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Falling prices have made smart phones extremely common.  According to the Pew Research Center, 46% of US adults owned a smart phone as of February 2012. With those kind of numbers, widespread smart phone and tablet adoption is undeniable. Unsurprisingly, smart phone ownership remains more common among young adults and those with high income, higher education.  However, smartphone adoption does not have a gender bias, which is unusual for technology adoption.  The smartphone adoption has been primarily on Android and Apple iOS devices, with 80% of the audience using those operating systems.
 
So, what are people actually doing with their mobile phones?  Text messaging and taking pictures are still the most common uses.  However sending and receiving email is also being done commonly.  And when people do engage with email on mobile, they engage at a much higher rate than people who engage with email on desktop.
 
So, what does this mean if you’re trying to reach people via email?  First, people are on the run.  Consumers don’t read emails the same way on phones as they do on desktops.  Understanding these differences will inform your design.  For example, mobile email users don’t scan email, they prioritize it.  They categorize their email into "read now," "read later" or "delete."
 
So, how do you make the cut to help ensure that your emails are read now or at least saved for later?  First, start with the subject line and concentrate on the first 20 characters:  keep it short and keep it recognizable.  That means getting the offer in first and being mindful of the sender name.  Secondly, make sure that your key information is visible above the fold (duh) and make the call to action clear and conspicuous.
 
Now, given that many of you are likely working with limited resources, here are some tools and tricks for understanding your eligible audience and optimizing your email template.  Several engagement tools in the marketplace, including StrongDelivery Tools for those using StrongMail Message Studio and standalone solutions like Pivotal Veracity Mailbox IQ, allow for the marketer to get row-level detail on the email rendering device.  Knowing the size of your mobile audience will help you justify the budget to optimize your template for this on-the-go audience.  Getting the template right should be left to the professionals; people who have learned from months of trial and error.  If possible, you should consider outsourcing your first few templates and let somebody teach you the ropes.
 
Your current email template may be great for customers using Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook, but you're going to significant reduce the potential of your impact of your campaigns by serving up the same template on a 3" screen.  If you're going to ask them to pay attention to your message, you should make it easy for them to read, interact and respond to it.
 
Creating the right email experience based on the rendering device has always been a priority for the email marketer.  Focusing a larger proportion of effort on the smart phone experience is money well spent. And there is no excuse for getting started – smart phone adoption is only going to increase.

As email marketing continues to change and evolve along with other forms of digital marketing, it’s important to attend email marketing conferences to learn the latest best practices. Two of the more popular conferences are the MarketingSherpa conference and the MediaPost Email Insider Summit. There are so many email marketing conferences now that it’s possible to spend almost a third of the year learning about email strategies and tactics in email marketing conferences.

It’s tempting to attend many of these conferences—especially with exotic locations that include south Florida, Las Vegas, Captiva Island, and Key Largo. While taking in the sights may be a goal for many of the email marketing professionals who attend the conferences, it’s important to attend these conferences with specific goals and awareness of the latest trends. Here are four hot button issues in email marketing.

Measuring Email Marketing Attribution

Because email has been somewhat isolated, digital marketers are aggressively looking for ways to include channel integration and multichannel marketing into email marketing strategy. However, it’s important to measure ROI for each channel in an integrated campaign—including email.

Merging Email Marketing with Other Channels

In many of the email marketing conferences, attendees will see examples of brands that are striving to integrate social media and texting with email marketing. How is this working out? What’s the ROI? Will this ‘multi channel’ approach work in your space?

The Value of an Email

Going to a conference means striving to find best practices. If you work in email marketing, you probably have a good idea of the value of an email in the short-term and long-term. At the conference, you can strive to discover the value of an email to other companies. If their value is significantly higher, then try to find out why at the conference.

The Problem with Over-Segmentation

With constant access to data plus a portfolio of offers, it’s tempting for all serious email marketers to take segmentation too far. Email marketers constantly face the “quality vs. quantity” conundrum. Sometimes, pure mass quantity is the winner. Other times, quality (through precise segmentation) is the winner. At a conference, see who goes for quantity and who goes for quality. Apply their results, reasoning, and logic to your email marketing model.

