The Winter Email Insider Summit was earlier this week in Park City, Utah. Here are just a few of the great insights and learnings from the event:
Attribution:
>>REI was challenged to understand the incremental value of an email contact, according to Meg Reynolds of REI. By withholding emails and monitoring sales, they discovered that they were overstating the impact of email on online sales because some customers still bought even if they didn’t receive an email. However, after determining email’s impact on store sales, which email previously got no credit for, they discovered that email contribution to total sales was actually twice the level of cookied sales.
Channel Preference:
>>87% of consumers prefer email to communicate with companies, according to Merkle’s next yet-to-be-released “View from the Inbox” consumer survey. 66% spend 20 minutes each week with permission email. 20% say they’ve used SWYN to share an email with their friends and family on social networks. People who are active on social networks check their email more often. 44% check their email on their smart phone.
Inactives:
>>The business relationship determines whether a customer is inactive, not the email relationship, said Loren McDonald of Silverpop.
>>Fabric.com purged inactives after sending them progressively better deals, culminating with a 30% off deal, according to McDonald. Because they only sell online, they had great confidence that these customers truly were inactive and not likely to ever become active again anytime soon.
>>Sears treats new subscribers who are inactive as a different segment from older inactive subscribers, according to Gretchen Scheiman of Ogilvy.
>>Dell’s reactivation campaign asks subscribers to update their preferences.
>>Make sure that win-back emails are designed for blocked images, said Matt Caldwell of Yesmail.
Social and Email:
>>“Marketers should understand the social value of their best customers—not every customer, but their best customers,” said David Rosen of Loyalty Lab.
>>About 15% of your list is composed of significant social influencers, said Joel Jewitt of Rapleaf.
>>Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory has a client that monitors keywords on Twitter, looks for days and times when those topics are being discussed most, and then uses that to decide when to send emails on those topics.
Email Content:
>>ESPN is working on deploying dynamic content and monitoring next year.
>>General Mills was able to boost their interaction rate by 70% over a 3-month period by redesigning and testing various content elements in their emails.
>>“The preheader is probably the area [of an email] with the most creative growth,” said Caldwell.
Multichannel:
>>“True multichannel is the ability to recognize customers across channels,” said Chris Marriott of Acxiom. It’s not the ability to message consistently across channels. Retail Email Takeaway: Each channel as their strengths and weaknesses. Don’t treat them all the same.
>>Chris Marriott of Axciom said that at the end of a chat with Sprint they offer to email you a transcript of the chat so you can review what was discussed. Coupons relevant to the products and services discussed in the chat are wrapped around the transcript.
>>REI started collecting email addresses at the POS in their 130 stores this year, said Reynolds. It has been “wildly” successful.
>>Walgreens has never collected email addresses effectively in-store, but they have a number of pilots going on right now.
Triggered Emails:
>>Backcountry.com sends a triggered email to customers who return a product, asking them why they returned it, according to Bill Schildknecht of OnBelay Consulting.
>>AAA sent an email that contained some Disney content and then sent everyone that clicked on that content and email asking if they’d like to subscribe to a Disney-focused newsletter. It was very effective.
Mobile:
>>“We’re in our tween years with mobile,” said Dylan Boyd of eROI
>>Matthew Silk of Waterfall Mobile has only seen clients segment by area code and zip code, rather than taking advantage of the ability to segment by other meta tags.
Preference Centers:
>>“Preference centers are a work-in-progress as I look across the industry,” said Matthew Kirsch of Walgreens. Retail Email Takeaway: While difficult, there are some retailers that have a clear lead in creating preference centers that give subscribers more control and ensure that the brand’s emails are welcome in the inbox.
Most Cringe-Inducing Moment of the Conference:
>>Jennifer Peterson, one of the Ball State University panelists, made it repeatedly and unabashedly clear that she does very little work at her job as an executive assistant, saying things like “you’re kidding yourself” if you think your executive assistant is working hard. Self-censorship should be a required college course.
For more insights, impressions and happenings from the conference, check out my Twitter stream or see what all Twitterers were saying by checking out the #MPEIS hashtag.
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3 comments:
Attribution: What we saw at Nordstrom, from 2003 - 2007, was identical to what was identified by REI.
Regarding the various comments on Inactives, one major point seems to have been generally overlooked - a large percentage of inactives are email accounts that people simply no longer read. We all have plenty of these.
As Loren of Silverpop correctly pointed out, it's "the business relationship that determines whether a customer is inactive, not the email relationship." The key, therefore, is to reconnect with your "inactive email account" customers by finding their current preferred email addresses by connecting the dots with your other databases or working with a provider that can perform this service for you.
Bill, what percentage of inactive subscribers do you think were simply too lazy to update their address (given that option, which many marketers don't)?
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