Relevance is the right content sent to the right audience, which results in high response rates, delivery rates and reader engagement. Advances in email list management software and customers’ increasing willingness to provide specific information about their preferences mean that email marketers can now use sophisticated segmentation in email campaigns to tailor messaging to be more relevant than ever.



Now, marketers can provide different messages to many different segments of their database, using all sorts of factors that affect buying behavior. This procedure, called segmenting, allows you to create a series of highly-focused mailing lists without having to re-enter the data every time or require subscribers to sign up for many different mailing lists in order to get the email they really want.

Why Segment Your List

Sure, batch-and-blast is easy. However, segmenting can help you boost the overall performance of your email marketing program because it can improve both revenue and list quality:

Revenue: Subscribers are more likely to open and act on mailings that more closely reflect their needs and interests. Studies have shown that you will see a greater return on your investment when you target your mailings. A campaign that uses segmenting based on past behavior, customer reported interests and statistics such as opens, clicks or conversions can bring in nine to 10 times more  revenue than one in which the entire list receives the same message.

List Quality: Segmenting can help you keep your mailing list fresh and engaged. For example, you can target subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked in your emails for a while and try to re-engage them by narrowing down the content to fit their interests. And for current or new subscribers, a subject line or offer that is most relevant to them will stand out in an overflowing inbox and is less likely to be reported as spam.

How Segmenting Works

You need two ingredients in order to segment effectively: some relevant data and list-management software that can create segments. Typically, you can get good, actionable data by using  information subscribers hand over to you when they sign up for your emails or register as a customer at your website (customer-reported data), as well as information they generate by how they act on your email messages or behave at your website (analytic data).

Customer-reported data:
    • Industry
    • City or location
    • Sales Volume
    • Number of Employees
    • Position / Title
    • Opens
    • Clicks on links to landing or forward-to-a-friend pages, contact information

One caveat: Don’t ask for too much information at registration. You probably will not have established the kind of trusted relationship with your prospective subscriber that would make them feel comfortable handing over demographic data such as household income. You can, however, create a list segment and send a targeted email inviting them to come back to your website and fill out a survey or preference page, which can collect the more useful data you need to sharpen your messaging even further.

Analytic data:

    • What they purchased or downloaded
    • Which pages they clicked on, in which order, and how long they stayed on each page
    • Which products they clicked on without acting on
    • Products they clicked on and added to their shopping carts
    • Whether they abandoned their carts
    • Whether they are first-time buyers or repeat customers
    • How much they spent
    • Which keywords they used to find your site

Even if you don’t collect much data from your subscribers through surveys and preference pages, you still have plenty of information based on their email history, such as how long they’ve been on
your list and how often they open or respond to your mailings.

Segment Non-Responders to Increase Deliverability

Let’s say you want to trim the dead wood from your mailing list to stop wasting money on emails that are being deleted unopened or are piling up in abandoned mailboxes. Segmenting can help you quickly identify your non-responders and either get them back as active customers or give you a reason to drop them from your list. To do this, send an email to anyone who hasn’t opened your emails for six months or longer and invite them either to update their preferences or unsubscribe. Anyone who doesn’t respond within a set time would be dropped.

However, assuming the contact is still valid, you don’t want to simply toss it away. After all, you probably had to spend something to acquire it and you’d like one last chance to recoup your cost with a sale or other display of interest. Consider creating a “We want you back!” segment. Choose non-responders based on a cutoff date or period of time that they have not been active. Create a segment of these addresses and a special message that acknowledges the lack of response and provides a special offer for re-engaging. Or, better yet, consider a Telemarketing campaign to research the contacts information a little more actively.  This campaign can also invite them to update their preferences or their primary email address, or provide unsubscribe instructions so that they can opt out.

If you get a low response – say, less than a 20 percent open rate and less than a 5 percent click rate on any link in the message – you might consider removing any non-responding addresses from your database at this point. Do this especially if you receive a markedly higher number of spam complaints forwarded from ISPs. You don’t want to do anything to jeopardize your sender reputation.

