigns with multiple touchpoints in their entirety, and 38% are challenged by an inefficient connection with other

marketing tools. In fact, only 54% of email marketers surveyed coordinate email with offline channels and just 46% use infor-mation from other channels to guide their email campaigns.

Another reason the time to shake things up is now? Only one third of email marketers surveyed are happy with their cur-rent email service provider (ESP). That means that two thirds are potentially open to something new, Naragon pointed out, adding that it’s a great opportunity for marketers and vendors alike. “Email is still the glue and delivers the best marketing ROI, but it’s been a bit stale,” she said. “So, now it’s time to shake up the market.”

Indeed, email marketers are looking to get more from their email efforts. Those surveyed say their priorities include having real-time integration with analytics tools (44%), taking real-time actions based on customer behaviors (44%), and tapping into their company’s content library to deliver more personalized communications (45%). Other strategies that respondents con-sider potentially high impact: 72% say technology that enables a 360-degree view of interactions and 64% say technology that enables real-time, cross-channel email insight; 68% cite the abil-ity to test and iterate email campaigns; and 67% say the ability to share email content seamlessly across silos and channels. Ad-ditionally, 60% claim that a CMO who values the integration of email with other channels would be a high-impact strategy.

“Respondents’ priorities are encouraging for us and debunk the naysayers who say that email’s dead or passé,” Naragon said. “But the research also points to a mature market that until re-cently hasn’t needed to change. Now’s the time…to change it.”

Naragon pointed out how closely email marketers’ challenges and priorities are linked. The marketers surveyed are look-ing for better data and analytics integration to deliver more contextually relevant messaging, for example. This includes conducting A/B testing at the email open to ensure that what’s displayed is relevant based on location or a recent customer action, or using real-time data to decide the next best action, whether that’s an offer or content. “There are ways to make that happen,” Naragon said. “This is real, here, and now; it’s no longer aspirational.”

And the marketers who are first to the party will outshine those who are fashionably late.

“We’re at a cool moment,” Naragon told me with enthusiasm. “The market is shifting. It’s ripe for disruption. Consumers are giving brands more information, but they’re expecting some-thing in return. They’re forgiving brands now for the misses, but not for long. Soon their expectations will be even higher than they already are. Marketers with big aspirations are great, but change isn’t always fast.” Today, it needs to be.

How to Give Email That Personal Touch

A personal touch can ignite conversations, build relationships—and boost sales. By Natasha D. Smith

Little can make as much of an impact on customers’ minds, emotions, and decisions as a personal touch.

In fact, it’s those intimate details about a person—his likes, dis-likes, motivations, preferences—that are the keys which unlock relationships with customers. “Personalizing marketing messag-es enables a conversation to happen,” says Loretta Jones, VP of marketing at CRM software provider Insightly. “Personal touches result in people feeling like the brand…cares about their problems and understands their needs, not just trying to make a sale. It’s how customer relationships are built.”

In this lucid Q&A, Jones spells out how marketers can bring that personal touch to email. Here she reveals why all marketers in small and large companies should be making moves to per-sonalize—and the consequences for those who don’t.

So according to Experian, an overwhelming 70% of surveyed brands failed to personalize their email messages in 2013. Why do you think so many marketers just aren’t personalizing?

A lack of personalization could be attributed to a lack of access to the data that makes email messages truly personal.

Marketing automation is a step, but just inserting the recip-ient’s name doesn’t make a message personal. Commenting on something they have or have not done is a better strategy for providing an excellent customer experience. It is helpful to set up a system that segments your customers to build and support conversations. It’s important to set up your busi-ness using this strategy. Ideally, marketers could set up their communication applications this way, but in reality, this is probably something that would happen once a user base has been established.