If you’re attending email marketing conferences, then enjoy the networking, the break from the daily routine, and the many and various sumptuous locations. But be sure to enter each conference with a list of what you can discover that will help you improve conversion.

Pinterest is a frequent topic of conversation these days.  According to Hitwise, Pinterest is the third most popular social media site in terms of site visits, behind Facebook and Twitter.  Pinterest (as I am sure you are all aware) is ultimately a virtual pin board where consumers can grab images from their web surfing activity and pin them up on categorical boards that allow them to share and revisit the information as necessary. It is a channel that is visual in nature, currently draws a largely female audience, resonates topically with the home, fashion and food (amongst others) and is leveraged heavily for planning (think weddings, birthdays, vacation, etc.). So a good thing to remember is that it isn’t the best place to be for every brand…yet.

According to a recent survey of over 4,800 US online consumers from the price comparison website PriceGrabber , 58% of respondents are not yet on Pinterest – and about 1/3 of those didn’t even know what it was.  But these numbers are anticipated to shift – making Pinterest a channel to watch – especially since the same survey found that 21% of those surveyed that did have Pinterest accounts had cited purchasing a product *specifically* after seeing the Pin.

The ability to integrate and leverage the email channel to build and grow a Pinterest presence is a relatively easy task to accomplish. Here are a couple quick tricks and “good-to-knows” about bringing these two channels together – beyond the act of adding a “follow us on Pinterest” icon in your standard social set:

1. Use Email to Announce Your Pinterest Presence
Your email subscribers are often your best customers. If your brand aligns with the demographic and psychographic make-up of the Pinterest user, there is no reason to not share your presence and the content available with your customers. One great example is how zulily has embraced its Pinterest presence by not only telling their subscribers what they can find on Pinterest, but also creating content specific to the channel via poster creation and even featuring an incentive to encourage Pinning from their site (See zulily email).

2. Include “Pin This” Icons on Individual Content Within Your Email
Including a Pinterest icon with a simple string of code is all you need to do to get your content from your email to your Board. You even have the ability to pass through a description to accompany the image – and descriptions in Pinterest are important. A few fun things to note here: if you include a dollar amount price in the description, Pinterest will automatically place a banner in the top, left hand side of the image feature the price; it will also place the Pin in the Gift Guides from the main drop down. Another fun note is that descriptions can also help impact SEO. Think the descriptions through as carefully as you choose your imagery.

3. Coordinate New Boards or Pins Around Email Deployment
If you are including references to Pinterest within your email communication, chances are your customers may visit your Pinterest Wall of various Boards following an email deployment. It is a good idea to have new content available when they get there. To that point, you should be putting up new content, arranging boards and managing the “above the fold” appearances of your Pinterest presence frequently to deter fatigue.

As you can imagine, this is an ever-evolving topic and new information is coming out by the minute it seems – we are just scratching the surface of what marketers can do with this channel, so look at this as a solid place to start and get to Pinning.

To hear more of my tips on marketing with Pinterest,  check out the on-demand version of StrongMail’s recent webinar, “Put a Pin in It.”

It’s tempting to think of social media and email marketing as different channels that don’t complement each other—and certainly don’t have the potential to augment each other. Don’t fall to the temptation. Email marketing and social media can work together, help to optimize each other, and drive additional revenue.
Making social media work with email marketing isn’t automatic and it’s not easy. It requires careful planning and content management. Yes—many email service providers offer what they describe as “social media integration” and this works well for many people with smaller lists and smaller budgets. However, for the larger business with a bigger digital footprint, integration requires more effort plus a deeper and more detailed strategy.
Want to know more about some proven ways to combine the power of email marketing with social media? Let’s say you’re a large company and you have a strong digital marketing platform that includes:

•    1,000,000 Facebook Likes
•    2,000 Twitter followers
•    4,000,000 email addresses

Now What?