If you generate more positive responses, try the mailing one more time. Create a second list segment of all those who didn’t respond and send one more mailing, then drop anyone who doesn’t respond in, say, a week or so.

Some Final Thoughts on Segmentation

Segmenting is a powerful tool, but you need to use it judiciously. Keep these two qualifications in mind when you get ready to slice up your own database:

Does this segment make sense? You can create any kind of segment you want once you have the right data but the segment should always have a clear goal that advances your email program or your company goal.

Do these mailings violate subscriber expectations? Related to the first concern, be careful not to let segmenting backfire on you. Sending additional messages, no matter how relevant, can irritate your buyers if your messages come too often or wander into product areas that go beyond what they signed up for. And irritated customers are the ones who vote against you by ignoring your messages, unsubscribing from your list or reporting your email as spam to their ISPs.

Segmenting will help you reach your customers with more targeted messages. However, it’s a tool that must be used correctly to deliver its potential benefits.


Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

The BC Government has a $5000 grant available to businesses in British Columbia looking to become more competitive in their market place.


The grant is to be used to increase productivity, support the introduction of new technology, support the introduction of new work processes, enhance international competitiveness, or introduce new innovative strategies to increase the long term competitiveness of the firm.

You can spend the grant on a wide range of services and choose any service provider you like. For your convenience we have listed two eligible services designed to get your sales team more productive and motivated to sell

• Set up and training on BigTurns eCommerce Platform (learn more >>)
• Set up and Training for the Managed Inside Sales Strategy (watch presentation >>)

Both services are custom designed specifically for your sales team. We are tailoring the services to fall within the allotted $5000 grant and should be able to save you a few dollars in the transition to selling more using online technologies.

The basic details are as follows.

• Available to BC Corporations, Partnerships, or Sole Proprietors
• For small business ( between 4 and 50 employees)
• A grant of $1500 per employee (owners with less than 10% equity are eligible, too)
• Maximum subsidy is $5000
• Funding is a grant not a loan
• Can be applied to new technology to help you sell more effectively
• Funding can be used for a wide variety of services focused on sales training or productivity
• Available to Not-for-Profit organizations as well.
• Contact Tracy Farr for more Information 604-763-5889

The government has an official notice that reads:

“The Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development has established a new initiative, the Workplace Training for Innovation Pilot Program (WTIP). The program is designed to provide funding to eligible employers with less than 50 staff for the employee training of their choice, delivered by the training provider of their choice. Through WTIP, employers decide on the training and the training provider best suited to assist them to improve productivity, enhance competitiveness, and/or introduce new technology, equipment, or work processes. There are hundreds of training options available across the province for employers to choose from, including colleges or private training institutions. The Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development has not pre-approved nor endorsed any courses, programs, or training providers with respect to WTIP. For more information, please visit the WTIP website www.aved.gov.bc.ca/workplace_training_program or contact the Program Administrator (Chemistry Consulting Group Inc.) toll-free at 1 877 365-5757"

If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity please call Tracy Farr at 604-763-5889 or tracy@BigTurns.com

Best of luck.

BigTurns

Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

One of the most important things to keep a grip on when you run a business is the overheads.  It’s so easy to let the cost of the “basics” mount up and start effecting your bottom line. We are going to outline how I first launched my office on a total shoestring but through being a bit savvy made sure that I didn’t compromise on any of the basics.

So in truth this post is half about me being a bit savvy and the half about me having made mistakes that hopefully I can now stop you making.

Google's Email System

This sounds almost too basic to mention, but it’s crazy how many people still get this so wrong.  When I first started working freelance I moved into a shared office downtown Vancouver…  This was probably the first good move I made, I rented a desk in an office with about 10 other freelancers, first off it was so cheap to do it this way and it also gave me an address Downtown Vancouver.  For the first few months I worked from home, this was a false economy for me, I went crazy and work ended up totally dominating my life.  If you’re working independently an office is a god send, it gives you regular social interaction and a regular routine, plus you can’t stay there all night.  Anyway the point of the matter is that I was simply blown away by how bad some of my fellow freelancers’ email setups were.  I would say to one of them did you get my email earlier and they’d be like “which email address?”… “oh that one… yeah that’s on my laptop and someone’s borrowing that at the moment” or it would be like “no it takes about 20 mins to come through because it being forwarded from this account which syncs with this one… but only when my home computer is switched on” and of course needless to say all their emails were stored locally.