And why exactly should marketers consider personalizing their email marketing messages? What should they be look-ing to get from this?The main goal for marketers should be to find out all there is to know about their customers’ needs, through demographic in-formation and behavioral data. Once these needs are identified, engaging in personal conversations about how to fulfill them can help marketers become trusted resources. Customers are more comfortable talking to brands about their problems once that trust is developed. From there, marketers can use customer feedback to build more effective campaigns.

Tell us, how is personalization different today than, say, five—or even one—years ago?There is more technology today to help marketers create per-sonalized messages and gain access to richer data. With new technology in the business intelligence space and the use of data management platforms (DMPs), marketers can take advantage of prospecting tools that help them to get to know the customer well before the initial point of contact. The availability of demo-graphic data also helps marketers learn about a person before they become a customer.

What are some of the least obvious ways to personalize an email?Asking questions is a way to engage a customer in a natural way.

Marketing is very similar to dating. If you go on a date with someone and they are talking about themselves the whole time, you are less likely to go out with that person again. As for mar-keting, if a customer is being bombarded with irrelevant emails, and not being asked questions about what they need as a user, the odds of the customer wanting to participate with the brand are slim. Marketers need to provide customers a place to belong within the brand. After all, without customers business would be non-existent.

Diamond Candles’ Emails Spark Blazing Results

The home fragrance company’s behavioral- and catalog-based messaging ignites stellar open and conversion rates. By Elyse Dupré

Burnout is a risk for any email marketer. From collecting and analyzing data to building templates and testing subject lines, it’s no wonder that many email marketers feel like they’re burning the candle at both ends. And once a brand’s inventory changes, the team has to start the process all over again.

Home fragrance company Diamond Candles wanted to better manage and personalize its emails as it updated its catalog. So the company known for putting $10 to $5,000 rings inside of its candles hired automated marketing provider Bluecore in February 2014 to achieve these goals and enhance its triggered email program.

Before working with Bluecore, Diamond Candles had a standard abandoned cart email program; however, the four-year-old compa-ny with less than a dozen employees wasn’t able to scale its program or personalize its messages based on people’s online behaviors.

“We wanted to have the power of Amazon without the cost, manual overhead, and time...because, certainly, there’s a lot of value if you can execute on that level,” says Justin Winter, co-founder and CEO of Diamond Candles.

After inserting Bluecore’s JavaScript code within its website, Diamond Candles was able to launch its new triggered email program within 72 hours. The solution enables Diamond Can-dles to send different triggered messages based on the behaviors of customers who have opted in to the retailer’s promotional program or catalog changes.

Diamond Candles can send customers emails if they abandon a website browse, search, or item in their cart—just a few examples of the company’s new behavior-based triggers. For instance, if a

customer adds a Diamond Candles Sunwashed Ring Candle to her cart but doesn’t make a purchase, the home fragrance brand may send her a message to resurface that item. Or, if a customer visits the site but doesn’t add anything to her cart, Diamond Can-dles may send her an email featuring the viewed items. Similarly, if a customer searches for a certain candle but then abandons the site, Diamond Candles may send her an email highlighting the searched item, as well as a few best sellers in that category. The retailer can also send post-purchase emails featuring related items and best sellers based on customers’ previous buys.

As for catalog-based triggers, Diamond Candles may send an email if the price of an item a customer looked at or virtually abandoned dropped or if the company introduced a new prod-uct in that same category. For example, if the brand debuts a new candle in the “Spice” category, Winter notes, it can view all of the customers who looked at candles in this group during the past 90 days and notify shoppers of the new arrival.

“The more relevant and helpful that we can be in helping peo-ple discover the products that they like and be reminded of what they’re interested in, the more likely it is that someone is proba-bly going to go ahead and purchase something,” he says.

To avoid over-emailing its customers, Diamond Candles relies on frequency caps and prioritization—both of which are built into Bluecore’s algorithm. For instance, a customer may qualify for price drop, browse abandonment, and cart abandonment emails; howev-er, that customer may only receive a cart abandonment email be-cause that behavior most strongly indicates that customer’s intent, explains Fayez Mohamood, cofounder and CEO of Bluecore.