Continue Building the Platform

The numbers above are excellent and admirable, but let’s remember—the company with the largest database of engaged followers has a huge advantage over the competition.

•    Use email to encourage and incentivize people to “Like” you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter.
•    Use your Facebook platform to persuade people to sign up for the email database – and let them know you’re also on Twitter.
•    Use Twitter to encourage followers to engage with you via email and Facebook.

This effort to build the digital database must be constant and overlapping

Listen. Learn. Develop Your Content.

The focus group isn’t dead. But if you want to find out what your customers are thinking about, Facebook and Twitter are excellent resources. You can monitor social media accounts to discover what’s going on in the minds of your consumers or you can prod a little to gather this information. It can be easy: simply ask your consumers what they think about issues, products, services, and their lives in general. You can then tailor content around what you know is interesting to your public.
Customers are talking about your business in person and on social media platforms. Respond and engage with them on social media and through emails.

Maintain a Theme but Don’t Self-Plagiarize

It’s important to maintain brand integrity, but it’s a mistake to cut and paste content between the platforms. Keep the content theme consistent but repurpose it across the channels so it’s fresh and engaging.

Share the Testing Data

You know which subject lines work for emails. Use the same lines in social media. Always be testing, then use the test results across the platforms.

Social Media, Social Proof.

Harvest social proof and testimonials from social media and use them in emails and other communications. You can develop a sense of community, plus create buzz for all your channels.

“Only Available on Our Facebook Page For a Limited Time”

To get the audience jumping across platforms, use the old standards of direct marketing. Offers, geographic exclusivity, “must act before” calls to action, “Special preview only for Facebook friends”, and so on.
    
Email marketing and social media may seem like an odd couple, but they can work extremely effectively together.

A subject line from EAT Club (MyEatClub.com) stuck out in my inbox today for its use of local targeting. This Bay Area startup lets you get one of a number of pre-set meals delivered straight to your office for $7.50 - including tax, tip and delivery. 

How did they get me to pay attention? By knowing and acknowleding the weather forecast.  

With a direct subject line of "Rain in the forecast! Order in - 15 great dishes to choose from!," they got me to start thinking about the benefits of getting lunch delivered instead of venturing out in the rain.

Well played EAT Club. I'm contemplating the Chicken Caesar Wrap.

Whatever marketers and the public think about email marketing, a permission-based email remains a valuable and sought after nugget of marketing gold.

Want proof?

Well it’s well known that email marketing continues to be a leader in marketing ROI, Google’s integration with email might be the only proof you need. Google has been experimenting with email opt-ins within paid search results. See below.

While the “subscribe to newsletter” incentive isn’t exactly the most enticing or exciting marketing carrot, it’s a big step for Google. In the past, Google has experienced a strained relationship with email marketing.
Every company needs traffic to its website. This explains the success of pay per click advertising. Every company needs opt in email addresses—which the company hopes to harvest when a consumer visits the site. So by taking a “click” out of the process, will Google help companies successfully harvest emails? If so, will Google be able to charge a premium for the service? Email marketing companies are watching this channel very closely.
Some key considerations…

Conversion. In theory, someone who is searching for something is a good candidate to want additional information about a product or service. Who will subscribe? What’s the “control” conversion rate? Can a company provide a stronger incentive than the elementary “subscribe to newsletter?” What will the subscriber actually receive once they’ve handed over their email?

Email Gets a Boost. If Google is now going to help advertisers harvest email addresses, then the importance of email marketing could prove to increase dramatically.

Go to the Front of the Line. What happens if the customer hands over their email address and it’s a Gmail account? Will Google prioritize emails it’s helped to harvest? Will that be a “premium” service?

That little opt in box on some experimental PPC ads may seem insignificant at first. But the implications for the merger of PPC and email marketing could be enormous.

According to the updated unsubscribe provisions in the 2008 revision of the CAN-SPAM Act, all commercial email has to enable recipients to unsubscribe via a link to a single Internet page or via replying to the message. 