I’m sure this sounds familiar… it doesn’t need to be like this!  I have so many devices, an iPhone, an iMac, a MacBook Pro, a PC laptop and  whatever device or email client I use I see exactly the same inbox and directory structure.  If you’ve worked in a corporate environment you probably think you need a Microsoft exchange server for this or a lot of people try to use mobile me, but set it up all wrong.  The answer is you need Google Apps.  Google Apps gives you IMAP access this means a copy of all your emails remains on the server and every time you read or delete or file an email, a message is sent back to Google and they record that change and make sure that next time you connect with your phone or any other device those changes are relayed to that too.  Apart from the obvious benefits of keeping all your devices in sync it means you can drop you laptop under a taxi and you’ve lost no email data.

Google Apps has two services, a free one and paid one… another mistake of mine.  I signed up for a paid one and every time I wanted to add an account I had to pay $50 a year, which started to get expensive.  The free version is exactly the same as the paid version except the capacity is less.  The free version is 7GB and you can upgrade anytime, the paid one is 25GB… I have insane volumes of emails dating back to 2004 and I’ve still not hit my 7GB limit (…I eventually swapped back from the paid account, which you can do and loose no data).

Google Apps lets you set up email with your own domain name i.e you@yourdomain.com and it lets you point any number of domains to it.  Over the years I’ve probably racked up about 10 different addresses and I’ve got them all aggregated in the one inbox from where I can send and receive from any of those addresses.

Google Apps also has shared calendars that can be set up to sync with iPhones etc.  It is a very credible alternative to Microsoft exchange server and it can be totally free – amazing.  If you remember anything from this post… stop accessing email via POP3 and start using IMAP.

Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

Fifty characters could be all that stands between you and the success of your next email campaign. Why? Because 50 characters is all the space you have in a typical subject line – to catch the attention of your reader, entice them to open your email and take action. With so much at stake, marketers need a quick and proven reference tool for developing subject lines that get the desired
result: opened emails.

Let these rules be your guide.

Rule 1: Read the Newspaper

If you want to develop subject lines that result in higher open rates, pick up your local paper. Headlines usually highlight a story’s most important point with brevity, while taking the audience into consideration. Use that approach to make your subject lines short and intriguing enough to compel your subscribers toread your emails.

Subject lines should clearly state what your readers can expect from your email, what’s in it for them and what you want them to do as a result of the email. And your subject line must stand out from others in your customers’ crowded inbox in the most relevant way. Emulating the headlines from newspapers can be a good starting point in the development of subject lines.

Rule 2: Focus on the Objective

What is the objective, or end goal, of your email marketing program? In most cases your end goal is not necessarily high open rates, but rather to have subscribers take a specific and measurable
action. Determine what that one action is, and make sure your subject line will achieve your objective. For instance, if your goal is for recipients to purchase from your online store, don’t use a subject line that is informational in nature. Instead, use a clear call-to-action that emphasizes their opportunity to make a “must have” purchase.

Learn from past campaigns – look at subject lines in emails that were associated with the highest number of conversions. Or if you drill down into your analytics, you might find additional clues, such as an email with a relatively low open rate but a high sales-per-order rate. That could mean something in the subject line strongly appealed to a narrow segment of your list. You could then test  variations of the same type of subject line with other audience segments.

Rule 3: Leverage the “From” Line

The “From” line tells the recipient who sent the email, and the subject line sells the recipient on opening it. So take the time to consider the best use of the “From” line, based on the goal of the email and the audience that will receive it. What name or email address gets the highest response?

Some basic guidelines:

If it’s the first time you have emailed a specific audience, use a “From” line that creates a sense of familiarity and/or credibility with your potential readers. They may not be familiar with your company or brand, so you will want to use a brief “From” line that includes your company name as well as the general purpose of the email, such as: Acme Health Experts. Coupled with a compelling subject line, this approach can generate higher open rates than a “From” line of “Acme, Inc.”