Plus, Diamond Candles doesn’t send all of its emails right away. Mohamood says that the retailer has a three-hour to sev-en-day window for its automated messages, depending on the customer and type of trigger. Finally, Winter adds that he looks at metrics, like open rates and revenue, to determine if Diamond Candles’ messages are truly resonating with its customers.

“If people weren’t interested and it wasn’t helpful, they wouldn’t be opening the emails, and they’d be marking it as spam,” Win-ter says. “But the reality is no one ever marks it as spam because it’s so appropriate to the conversation.... We’re not sending all of these triggered messages to somebody who doesn’t qualify for that campaign type.”

And it looks like Diamond Candles’ customers are indeed in-terested in its messaging. During the past year, the home fra-grance company has sent 1.1 million triggered messages with a 40% average open rate and a 13% average conversion rate.

Now those results are enough to make any marketer glow with pride.

Mobile Email Conversion Rates Grow

Tailoring emails to customers’ browsing habits generated a 70% increase in mobile email conversion rates. By Andrew Corselli

Mobile email conversion rates ballooned 70% over the past year as marketers adapted their strategies to better suit small-er screens.

Yesmail’s “Email Marketing Compass” report states that mar-keters’ increased use of mobile-friendly strategies—e.g., responsive design, adaptive landing pages, and path-to-purchase optimiza-tion—is to thank for the jump in conversions.

“Considering the importance that marketers place on listen-ing to their customers and catering to their preferences, it’s surprising that brands have been slow to optimize the mobile experience,” says Michael Fisher, president, Yes Lifecycle Mar-keting, Yesmail’s parent company. “To deliver a truly mobile experience, marketers should move beyond just design and de-velop communications that speak to device functionality, use, and context.”

The email marketing solutions provider says that the increased conversion rate from Q4 2013 to 2014 is driven by double-digit in-creases in mobile clicks (10% YoY) and mobile click-to-open rates (20% YoY). The desktop conversion rate, however, dropped by

4% over the same time frame.Mobile click-to-open rates soar even higher for brands using

responsive design at 14.1%—or 40% higher for brands that ex-clusively implement responsive design compared to brands that only use non-responsive emails.

Yesmail’s research shows that upping the mobile email experi-ence is behooving brands in such ways:

• Average order value for mobile email grew 28%, doubling desktop’s annual average order value growth.

• Mobile revenue share grew by one third, making up 20% of all email-generated revenue.

• The share of orders completed on mobile devices grew by 21%, accounting for almost one quarter of all email-generated orders.

• The average mobile email click generated $.40 in revenue, compared to just $.19 for a desktop click.

Email Marketers Are Failing To Engage New Subscribers

Two thirds of new opt-ins fail to take part in any other interactions over the subsequent three months. By Al Urbanski

Three months after opting in to email programs, the great majority of people fail to engage with the senders in any way, shape, or form. Epsilon’s Q4 Email Benchmarks study, released today, reported that only 34% of new subscribers initiated another interaction in the quarter, and that’s four percentage points less than last year.

Half of the average company’s email file was active during the quarter, says Epsilon, but only 14% on the list were classified as “Superstars” who opened or clicked on an email within the previous three months. A third of the file engaged farther back than three months, but the largest segment, at 41%, was com-prised of “Dormants” who had been inactive for at least a year.

Epsilon’s study of more than 12 billion emails across 13 verti-cals sent between October and December 2014 discovered that more email marketers are adopting tactics such as adaptive con-tent, timing metrics, and social data integration to increase rele-vancy and send up engagement levels.

Triggered emails that respond to specific interactions such as

sign-ups or abandoned carts accounted for about 4% of emails sent during the quarter. Their open rates continued to track around 50% higher than business-as-usual emails (BAUs), though that heightened performance was eight percentage points higher in 2013.

