Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

E-mail Marketing is Top Online Marketing Tactic: Proven

I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but check this out. This study shows in a better way what I find awfully hard to convey in words. This research conclusively shows the relative importance to marketers of many kinds of online promotional techniques.

And guess which one is ahead of the pack by leaps and bounds? 

You got it.

Making Subject Lines Relevant -- Today

Joseph Burch at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra alerted me to an interesting article today. It's about subject lines and the gist is that if you can relate your subject line to something that's in the news today, you'll get a better open rate. Their example links Brittany Spears to drunk driving and was sent by MADD.

http://www.ephilanthropy.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6372

The parallel for the arts is a little harder. I mean, something like, "Hear the Next Pavarotti" is probably in bad taste. But what about something as simple as "Fed Lowers Interest Rates -- Come Celebrate with a Concert."  Again, maybe not so swift, but you get the idea.

I think the point that's entirely valid here is that a lot of what people focus their time on when they are online is breaking news. And if your subject line can in some way relate to something that happened yesterday, and you can do it in a smart & sophisticated way, it's worth a try.

Of course, I'm an advocate of A/B tests. So if any of you try this, let me know.

What To Do

Now that that American Airlines thing is out of my system, let's turn to the positive.

I read a lot about our industry and often what the corporate world is doing in e-mail marketing isn't completely relevant. However, today I want to share an article with you from DM News which i think succinctly captures some best-practices for e-mail that I've been talking about for years.

The article is here and I hope you'll read the whole thing.

 

http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/e-mail-marketing/42331.html

 

However, if you're pressed for time, and I know many of you are, the main points are:

 

1. Know your audience

2. Mail only relevant information

3. Develop a strong wire frame template (PatronMail helps you do this)

4. Avoid many different colors and fonts

5. Don't overload your audience

6. Set the stage (set and manage expectations)

What Not To Do

From time to time, something comes across my inbox from a major corporation that's so amazingly misguided and filled with fundamental mistakes that I go into marketing-shock. That's what happened to me when I got an e-mail from American Airlines last week, the subject line of which read: Hurry! Choose Your Reward - Bonus Miles or Discounts.

 

Needless to say, I was eager to get a reward so I was suckered. Well, it turns out to be a highly overproduced flash animation all designed to get me to sign up for more of their e-mail newsletters. The amount of money and technology that's been expended here is just staggering. And the arrogance to think that I would actually watch this, and then respond just makes me wonder what these people were thinking.

 

Here's a screen shot of the e-mail in my inbox. Notice that it's personalized and quite professional. But the subject line is clearly spammy and totally misleading.

 

Please, don't do this kind of thing. It just makes your recipients think you're slimy. Goodness knows it would take a lot to make me reduce my already low estimation of American Airlines, but this e-mail did just that. 

Text Messaging VS E-mail Marketing

I've long predicted that text messaging is a transitional technology, rather than the next "big thing." Since most teenagers use text messaging to communicate with each other, rather than e-mail, I'm often asked if e-mail will die out. The logic is that once these teens grow older, text messages will be their preferred form of communication.

I don't think this is going to happen for a number of reasons, one of which surfaced in the news this week. Here's a rundown of why I think text-messaging will soon be yesterday's news.

1. The lines between e-mail and text messaging will blur: Yahoo has just announced that its e-mail subscribers will be able to send text messages from within its e-mail system. This will blur the line between e-mail and text messaging, and will increase the value of e-mail.

The move also serves as a clever way to give users incentives to continue using e-mail, when many teens and young adults are increasingly turning to text messaging or IM in lieu of e-mail.. Ms. Wendy Davis of MediaPost wrote last week.

2. Text messaging is just text: Text messaging is limited - you can only send 160 characters (not words), and it's plain text. You can't send a complex message, or an attachment, or a picture or video. And, there's no formatting. Text messages can't be easily stored, forwarded or archived.

3. Text Messaging Merely Got There First:  If getting e-mail on your phone was really what everyone wanted in the first place, the reason it didn't happen was that the first generation of cell phones couldn't support the technology infrastructure needed. Thus, text messaging slipped in there quick and easy. But things have changed. As any iPhone user will tell you, getting an e-mail is now just as easy as getting a text message.

As the next generation of phones gets into consumers' hands, e-mail will come as a standard feature. I believe that when this generation of teens can send an e-mail just as quickly and easily as they can send a text message, they will do so. Then when they get to college, e-mail is the lingua franca of the adult world, and they will become part of it.

As a vendor to arts marketers, we are getting more and more inquiries about whether we can provide a text messaging service. We can and we will inevitably do more of it.

However, be forewarned. The price of text messaging is about $.08 to $.10 per message, to send AND the same cost to receive a reply. In a world in which most of our clients pay half to one tenth that rate to send an e-mail and pay nothing to get a response from a consumer, I think it's a marketing method with a lot sizzle, but not a lot of beef.