If the “From” line lists your company name, you don’t have to repeat it in the subject line, which frees up space there. But do consider branding your subject line with the name of your newsletter, for example, so that it will stand out in the inbox of your recipients. For instance, if the “From” line says Acme Health Experts, your subject line might say, Health Wise Newsletter.

Rule 4: Mention Key Information First

It sounds obvious, but it’s important to mention the most important information first when it comes to both your subject line and the email content itself. You only have one opportunity to make
a first impression and with subject lines that adage is amplified.

Some tips:

Keep your end goal, and the interest of the recipients, in mind: What is it that you want them to do after reading the email, and what would make them care enough to do that? If you can answer that question in 50 characters or less, you may have your subject line.

In many cases it doesn’t make sense to try to cram the offer and call-to-action into literally 50 characters. If that is the case, focus on mentioning something that makes your recipient care enough to open the email to learn more. Then use the top portion of the email to elaborate on the offer.

Most email preview panes allow for 50 characters worth of space in the subject line area, and anything beyond that gets cutoff. So make sure the cut-off doesn’t occur in a crucial word, such as a price or date. One of the best ways to catch this is to send a test email message to your own account and see what it looks like in your preview pane.

Rule 5: Personalize

Personalized subject lines are a simple way to secure the interest and action of your recipients. Subject lines can be personalized based on the product or content preferences of the recipient, or based on their interests, past purchases, website visits or links clicked. Where appropriate, use of the recipients’ first names can be a very effective form of personalization as well. When personalizing, be sure to consider the following:

Be careful when using past purchases to personalize because the purchase could have been a gift for someone else and might not relate to your reader’s real interests. Always make it easy for readers to find and update their data and preferences so you can personalize in a relevant and accurate manner.

If you elect to include the first name of your recipients, take the time to go through the database and make sure that you actually have the first name for every record. Also assure that the names in your database use proper capitalization, such as Alice instead of alice. If the database is not 100 percent accurate, it’s better to not use first name personalization in your email messages.

Rule 6: Urgency Drives Action

The recipients of your email messages are more likely to act on your offer if they have an urgent reason to do so. Where appropriate, drive urgency with messaging such as expiring offers, “first XX
people” or only “X days left.” You can even create a planned series of emails – each incorporating the imminent deadline. However, don’t overuse or misrepresent deadlines as it will train your recipients to wait until the last minute to act or, worse yet, sour them to your offers entirely. But do drive urgency where it’s relevant.

Rule 7: Lead, but Don’t Mislead

While it’s important to drive a sense of urgency and develop offers that compel action, it’s even more important to maintain your company’s integrity in every outbound communication. That means not misleading your prospects and customers with the subject line in order to get them to read or act on the call-to-action in the email.

Never stretch the truth in your subject line or promise more than your email delivers, make grand claims that require compliance in order to redeem an offer but make it difficult for customers to do so, or offer one thing and deliver something different than what is described.

Rule 8: “Free” is not Evil

Yes, you can use the word “free” in a subject line, contrary to the urban legends out there. People still respond to the word “free;” so, the increase in orders or other actions will almost always outweigh the messages lost to filtering. But be sure to follow the best practices listed below to minimize your email message getting caught in spam filters:

Don’t make “free” the first word every time.

Don’t use the word “free” in conjunction with an exclamation point.

Refrain from spelling “free” in all capital letters.

Test the use of the word «free» as you would any other variable – and optimize on the best test results.

Rule 9: Plan for Deliverability

There are a number of factors that affect whether your email will be delivered to the inbox or not, and most of them are within your control. More methods for improving deliverability are detailed later in this guide, but here are a few simple things you can do with subject lines to increase the deliverability of your email marketing campaigns:

There’s a fine line between “catchy” and “spammy.” Run your email subject line and body copy through a content checker to identify any spam-like words, phrases or construction. The content checker will tell you which types of phrases to avoid.

Two tricks that could trip a spam filter: subject lines in all capital letters and using more exclamation points than necessary (both look unprofessional, too). In fact, we recommend not using exclamation points at all if you can avoid it.