Click rates for triggered emails outpaced BAUs by a factor of 136%. The highest open rates were achieved by companies in general financial services (66%), credit cards and banking (56%), and pharmaceuticals (55%). The highest click rates—all in the 12% range—were won by apparel retailers, consumer pub-lishers, and pharma companies.

The highest open rates across the board in Q4 were turned in by credit cards and banking (48%), general retail (40%), and general financial services (35.7%). The highest click rates came in business publishing (7.1%) and consumer publishing (5.5%). The only vertical to produce a sub-3% click rate was travel and hospitality at 2.8%.

An Analysis of Consumer Email Habits

Marketers can learn a lot by simply looking at how consumers email each other. By Elyse Dupré

Marketers are always looking for new ways to stand out from their competitors. So much so, in fact, that it can be easy for them to lose sight of one very important fact: They’re consumers, too. And the best way to email consumers is to think like consumers.

The April 2015 “Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload” study can help marketers do just that. The report—con-ducted by researchers from Yahoo Labs and the University of South-ern California Information Sciences Institute—takes a deep dive into consumers’ email habits by analyzing more than 16 billion emails exchanged between two million people over several months in the form of back-and-forth conversations. Here are four key findings:

Email overload is real. But today’s consumers are up for the challenge. In fact, the study reveals that users send and reply to more emails as their inbox tally increases.

However, try as they might, consumers can’t always keep up with the bombardment of messages. Although activity increases as us-ers’ email count grows, the actual fraction of emails they respond to decreases. According to the study, users respond to about 25% of all emails at “low load” versus 5% of all emails at “high load.” The study does acknowledge that consumers don’t have to respond to every email they receive—such as marketing emails or spam.

“We don’t know how people treat marketing messages because they typically don’t respond to them,” says Kristina Lerman, proj-ect leader at the Information Sciences Institute and research associ-ate professor for USC’s Department of Computer Science. “We do find, however, that receiving too many email messages hampers a user’s ability to carry on conversations, especially for older users. In the interests of users, marketers should strive to reduce the num-ber of email messages they send. Unfortunately, that will never happen, and there are even incentives against it. To be seen among the hundreds of updates from Facebook or Pinterest that users get in their inbox, a marketer may feel like he needs to send even more messages. It is a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation.”

Consumers are mobile mavens. Although the study’s re-searchers did not have access to the email metadata, they were able to determine when consumers interacted with their mobile inboxes through such clues as “sent from my iPhone” or “sent from my iPad” default signatures.

Even though researchers weren’t able to paint a perfect pic-ture, they collected enough data to determine mobile’s signif-icance. According to the report, emails sent from phones had a median reply time (or time between a user sending an email and a recipient responding) of 28 minutes versus 57 minutes for emails sent via tablets and 62 minutes for emails sent via desktop. These replies tended to be on the shorter side, as well. Replies sent from phones had a median length of 20 words, according to the study, versus 27 and 60 words for tablet and desktop replies, respectively.

Not surprisingly, some age groups were more prone to sending email responses via mobile than others. Adults 35 to 50 years old were the leaders in this category, with 53% sending emails via their phones or tablets at least once. Teens (13 to 19 years old) and young adults (20 to 35 years old) were next in line, with 49% and 48% sending mobile messages, respectively. Finally, mature adults (51 years old+) made up the smallest segment, with 43% replying to emails via mobile. There was a slight disparity be-tween men and women, as well. According to the report, 50% of women send email via their mobile devices versus 45% of men.

Users are most active during the day and during the work week. Consumers have considerably shorter reply times Mon-day through Friday versus Saturday and Sunday, according to the study; emails received during the work week are significantly longer than those received on the weekend. In addition, emails received during standard working hours and in the evening have the shortest reply time (compared to those sent in the early morn-ing); emails received in the morning have the longest replies.

