The Birthday Email

My kids get cards and phone calls from the dentist on their birthday. It is the one place they really don't like to go, yet this call is something that they have begun to look forward to. Usually, this call is preceded by a birthday card, and includes a coupon to a treat at a local fast food place. Not a voice recording but a real person calling to speak to the kids. Very thoughtful of the dentist's office, and something we all appreciate.

I have two main financial institutions - one which serves as a conduit for my paychecks, the latter is where I save for the future. Both of them know my birthday date, in fact they both know a whole lot more, yet it is a credit union where I have less than $250 that doesn't forget to send me an email and a real card each birthday. The card is personally signed by the branch manager.

A major apparel retailer asks those who sign up for their birthday date. This information is then used to target the recipient with a special promotion during their birthday month. While this is good, it is interesting to note that the open rate on these emails goes from an average of 20% to approximately 60%. The next three emails from this retailer to the 'birthday recipient' leads to open rates of between 35 - 50%. Twenty percent of those who open the special promotion actually redeem it. This makes this particular promotion quite special for the retailer. Now you do have a few people that abuse this by creating a birthday to get a discount, but the retailer counters this by trying to get the recipient to provide some preference information.

A jewelry company asks you for your birth month so they can wish you and also talk to you about your special stone. Remarkably, this has done very well for this company. People are intrigued by their stone and what it all means. They read, they click, and they eventually buy.

A men's clothing company used to give out $10 gift cards on people's birthdays. This is a practice that has since been abandoned, as after much testing we realized that most of the recipients were redeeming up to $10 (only). Also, in split tests we found that it didn't boost overall response. This company has since switched to simply wishing the recipient on their special day. The results are almost the same. Now, if you are a higher tier buyer, you get a real birthday card from this company. This is appreciated and acknowledged in subsequent purchases by the customer.

Do remember, if you ask for a birthday date - please be sure you are going to protect the information. Also, if you ask people for the exact date, please use it as you have created an expectation.

I would like to borrow an approach from a Florida newspaper. They put in your luck for the year as part of their message. I know many people who used to cut that out and keep it in their wallet or purse (for the entire year).

From an email marketers perspective, why not ask for the birthday date - include a little snippet about their annual forecast, thank them for their past business, wish them the best, and introduce them to a special landing page where they can find great deals. Transactional email gives you the opportunity to make things conversational - you ought to leverage it.

So if today is your birthday - here is a little note - There’s plenty of activity this year, traveling near and far. You’ll get lots of practice scheduling and setting priorities. Don’t bet the ranch, you won’t be that lucky, but you should do quite well. Once you learn the game you can achieve your objective. Celebrity birthdays today - Billy Joel, Candice Bergen, & Reagan Taylor.

If nothing else, just wish the recipient - Happy Birthday! It goes a long way in building a relationship.

What if they come to you?

So much time is spent on perfecting campaigns for customer and prospects. We focus on the list, the subject lines, the copy & the image, the call to action, some of us even focus on the landing pages. All this with the idea to gradually coax the recipient into responding to your offer. Sometimes, the recipient might just call you up or walk into your store or branch. What are your chances of the person serving the recipient knowing about the offer?

Here are a few things you could (gradually) do to make the 'people channels' part of your program.

1. The easiest thing to do is to make a simple mistake in the copy, targeting your own people. The first person to find the error should get rewarded with a free lunch or a bread or as I have seen in some instances - recognition. This makes your team look for offers and give you advice. Now target the prospect list with the regular email (without the mistake).

2. As the team gets more involved, solicit their advice. Take a copy of your email & pass it around to them. Ask for subject lines suggestions. I know of a few companies that have a betting pool for what subject line will work best - the goal is three fold - split tests with customers, employee involvement, and it gets everyones head in the game.

3. Call up or visit your team to inquire about the effectiveness of your email. Ask them what people are saying or to look out for what people are saying about your campaign. Provide them with your contact information as well so they can reach out to you themselves with suggestions. Try to work this into a process, where every one of your campaigns collects employee and recipient feedback.

4. Put out a special email to your team, explaining the offer to them. Give them options for each segment and if you have a decent database you can even personalize the offers for each recipient if your people were to look it up. This way, there is unison in your messaging and the offers are consistent, yet personalized.

In a subsequent post we will talk about how Casino's, Banks, and some companies with loyalty programs are leveraging their campaigns to make their 'people' more powerful in making targeted offers and in collecting valuable customer information. All this towards building an effective contact management system.

How important is an Email ID?

Promotions are often frowned upon as a means of collecting email IDs. The rationale is that most people sign up for emails and then forget about your brand once the promotion is over. I contend that you can change some of this by elevating the importance of the email channel. Do this by telling your subscribers that you will use the email channel to make important announcements. I still remember Christine and Jeff – this is going back five years (perhaps longer) – they both ran promotions and insisted on making the announcement in the following month’s email.