Rule 10: Measure, Test, Analyze – Repeat

There are numerous ways to optimize your subject lines and, in all cases, the easiest and most effective way to identify the most effective method for each of your campaigns is to measure, test, analyze and then repeat that process.

In order to use data to support better decisions, you must have meaningful data to analyze. But where do you get the data? If you want to understand which of two test subject lines results in the best conversion rate, then you need a way to track responses from Email A differently than Email B. That may mean assigning a unique source code to the landing page associated with each of the emails, or it may mean assigning some other unique identifier such as a promotional code. Then, compare the two sets of data to determine the results. Be sure to use a large enough sample size with each test group so that your results are statistically accurate – 300 or more responses per test group is generally considered viable from an analysis perspective. And be careful to change just one variable across test cells so you can definitively determine the cause of any change in results.

Some testing ideas for your subject lines include:

Negative subject lines vs. positive ones – “We hate to see you go” vs. “Newsletter subscription offer”

Challenger vs. champion offers –Test your best-performing subject line against a new challenger

Personalization vs. no personalization –Using the subscriber’s name in the subject line vs. not mentioning a name)

Mention of price or savings vs. no mention of price or savings

Once you have results, use the metrics from each segment to determine which subject line(s) delivered the action you wanted – the most conversions, the highest average sale per order, the highest click-through rate, etc. From this data you should be able to establish a “champion” subject line, then introduce a “challenger” and test again.

Conclusion

Yes, this seems like a lot of fuss over 50 little characters. But those 50 characters will have a significant impact on the success or failure of your email. It pays to get them right.



Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

How do you interpret your results? What metrics are available and which are the best metrics to determine success? The
following is a list of the basics, their priority, how to read them and how to use them to refine content:

Open Rate

This metric indicates how often a recipient opened your email. Since so many emails go ignored, it’s good to know how many got subscribers› attention. However, don’t be misled into believing that every opened email was actually read and digested – in some cases, email is scanned and dumped, opened by mistake or only opened to find the unsubscribe link. Open rate is not the best indicator of email success; however, it can be a great pre-response indicator and also a great way to get results on content or subject line testing.

Click-Through Rate

This is a metric that lets you know how often a recipient clicked on a specific link in your email to either go to your website or to take another action. Again, it’s a pre-response indicator, but it can let you know what content and actions in your email are the most attractive to the reader and give you a good idea of what part of the email was of most interest. Be sure and look at each link separately to determine the winners. Also look at the comparison of click-through to conversion or response. Did people click on your email links (showing interest) and lose it when  they got to the response area? This could be an indication that your response form either asks for too much information, the offer doesn’t pay off as promised in your email or that somehow you lost the reader’s interest.

Conversion or Response Rate

This is absolutely the most important metric. All email has a call-to-action, and this metric answers the question, “Did recipients convert to the action you wanted them to take?” Did they sign up for a subscription? Make a purchase? For most email marketers, the question about whether or not someone bought is the most important metric of all.

Unsubscribes and Spam Complaints

The unsubscribe metric is becoming less important over time. Since consumers are getting so overwhelmed with email, many don’t even take the time to unsubscribe or report email as spam. So in most cases, you’ll find that those people not interested will simply delete your email without reading it. But watch this metric for spikes that could indicate that your content is off base. And any spikes in spam complaints can adversely affect your deliverability so it’s important that you pay attention and take action to avoid this.

Bounces

This is a deliverability metric and can help you keep watch on how current your email opt-in list is. Soft bounces are temporary – a full mailbox or server that is down – and hard bounces are permanent – a mailbox that is no longer in existence. Delete any hard bounces, and if an address provides a soft bounce over time, remove it. Not keeping your list current can mean that you are relying on a skewed picture of your email universe and also can affect your reputation with an ISP over time.

The beauty of email marketing is that it is trackable, measurable and you can test programs to improve results. Get comfortable running your metrics, and spend some time interpreting them for increased email success.

Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

Google for Small Business

Google is the market leader in online search and is becoming the market leader in FREE tools for small business. Watch the presentation on how to get started with Google.



Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

BigTurns is an online business platform.  What’s an “online businesss” platform?  If you’ve not come across this concept before you probably talk about a CMS (content management system).  BigTurns platform at its most basic level is a CMS system, but it’s so much more…

What BigTurns does is take all the elements that a traditional online business needs to be successful and merge them into one holistic solution.  The elements that I’m talking about are CMS, e-commerce, email marketing, CRM, analytics and reporting. 

Typically a business will run all these systems separately in different environments.  By doing it all in one place will save you money, but having these fully integrated can make marketing so much more targeted and accountable.  Calculating ROI on email campaigns and affiliate schemes is so much easier and can done “out of the box”. 

The system also helps to build accurate profiles of your customers because every interaction they have with your website, whether it be completing a form or buying a product is recorded against their CRM record as can every email you have with them.  This means any member of staff can pick up that customer and at a glance can see exactly their history with the company.

The benefits of this type of approach will filter through to every part of your business, but what’s also worth highlighting is that having this type of functionality pre-integrated and available “out of the box” means that online development cost can be dramatically reduced.  A complex database driven site that might have cost you 40k to develop a couple of years ago can now be achieved using BC for a third of that.

There are other fringe benefits as well, the whole system is hosted, which means you don’t need worry about servers or what to do if they go down.  BIgTurns is built on an Adobe infrastructure which has multiple backup and disaster recovery processes in place.  By using a system like this with thousands of other users means you actually leverage real power.  If you’re having a problem the likelihood is thousands of others are probably experiencing the same problem this means in the rare instance there are problems they are resolved very quickly.

Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

Hopefully this guide provided information, tools and ideas for your email campaigns that you can implement right away. But even with a new focus on strategy, list building, content creation and analysis, there are still tactical things that should be periodically checked to ensure email programs are working. See how well your email program performs against these essential diagnostics:

Test your opt-in process

Take a minute to walk yourself through your opt-in process, especially if it has been a year or more since you designed or tweaked it. Your first questions: Do all the links work? Do they send you to the pages you expect, such as a registration or confirmation page? Next, how many clicks does it take to complete the opt-in, including clicking a confirmation link in a follow-up email? Usability rules say the fewer clicks required, the more likely the user will complete the process. Two clicks is ideal, three is reasonable and four or more means you're more likely to see users abandon the optin. Be sure and do this for all working opt-in points including your main opt-in page and all landing pages that are active on your site.

Who's monitoring your incoming mailboxes.

It makes sense to automate your email marketing or newsletter program as much as you can, to reduce the need to supervise opt-ins, opt-outs, registration changes, targeting and segmentation, etc. However, remember that there's a human being behind every email address on your list, and they’re capable of just about anything. That includes not following directions for opting in, opting out,  sending feedback or otherwise contacting you. That's why you need to designate someone, either in your department or in your company's IT department, to monitor all email mailboxes associated  with your outgoing messages to watch for misdirected opt-outs, complaints and comments. Most especially this includes the email address you use to send your messages. No matter how many times you tell people not to reply to messages or how easy your feedback or unsubscribe process is, subscribers are going to hit «reply» anyway. Someone must monitor that mailbox to catch and route personal replies. If you haven’t designated someone, now is the time to do so. If you have, check in often and find out what type of traffic and feedback is coming in.

Review message performance across platforms and email clients.

The way your email is received has definitely changed in the last 12 months, and it will continue to do so in the future. When was the last time you tested your email message to make sure it renders correctly across all email clients? You may regularly check test messages in your inbox, but have you checked them in Outlook, on a Mac, in AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail? And don’t forget, you have to add in mobile devices like iPhones and Blackberries and other smartphones, which don't handle HTML and rich text well. If you use an email solution provider to manage your email programs, it might offer a testing service that can do this for you automatically. If not, take the time to check it yourself. If your emails don’t look exactly like you want, change your designs so they work more effectively.

Optimize both ends of the email relationship.