Teens like to keep it short and sweet. Adolescents have the fastest median reply time out of all the studied age groups, clocking in at 13 minutes. Young adults came in a close second at 16 minutes, followed by adults at 24 minutes, and mature users at 47 minutes. Teens send quick replies by keeping their messages brief. According to the study, the median reply length for teens is about 17 words compared to 21 words for young adults, 31 words for adults, and 40 words for mature adults. Senders typically have to wait 39 minutes to receive a 50-word response from teens; however, they have to wait twice as long (79 minutes) to receive a message of the same length from ma-ture adults.

The Best (and Worst) Words to Use in an Email

Subject LineCan you guess which words can make or break an email campaign?

A new study reveals the answers. By Natasha D. Smith

Marketers need to be black and white about the value of an email message. And there’s no better place to do that than in the subject line. In fact, a new study from email marketing agency Alchemy Worx reveals which words are more likely to prompt an open—and which ones simply turn readers off.

The study shows that “a single word can make a dramatic dif-ference,” said Dela Quist, founder and CEO of Alchemy Worx, in a written release. But Quist and his team insist that even prolific testing methods, like A/B testing, aren’t enough to deter-mine which words work the best and which fall flat. They point out that these popular methods, including A/B and multivariate testing, allow marketers to experiment with only a few subject lines at a time.

In this study, however, strategists at Alchemy Worx used

their tool, Touchstone, to search a database of more than 21 bil-lion emails to compare and cull the best and worst performing words in the subject line. The agency looked at the top and bot-tom words overall, and then sorted for varying industries. They determined exactly how much better, or worse, these words per-formed compared to average email open rates. The study even examined the best- and worst-performing symbols in the email subject line.

The findings are interesting.The top five words that brands can use to prompt more opens

are: “upgrade” (65% higher open rate), “just” (64%), “content” (59%), “go” (55%), and “wonderful” (55%). Those are the top five words overall.

Things shift dramatically, however, when you zero in on sepa-rate industries. The top word for the entertainment industry, for example, is “content”—perhaps not a surprise. Readers expect a plethora of content from publishers and media companies.

For retailers, however, the top words are “painting” (18%), “ships” (13%), “please” (7%), “notice” (6%), and “recipe” (5%). The top word in the travel industry is “about” (26%), consumer services is “wonderful” (55%), and for the technology industry, “upgrade” (66%).

Equally as interesting are the overall worst-performing words: “miss” (-4.6%), “deals!” (-4.38%), “groovy” (-4.26%), “condi-tions” (-4.04%), and “Friday!” (-4%). “Monday,” ironically, is the worst-performing word for the media industry; “groovy” (-4.3%) is the worst for retailers.

Symbols and emojis are becoming more common in email subject lines. The best-performing symbol is a snowman (65%), followed by an emoji of the sun (21%), and a star (11%). The worst symbol is a human figure pointing to the right (-9.52%).

Obviously, each business has to determine what’s best for it-self and its customers. But whether email marketers follow these findings or not, they need to “look at the finer details,” said Alchemy Worx’s Quist in the release. He suggests that as mar-keters craft their email campaigns they remember this: “The subject line is the most important part of an email…By looking at the finer details, such as the best and worst words to use with-in the subject lines, [we] can manage campaigns to ensure they achieve the best click-through rates and conversions.”

Email Marketing VersusSocial Media

Analysts weigh in on which channel gets you the most bang for your marketing bucks. By Natasha D. Smith

Most every marketer wants to know how to get the most out of his resources. And today there are more choices than ever on how to invest those precious dollars. In particular, there’s the ongoing—and fervent—debate about email marketing versus social media; which one produces the most return?

“In most cases the uses of email marketing and social media are really going to vary,” says Evan James, head of North Amer-ican marketing at social analytics company Socialbakers. James says that whether marketers use email, social, or both depends on the industry and where the customer is in his purchasing journey. “First, [it] depends on the industry that a brand is mar-keting in,” he explains. “The difference also depends on what point someone is in the customer purchasing lifecycle: brand recognition, evaluation, purchase, or an actual customer.”