Look at what Loretta and Avi have done here, they promised $7,500 and a grand prize of $2,500 – at an event. The subject line, “Another Exclusive Email Event” and the conditions “Only those patrons who have or will provide Argosy with an email address will be ALLOWED to participate…” This wasn't the first time they have done an email exclusive event and it definitely won’t be the last.

Now look at the second image – the announcement is done by email again. The subject line, “Argosy email promotion update” and the copy within, “Will you be our next email winner? Check your inbox!”

Every now and then you need to make sure that your readers realize that email is a very serious and important channel for you. This is a means for you to quickly communicate with the reader. Customers and prospects need to be coached as well – proven that email is vital to your organization and they ought to pay close attention to it. Start planning EMAIL EXCLUSIVE announcements to reinforce the importance. The importance can also relate to your call center, coach your CSRs to naturally offer the customer/ prospect information immediately via email – if someone were to call in to get the email only special, give them a partial offer but encourage the customer to sign up, and pay attention to the email campaigns in the future.

Nice work ladies, I wish you much success.

The Tax-Free Sale

States have Back to School sales on certain items – these tax-free sales are very popular as people. Families put together lists of items they need and wait for the day; they visit the store during the sale and all are happy – the customer and the retailers. Retailers are happy because in addition to the merchandise on sale, they are also able to move full price items, plus even some taxable items. Because of the amount of ‘money’ they have saved in taxes – the buyers are happy to purchase the additional items.

Unfortunately, this tax-free sale concept has been totally abused, and is being used as an ultimate weapon to close new deals. I have been offered tax-free incentives to purchase furniture, a car, a vacation and even clothing. The retailer is simply paying for the taxes themselves diluting the true magic these words originally had.

My daughter, who is 11, kept rolling her eyes every time a salesperson told us about their Tax-Free offer. She got me thinking about this and was the motivation for this post (Thanks Shivani!)

Many times as marketers we try to reuse something that works well, running the risk of trivializing the offer. Anticipation or creating a genuine sense of expectation is much more effective in helping create superb offers. Get your openers, clickers and buyers to yearn for that special offer is a great way to personalize and create that special sale. Here are three examples that stand out in the year ahead:

First Look: 70–90% OFF
A major retailer segmented its list into buyers and non-buyers. Non-buyers were further segmented into clickers, openers and non-openers. These people were targeted with the email being trickled over a few hours – buyers got it first, non-openers last. Each group was asked to update their preferences; all responders were told to look for the next season clearance event and learned that the more attention they paid to the emails the earlier their notifications.

The Employee Discount
An apparel retailer offered employee discounts to some of their best customers as a thank you for their purchases over the year (2006.) Additionally each CSR was given ONE coupon to share with ONE customer. Come 2007, these buyers were aware of this closed door special sale and looked forward to this event. In 2007, each buyer was also given ONE coupon to share with their friends/ family. It was very effective, for not only did it create revenue but it created a special bond with the receivers of the offer over the entire year. This segment of customers had a much higher attention rate.

The 10% CD!
When interest rates were less than 5%, a financial institution offered a 10% CD – only 500 were available. It was a phenomenal event, more than a quarter of their list inquired about the CD, filled out preferences and more than 500 CDs were given away in less than 45 minutes! Oh, and talk about paying attention – the email-only offer was launched at 8.00 am EST.

The lesson from today’s post is that we shouldn’t ride the Tax-Free sale offer or the same offer to extinction. Another key learning is that the best thing to do is to remind people about an event and start a build-up leading up to the special event.

Hope your 2007 was great, best wishes for 2008.

Don't Get Caught in the Spam Trap

On our last Service In Action call, Return Path’s Amanda Bacher talked about delivery. One of the things that really caught my attention was her discussion of Spam Traps. According to Wikipedia, Spamtraps are usually an email addresses that are created not for communication, but rather to lure spam.



Sometimes, these addresses could be added to your list maliciously, or from an append list you may have purchased. How can you get rid of them from your list? The are two things that you can do to both clean out Spam Traps, and also trim some of the fat from your email list.

• Exclude Non-Openers: People who have been on your email list and haven't opened in three months should receive reduced frequency of emails. Spam Trap emails will never open, so they will fall into this category.


• Re-permission Non-Openers: If people haven't opened your mail in six months or more, send them a friendly note asking them to open and click on your mail, or else they'll be removed from your list.

One client trimmed the fat of their non-openers from their list, and found their open rates doubled. Also, because they were mailing to less people, their ROI increased as well.

So take a look at a strategy to remove non-openers from your email campaigns. Not only will you avoid Spam traps, but you'll also boost your open rates and improve ROI.