When was the last time you looked at your unsubscribe rate – and the reasons for unsubscribes? New names grow old quickly on the typical mailing list. Interest, as judged by opens and clicks, starts to drop off as early as the first couple of weeks after opt-in. You need to act fast to get newcomers engaged enough to continue opening your messages and clicking on your offers. It isn't enough to nurture newcomers, though. You also need to do more than just say good-bye to people leaving your list, especially if they take the time to unsubscribe properly instead of merely fading away or hitting the spam complaint button in a misguided attempt to quit. Although you must stop emailing as soon as the owner asks to unsubscribe, you should confirm the unsubscribe in a followup email or on the landing page. Include in it a link to a short exit survey, directions on how to re-subscribe if the unsubscribe was a mistake and maybe even an offer to sweeten the pot. This learning will help  you refine strategy for the future.

Review all co-registration sources, and monitor by source to see how they perform.

Co-registration, in which you cross-promote your email offerings with third parties, can be a fast and inexpensive way to build your list, especially if you don›t have a lot of resources. However, co- registration has two big downsides. First, you can't always control what other businesses listed along with you in the co-registration deal do. Second, the people who sign up for your program may not be as motivated as the ones who sign up directly. How long has it been since you checked out your co-registration? Examine the opt-in page to see what other companies and offers are being listed  with you. Make sure the registration page still works and contains your branding, that the permission level has not changed and that the registrations are properly being fed into your database. You also need to monitor how well these names perform and whether they are responsible for more than their share of either business or problems, such as bad addresses and spam complaints. Segregate the names into a sublist and compare them on key metrics with your general database. If the numbers are bad, discontinue the co-registration partnership.

Test all links in all email messages

One of the key provisions in CAN-SPAM, the U.S. law regulating commercial email, is that you must include a working unsubscribe mechanism in each commercial email message. Do you know if yours is working? There's a good chance it might not be. As simple a step as unsubscribe might be, check each time to make sure your process is working. Don’t get lulled into a false sense of compliance. You should test every link in every campaign message you send to make sure each one works. More than one time is even better, since things do break down. But with the unsubscribe process, follow it through to the confirmation. Using a seed address, one that's on your list specifically to track rendering and deliverability, unsubscribe the address and take every required step to complete the process. Then, check the database to make sure the address has been either deleted or moved to an internal do-not-email list.

Review your deliverability.

Emails that are well targeted with great creative and compelling offers don’t do your company any good unless they are actually delivered. When was the last time you reviewed your rate of delivery? Test your content against spam filters and see how many of your emails are blocked. If you aren’t pleased with the results, optimize your email for inbox delivery by creating good headers, writing content that doesn’t look like spam and cultivating good industry relations. If your current email solution doesn’t have a component to rate your delivery success and help your company avoid spam filters, consider finding a service that can analyze your content and help you improve deliverability.

Review message frequency and sending schedule.

Are you sending too frequently, or not often enough? This is a hard call to make, because it›s often not clear whether you would gain ROI by increasing mailings by one or two a month or lose it because you would aggravate recipients into unsubscribing, hitting the spam complaint button or going into hiding to escape you. However, it›s time to review your email program›s performance over the last 12 months. If you›re sending less frequently than weekly or even bi-weekly, your list might be going to sleep in between sends. Consider stepping up your frequency by one or two mailings in a cycle to see if it will bring you added revenue. While you don’t want to lose subscribers, you also don’t want to leave money on the table. Understand that you have to be careful when you move mailings up beyond the level you promised subscribers. Moving from a weekly to a daily schedule could create havoc, but moving from a monthly schedule to bi-weekly might not have the same effect. How will you know? Test first and watch both the positive indicators – opens, clicks, conversions, sales, order size per sales, etc. – and the negative ones, such as spam complaints and unsubscribes.

Keep your list clean with periodic removal of inactive addresses.

It's true: half of your mailing list, maybe even more if you don't email it often enough, has gone inactive on you. They're still out there, but they aren›t opening, clicking or buying. And you need to either clean out the dead wood or find a way to wake them up. First, you need to find out how many addresses have not responded in a certain time period. Segment your database by addresses that generated no clicks or opens in six months. Create a special message inviting recipients to opt in again, update preferences or take advantage of a special offer. After a period of time, go back into the segment and delete any address that hasn't responded.

Review your resources.