Perhaps the best way to determine which channels work best for your business is to weigh the pros and cons of each. “The strength of social media is that it can give a company credibility to an audi-ence,” says Eric Krattenstein, CMO of email marketing software Mailify. “People like to go online and see brands are active on so-cial media. It tells the customers that they’re being heard, and that they can get a response in real time.” Krattenstein says that the problem with social media marketing, however, is that for it to be the most effective, companies need a large following.

“With email marketing, you can do more with less,” he con-tinues. “Even if you have only 200 subscribers, a marketer can

generate leads. That’s a major pro. The con may be that you always have to produce good, strong content for those emails. On social you can focus more on conversations.”

“It all comes back to what’s your objective,” says Jeremy Ep-stein, VP of marketing at social management platform Sprinklr. “For social media marketers your goals might be participation, engagement, producing advocates, education, and connecting with a community. For email you might be looking for gaining permission, subscriptions, building customer anticipation, or clicks-to-conversions.”

Epstein says that, bottom line, marketers need to determine whether a channel is meeting a company’s specific goals. “At the end of the day, it has to be about driving business outcome,” he says. “If you’re not driving a business outcome, then why bother?”

Epstein, along with Krattenstein and Socialbakers’ James, says that ultimately the right strategy will be customer-focused and omnichannel. In fact, each says that marketers shouldn’t choose one over the other but rather create a strategy that meets shop-pers wherever they are.

“The channel of the future will be one that’s some sort of hy-brid of all the channels,” Krattenstein says on a final note. “The technology is already getting us there with social feeds inside of emails and the fusion of email and mobile. Eventually we’ll bring all of the unique benefits together, and that’s when we’ll begin to see the most return. That’s marketing of the future.”

Email and Phone Uber Alles

Those two old standbys command the highest ROI and response rate, respec-tively. Social and mobile are still waiting for their cab to arrive. By Al Urbanski

A marketer lecturing senior management on the merits of direct mail and call centers is about as common as a clean-shaven hipster in a Brooks Brothers suit. But while mobile and social may have captured the hearts and minds of consumers and marketers, email, phone, and direct mail continue to do a better job of capturing sales.

That’s among the findings in the latest edition of the Direct Marketing Association’s new Response Rate Report. This may well be the most succinct handbook available to direct market-ers. It gets right to the heart of the direct matter: measurable results. Whenever an interview subject of mine questions why anyone still uses direct mail, I always respond that it’s because it gets much higher response and conversion rates than digital and direct them to the 2012 Response Rate Report.

The new study—which calls on a survey of 485 marketers con-ducted in December and January—doesn’t tell a much different story about the efficacy of the old standbys. To wit:

• Email, while eliciting one of the lowest response rates among channels, continues to be the leader in ROI. Campaigns con-ducted with house lists achieved an average 30 to 32% ROI. Those done using prospect lists achieved 15 to 17%. Conversion rates among digital media types were best in emails sent to pros-pect lists (5 to 5.9%). Mobile came next with 5%.

• Direct mail outperformed all forms of digital media for re-sponse rates, with house list campaigns generating 3.73%. Such campaigns earned an average ROI of 18 to 20%. Social media,

by comparison, had average click-through rates (CTRs) of 2.1 to 2.5% and ROI of 15 to 17%.

• Spending on online display advertising in the year ahead will decline 17%. The display ad came in last among digital devices for CTR, at between 1.1 and 1.5%.

• Phone calls registered the highest response rate of 9 to 10% and also earned one of the highest ROI percentages—though more than half of survey respondents said they were unable to determine the ROI of their call programs.

Be apprised that these are but a few data points lifted from the report for dramatic effect and, though authentic, must be weighed against all the other channel metrics for full effect. “Email is always going to have a high ROI, because people are going to say, “It didn’t really cost me anything,’” says Jer-ry Rackley, chief analyst of Demand Metric, which conducted the study with DMA. “But if you look at all the costs of data and technology that could be applied to email campaigns today, there should be a cost.”

