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.
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.
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)
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.
Back in the 1990's at the dawn of
the Web, the word "convergence" was on everyone's lips. It meant that people
were looking forward to a time when all content could be digitized and available
all the time on any electronic device -- a computer, a phone etc. That halcyon
notion is appearing before our eyes today, and it's fascinating to
watch.
AmericaThere's another kind of convergence
going on which I find equally interesting. It's the one happening in the
newspaper industry. I was spurred to write this post today after reading an
eMarketer study which said "92% of America's top 100 newspapers now have
online video." That number is up from 61% in 2006.
So where does this leave television
news? If newspapers are providing content that is more like television news, what will make
television news different? And, goodness knows newspapers (for all their faults)
often command more respect than local TV stations. So will news in general
converge and both newspapers and television deliver equal amounts of video news content online?
And, if so, which one will win out?
And what about reporters? Will all
reporters need to be video savvy? How about reviews for arts events? Will the
age of print reviews give way to video reviews? What does that mean for the role
of press and PR in the arts?
Of course there are no answers to these
questions, but I think it's interesting to start thinking along these lines, and
preparing our organizations for a future in which not only will they produce
their own video, but others will want to produce video material about them.
As a public service for all you Spam-a-holics, I am calling your attention here to a terrific article in The New Yorker about Spam. And, I'm not talking about the food.
True to the style and quality of that publication, the article is smart, well-written and beautifully documented. If you want to know the whole story about Spam, I recommend it highly. You can read it here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/06/070806fa_fact_specter
If you're not that interested, permit me to quote a few facts from the article - which may surprise you.
* Spammers send 1 million e-mail messages to get 15 positive responses.
* Hotmail processes 4 billion pieces of e-mail every day, and delivers just 600 million. The rest are filtered out as Spam.
* Microsoft maintains 130,000 special Hotmail accounts specifically for the purpose of trapping and examining suspicious e-mail.
These numbers are staggering by any standard. This article makes the case better than I could ever hope to, as to why e-mail marketing has now become an area of technology that is best managed by people who really know what they are doing.
I'm guessing that many of you are finding time this summer to do things that you've been putting off. Me too.
I had promised many of you who attended my seminars this spring that I'd be revising my book Sign-Up for Culture: The Arts Marketer's Guide to Building an Effective E-mail List with some new case studies and updated research. I've been working on it for months, but you know how that goes. The good news is that with the summer in full swing we're actually getting it done, and it should be ready to ship in about two weeks.
Since it's the summer, perhaps the timing is good for you to think about how you'll be building your own e-mail list next season. In the book, I note that the average growth rate for e-mail mailing lists for all of our clients in the last year was 50%. That's a pretty decent number - how does that stack up with your experience?
If you're feeling that you need some inspiration, I've added a case study from the Alvin American Dance Theater who followed an approach I outline in the book to build their e-mail lists during their performances. Here's a quick summary:
.... the first year we did this [collecting e-mail addresses at our annual run in New York], we collected 20,426 new addresses in just those five weeks. This year the total was 18,626 - and 95% of those names were new!
Since beginning this list-building campaign two years ago, Ailey has grown its list from 12,000 names to 67,000, a whopping 458% increase!
I offer 21 ideas for building your e-mail lists in the book, and if you'd like, you can pre-order the new version of the book by clicking here and you'll have it very soon.
And if you're interested in one-on-one training and guidance, we are working with clients in in a consulting capacity to help them build their lists, and we'd be glad to speak with you about that as well.
All in all, if you’re putting your plans in place for next season, add "Build my e-mail list" to your to-do list. In my view, there are few things as important.
I'm not necessarily proud of the fact that I have a lot of facts and figures in my head about SPAM, but I'm a junkie for facts that help explain how our business really works, and particularly why e-mail delivery is so complex and difficult.
An article last week about a spammer that got arrested, included some pretty revealing information. I think these numbers are worth remembering, and could perhaps even be useful at your next party, marketing meeting or Board meeting. And when your boss questions you on why you're spending money to outsource your e-mail to a company that can assure that your mail gets delivered and not filtered by ISP spam filters, bear this in mind:
Consider, email security company IronPort told the Associated Press that 70
billion spam messages were sent Thursday, the day after Soloway's arrest. That
figure was unchanged from two weeks prior. It's also almost double last May's 36
billion spam emails per day.
I want to call your attention to an article in today's edition of The New York Times which describes the complexity of getting your legitimate e-mail delivered properly and not inadvertently marked as spam.
You'll need an account to read the article which is called When They Say You Are a Spammer.
The article talks about the importance of vetting your e-mail vendor to make sure that they take e-mail delivery seriously. We've taken e-mail delivery seriously for years and have done extremely well in this regard. Our delivery is typically at least 10% higher than the industry benchmarks, due in large part to the fact that we monitor our e-mail delivery constantly, take immediate action to resolve delivery issues (as is so colorfully described in the article) and are part of the "Sender Score Certified" program mentioned at the end.
I'm loving E-marketer these days, because it seems they are making my case better than I could ever do.
Take a look at this chart. It shows the results of a recent study of promotion-oriented marketers and shows the relative importance these folks are placing on e-mail marketing.
I feel like we in the arts are a little bit too much "flavor of the month," and this month it seems that it's all about myspace, youtube, and podcasts. That's what's passing as the sexy stuff these days.
But, you know what? I've been saying that E-mail is the the real thing for years.
And every day I have more and more proof.
E-mail marketing is maturing as a discipline and with that comes a dilemma. The chart to the right demonstrates what I've been saying (and a lot of people have been saying) for a long time: when you segment your list, target your mailings and test various approaches, you'll get better results.
This seems almost self-evident, since e-mail is nothing more than a form of direct mail, where targeting and segmenting and testing is a way of life.
The dilemma is how to get this message out to our industry in a way that marketers will swallow. What frustrates me is that just because the execution of e-mail marketing is quick and easy compared to print, most marketers seem to want the entire experience of e-mail marketing to be quick and easy.
"Heck I'll blast everyone with this e-mail" is a lot quicker and easier than "let me segment my list, write different copy for different segments and test some subject lines."
As it matures, e-mail marketing in the arts must move from a "quick and easy" mentality to a "thoughtful and efficient" mindset. E-mail marketing can't be thought of as great because it's fast and cheap. It needs to be great because you can get better ROI than any other marketing technique you can use.
The evidence is in. Can you help me spread the word?