Specifically, the Act says,

“(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender”

 While replying to an email is acceptable in the eyes of the law, an unsubscribe link is a much better consumer experience. Plus, it provides the marketer an opportunity to preserve the relationship by serving up information adjacent to the unsubscribe form that includes a link to a preference center where subscribers can choose to update the frequency or topic focus of the emails they are receiving.

 If you insist on having your subscribers hit the "Reply" button, you better make sure you monitor that inbox and removing the addresses within the 10 days required by law. And, you better make sure the mailbox doesn't get full and send an error message, as what happened to me yesterday.

 That mailer will have some splainin' to do to the FTC. 

 Like it or not, there will always be email subscribers who become unresponsive over time.  Maybe they've lost interest, become too busy or changed email addresses. Having inactives on your list is a reality, but that doesn't mean you shouldn’t try to win them back. 

I signed up for CNET's emails a while back when I was using the site more to read reviews on the latest tech gadgets.  These days, instead of waiting for a newsletter, I just go directly to the site, so I don't bother opening their messages – until I got the one below with the subject line, "Is this goodbye? CNET will miss you."

For whatever reason, the non-assuming question in the subject line caused me to open, and what I found was a well-executed email designed to get me engaged.  CNET chose a simple, good-looking template that focused on three things – the appeal and two reasons to come back – "breaking news" and "unbiased reviews." It finishes with an opportunity to change my newletter preferences, which is always a smart move. Offering the ablity to change the frequency or topic focus of email communications is an excellent way to increase engagement and retain a subscriber.

There's nothing fancy about this template, but that's one reason why it works: it's direct and to the point. 

<Click to Enlarge>

As marketers continue to identify opportunities to leverage email as part of an integrated and multi-channel marketing plan, it is imperative to understand the most effective manner in which to measure success of the channel. And with no standardization in nomenclature or calculation of email measurement metrics, coming to consensus can be more than difficult.

Email Attribution

What is certain is that it is time to go beyond the basics. While opens and clicks provide you some insight into how a specific message is performing, it does not give you any insight into the effect that that message had on the buying decision. So the real question becomes, how to do you attribute revenue and conversion to an email communication?

The answers are easier than you think – though few want to take the approach. Direct marketers have been doing channel attribution for years; formulating means and methods for determining incremental behavior as driven by a marketing effort. Consequently, this requires holding out a Control group. Yes, a control group that you don’t send select communications to. I know…a statement like this is likened to email blasphemy these days, but nonetheless, it is an effective (and easy) way to achieve channel attribution.

Measuring Email Impact

In taking the lead from Media Buyers and Direct Marketers around the globe, here are a few things to consider when determining the impact your email program has had on your marketing efforts.

1. Impressions
Media Buyers have long leveraged the “impression” as a metric in the ad procurement process as well as success measurement. The reason is that tracking the conversion of a television commercial or an ad in a magazine is near impossible to measure. However, it is also a known fact that exposure to an ad or commercial can also formulate a response from the consumer; hence, the importance of an impression. But because of the insane amount of tracking that we can do in the online world, the impression has gone by the wayside in measuring impact.

We look at deliverability – how many email addresses did not bounce. We can also measure inbox placement (to a degree) and open behavior (to a degree as well). But very few marketers actually put any weight on the messages that hit the inbox but were not opened. Why should you? There was no engagement, right? Wrong. Your message made an impression.

If your message made it to the inbox, the customer likely saw it. They may not have opened, clicked and converted in the streamlined sense that we would love them to – but that single impression could have driven behaviors elsewhere. Maybe they called the call center, or went directly to your site to engage in the manner they chose. Maybe they truly did nothing at all, but how many of you can answer that question? Very few I would imagine. If you truly want to understand the value of the email channel to your bottom line, spend the time to determine the value of an impression to the Lifetime Value of your customer.

2. Incremental Lift
I started my career, years ago, in the direct mail business. Oh yes, postcards were my life. But the most valuable discipline I learned during my stint there was the value of metrics and measurement. Because direct mail can be so costly and time consuming, marketers want to be smart about how they allocate their budget to the channel as well as determine the impact the offers had on a specific subset of their audience; otherwise they could be unknowingly throwing money down the drain.