So, just as I have done the past three years with the 2012 re-port, I suggest you get hold of the new one and send it around to your teams as a conversation starter for strategy sessions. It’s an easy read, packed with juicy numbers about every marketing channel. What will be hard is deciding how you’ll deal with some of the facts it presents.

How to Activate Your Inactive Email Subscribers

An email marketer reveals how to galvanize your customers—even the inactive ones. By Natasha D. Smith

No matter how engaging, relevant, or valuable an email cam-paign is, every list has inactive subscribers—i.e., users who sim-ply don’t respond to marketers’ messages.

But what are the reasons for that?Here, Gurjit Sandhu, marketing specialist for Yesmail Inter-

active, spells out some common causes of inactivity—and some effective solutions.

Define an inactive email subscriber.An inactive subscriber is a subscriber who’s previously opted in to receive messages from your company. But for some rea-son, he’s stopped engaging with your emails, although he hasn’t formally requested to stop receiving them. He basically just stopped opening them and stopped clicking them.

Why might a subscriber become inactive? There are a number of reasons, but there are several common ones. And there are a lot of reasons at different companies. But the main one that we’ve found is that customers receive too many emails. So, it’s always important for an email marketer to understand [custom-ers’] preferences—especially the mailing frequency that your cus-tomers prefer. It’s always important not to overwhelm them with emails. When you send too many emails, you’re causing them to tune out.... They’ll look at them, and just ignore them.

Another reason is irrelevant content. You [as a marketer] may start off with customers opting in to receive messages about specific products or services, and then over time their interests change.... [What customers buy] can change from holiday to hol-iday or different times of the year. So, it’s always important to keep up with things that your customers prefer. That way, you

can avoid sending them content that they’re just not interested in.A final reason—which is common but [many marketers don’t]

realize—is that a lot of their emails are just not reaching their subscribers’ inboxes. And that could be for a number of reasons. It could be because the messages are being marked as spam. Or if customers are not opening their messages, some email ser-vices will automatically route them into a spam folder.

How can you reengage inactive customers?Marketers should consider a reactivation campaign—a campaign that’s specifically designed to reactivate target customers. That can include how the campaigns are segmented, how messages are formed, messages that try to engage the customer through enticing offers, or perhaps asking questions about preference changes. It’s basically to reengage inactive subscribers.

In terms of goals, you want to think about the benefits that you want to get out of these reactivation campaigns. Why are you really doing them? As a basic principle, the idea is to drive engagement. You really want to make the best out of your sub-scriber base. Take advantage of your opportunity with them in the most optimized way possible. So again, the main goal is to drive engagement. It’s to bring them back into the fold.

You may want to take subscribers to the next level of engage-ment. A great example of that would be getting them to enroll in the loyalty club.

That way [customers] will have more information and become an insider.

Other things that are main goals for running reactivation cam-paigns would be to generate quick revenue. It’s cheaper to gen-erate revenue out of existing customers versus acquiring new customers. Catch that low-hanging fruit.

The other benefit [of a reactivation campaign] is the ability to keep up with your subscriber base. Keep up to date with their preferences, their interests, and their frequency. And it works as a great last point of contact before you completely phase them out.

In the retail industry, email lists often have somewhere between 40 and 50% of their subscribers who are inactive. It can be really high; it can be overwhelming. But it’s something that’s certainly addressable.

Any final advice?Just take a few steps: analyze your database, understand your subscribers, don’t forget about deliverability, and be creative. Email is usually the backbone [of a reactivation campaign]. But don’t be afraid to mix it up. Sometimes you can use social media to boost the messages that you send via email; message to [cus-tomers] across channels. Most important, just remember to keep up with their interests and be creative.

Jay Jhun @emailrocks Nice glimpse into the future of email marketing - spending 70% of our time designing engagements #IBMAmplify

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