What the heck is M 2.0?

If you were to open a business, you need to let people know that you are in business. In the “good ole days” all you did was call the phone company and you were in the book. Some people went the extra mile and registered with the Better Business Bureau, hosted a grand opening or did a little advertising. These still apply but given the challenges and opportunities today, it’s fascinating what David can accomplish with all the Goliaths out there.

Here are a few (Web 2.0) things to consider to enhance your presence:
1. Your website – This is your imprint for the online world and an absolute to let people find you. Keep it simple and current, and try to engage people – but don't stop there.

2. Your email list – Ask people to sign up, ask them for preferences, communicate with them on a regular basis. Overstock.com, Paul Fredrick Menstyle and King Arthur Flour are three companies that do an outstanding job in getting people to sign up.

3. Your blog – Keep this current; incorporate customer feedback, product information, testimonials, email campaign information and editorials – all written with a passion to keep users engaged. The Craving Anthropologie blog is a masterpiece; Stave Puzzles and Duncraft also have great special interest blogs. An up-and-comer in this space is the blog of 1154 LILL Studio’s.

4. Your MySpace & Facebook Page – Set up an online profile about your company, feature key people within your company. If you are a financial institution – feature your reps, if you are a consumer products company – feature some of the personas that you market to, if you are a B2B company – feature the difference you are making in society, if you are selling a city – market it and so on. This is how the new generation will find you, and we better learn to be connected.

5. Twitter – Remember the Dell Dude? People enjoyed looking for him – now people track their favorites on Twitter – just remember to keep it brief.

6. Flickr a little – Why not put images up so people can find them, if people can see a delicious desert on Facebook with a note that it was put together with the finest ingredients from King Arthur Flour – odds are they will visit the site to learn a little more.

7. YouTube is cool – This weekend, we enjoyed watching two hours worth of clips with the kids – all different kinds of videos. A couple of months ago Britton’s of Columbia posted a video on how to tie a bow tie; the Masai shoe is so aptly displayed in a video from Herrington Catalog (part of their site). Of course you may have already heard the story of BlendTec. The point is that we should look for ways to engage the user through infomercials, as well as testimonial videos – linking all of it back.

8. Surveys are vital – we always want to know what our customers are thinking and how we can help them even more. Design Toscano does a great job in engaging their users for feedback. The key point is that you should always look for reasons to ask questions and try to leverage this information for future communiqués.

9. Podcasts are effective too – Why not record customer testimonials and play them on your site. Same thing for a bank – have someone provide a daily update on the rates and the market performance, trends, etc. Set these up on your site so people can come and be entertained as well as engaged.

10. Mashups are good way to integrate – think of it as a site cocktail, for instance you can combine mapping sites (Google or Yahoo!) and overlay apartment listings or traffic information. There are a couple sites that make it possible – visit Popfly or Yahoo! Pipes

So how do you use these Web 2.0 techniques? Yogis define M2.0 as new era marketing, in a recent seminar on M2.0 in Woodstock, VT, Reagan Taylor defined M2.0 as a strategy and tactics that leverage Web 2.0 technologies. The beauty of M2.0 according to Taylor is that all of this can be done on a minimum budget. Look for future seminars on M2.0 – we’re planning on in Atlanta soon.

List Revival

List Revival
A multi-channel cataloger offered its house-file an incentive to come shop – web, call center, or store. Buyers were given a smaller offer, non-buyers were offered a little more. Everybody won something, a few won a lot, a handful really made out. You had to tell them a little bit about yourself, and of course, all offers were e-mailed to you.

The sequence of events that led to this were quite interesting. You got a direct mail piece at home or a phone call. They provided you with an access code with a timed incentive to respond. You went online – input your offer code & were e-mailed a confirmation link.

This confirmation link asked you to provide preferences – seven basic questions & a big thank you with a coupon you could redeem immediately. You wonder why the cataloger went back and forth with the prospect or customer.

This was a result of a few control group tests. Let me offer a colloquial example. If I was to meet you and ask you your name, where you are from, what you like, & your ‘best’ e-mail id – you are more likely to respond correctly if I was to engage you in a dialog versus having you answer all questions all at once. People are human, not robots.

The impact this had was phenomenal. Pre ‘list revival’ the catalogers e-mail list was 20% of the house-file, they averaged less than 5% open rates, with an even more dismal click-through. Post ‘list revival’ the cataloger had more than doubled the e-mail list. Also their open rates quadrupled & click through’s improved.

The result of all of this was better segmentation, targeted messaging, & a boost in overall sales. More importantly, a random survey of more than 1000 new customers revealed that they felt they were part of the ‘club.’ The offers they had received were exactly what they wanted!