Email is a channel that is certainly more cost effective and less time consuming than direct mail, but the fundamental principles are the same. You are ultimately trying to drive a behavior from your customer that might not have otherwise occurred. But because we can learn in real-time about our customers’ engagement with our email messages, the idea of testing, holding out a control group and measuring incremental behavior have well…died.

Measuring Incremental Lift

There are two ways (I employ – I am sure there are others) to measure incremental lift – both certainly have room for error and should be used as directional, not gospel. But any insight is better than no insight at all.

First, there is the Control Group. This requires that you identify a statistically viable and representative subset of your email database that you will leverage as a control group for a period of time. There may be some table-stakes communications that you send to everyone, such as transactional alerts, account updates, maybe even a newsletter – those are fine, but suppress them from everything else you send.

Over time, you will be able to see what the average revenue contribution of an email subscriber is versus those who are being suppressed from promotional or other email communications. The first step in getting here is truly understanding how many and what types of email communications your customers are getting and then weighting the importance of each of those communications appropriately.

The second, and sometimes preferred by marketers, is something of an “after-the-fact” analysis. It is safe to surmise that the act of a customer unsubscribing from your email program doesn’t necessarily mean they are no longer a customer. In order to conduct this analysis effectively, you need to first be able to track revenue contribution at a customer level and/or know the Lifetime Value of your customers. Next, you need to be able to compare behavior of a customer over time. These can be complicated feats to overcome for some brands, especially if your data systems are disparate, but getting as close to that Holy Grail as possible will open you up to a wonderful world of data analytics!

Once you have this information, the analysis can begin. Be sure to take seasonality or conversion patterns into consideration when determining the time period to evaluate. For demonstrative purposes, I am going to look at a quarter-over-quarter comparison. Identify those email recipients that unsubscribed or complained in 4Q11 and attribute their individual revenue contribution at a record level. Then take that same group and look at their individual revenue contribution in 3Q11 when they were email subscribers. What’s the difference? Is there a marketed increase when they were receiving your email communications or no? This can help you to understand the incremental lift your email communications provide.

So now that we have totally geeked-out on the data, start looking at other cues you can take to measure your email success from our Media Buying and Direct Mail counterparts. They have been at this a long time and may just strike a chord with your email program.

At a December Email Insider Summit, attended by some of the world’s top email marketing experts, audience members peppered the panelists with a wide variety of questions. Evidently, many of the panelists replied to the questions with “it depends.” Was this a genuine answer? Or is there some type of secret to email marketing?
To clear up any confusion, let’s take a look at some of the secrets of successful email marketing.

Secret #1. Email Marketing is One Piece of the Marketing Puzzle.

Email is not a one-size-fits-all channel for all brands in all industries. Increasingly, it’s vital to merge email marketing with other channels.

Secret #2. People Can Leave You.

Email marketers are required to place an opt-out option at the foot of each email. Subscribers can, and will, leave you. So maintaining the interest of the audience is vital. It’s also important to pay close attention to frequency. Do the people in your database want to hear from you five times a day? Or five times a year?

Secret #3. The Customer is the Expert.

In email marketing, it’s tempting to rely on researchers, creative types, and executives to come up with content for emails. While these professionals may have significant experience and knowledge, they are not the experts. The experts are the customers and clients. Rely on them for content direction in your email marketing - and speak to them directly.

Secret #4. Engage the Non-Engaged.

Even though someone has opted to receive your emails, you may discover they don’t open them or engage with your content - but they also don’t leave your database. The most successful companies find a way to use their email marketing to engage with all their subscribers. This level of engagement requires advanced-level marketing and reorganization of content.

Secret #5. The Subtleties of Content.

Content needs elasticity. And experimentation. When organizing content, consider the following: emotion; logic; timing; consumer behavior; shock value; benefits; changes in the industry.

So next time you have a question about email marketing and the response is “it depends,” you know that this means it will take a conversation to find the answer. The secrets revealed here will hopefully guide that discussion.