Do you have the right partner for email marketing? One that can also help you integrate email with Web analytics, social media and mobile marketing, and enhance delivery? And one that can provide content and support for you to continue learning about email marketing? Consider learning more about BigTurns. We offer tools such as a Blacklist Checker for Email that can enable your company to determine if you are blacklisted with any of the seven major service providers. We also offer free HTML templates and basics, plus quizzes, white papers, Webcasts and more.

Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

Lead generation is a tough thing to do. It takes time, lots of time, and the results are few and far between. 

We have put together a system for generating leads that motivates, automates, and provides results.  It's a bit complicated and has taken some years to perfect but now it's working and I'm going to show you how to do it for your own business.

The system is a 6 part Sales & Marketing System for lead generation.

1. Get a List of Contacts
2. Market Research
3. Multi Part Email Campaign
4. Watch the results
5. Call back
6. Monthly Newsletters

Get a List of Contacts

You need access to multiple lists of contacts.  Lots of lists & lots of contacts.  This is the raw data where everything starts.  If sales is a numbers game then this is the big number.  You can find lists of contacts in lots of different places.

• List Brokers
• Scrub The Web
• Phone Book
• Yellowpages
• Association Memberships
• etc

The trick with lists is finding a current list that is relevant to your business. No sense having a list of retail clothing companies if you are selling lab equipment.  The best lists are the ones in your current database, in your phone, and in your email address book.  But the volume of contacts needed is usually not there.

Once you have the list you will need to sort and segment based on relevant fields.  We sort our database into Manufacturers, Retailers, & Associations.

At this stage in the lead generation process we keep all the lists in Excel or Google Spreadsheets.  We like to have Name, Company, Telephone, Industry, City, website.

We don't care for email addresses 'cause you can't use them for your marketing.  You need to have "Explicit Permission" to comply with the CAN-SPAM act.  So, don't bother buying a list of email addresses 'cause they are not usable and can get you barred from sending emails in the future.

Market Research
We hire Telemarketers to help us with our market research and to build the database. Our process is to call everyone on the list of contacts, ask a few relevant questions to their industry, tell them what industry we are in (eCommerce), and then close the call requesting the name of the appropriate decision maker and their email address.

Here's the thing.  Ask the contact if you can send them relevant information via email.  If they say "Yes" then you have permission to send them emails.

We use a team of Telemarketers, we have a system for training, managing, and monitoring their progress.  It's a bit of set up work but the results are well worth it.

Multi-Part Email Campaign

Once we have permission to email the contact, we subscribe them to the "intro campaign".

We use a 5 part intro campaign that auto sends 5 different emails over the next 60 days.  We set up the email to provide useful information to the contact.  The emails go out automatically based on the day they signed up to the campaign.  We try to keep these emails short and have a soft close.  All the discussion about our firm is put after our Signature.

So, now the contact will be exposed to your firms name 6 times in 2 months.  Your awareness is starting to build.

Email Analytics

Watch the results using a professional email marketing system.  We use the BigTurns Email system because it is tied into our CRM database and lets us have a birds eye view of what's happening as it happens.

Everyday we look at the "Live Feed" showing us how many emails went out that day, who opened, who clicked, and who unsubscribed.  We see this interaction in real time.

Don't worry about the Unsubscribes.  We want people to unsubscribe.  It proves that our message is focused and not for everyone.

Call Back

The "Who Clicked" is a warm list for the sales people to call.

From this Live Feed we set up times and dates to call the contacts who clicked, and if we have time we call the contacts who opened.  The call goes something like this:  Hi__________, I am following up on the email we sent you and would like to know if you would like to discuss [article they clicked on]."

Don't leave this part up to a junior person.  This is the warm lead that could result in a sale. 

Monthly Newsletter

After the intro campaign has finished (60 days after sign up) we need to do a couple of things.

1. Check to see if the contact has had any action with the newsletters and if you have called them
2. Subscribe them to the Monthly Newsletter

You never know when the contact is going to be ready to contact you so it is best to keep top of mind and there is no better way then through email newsletters.

I hope this helps.

C

Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com

PayPal  recently published a survey of online transactions (or non-transactions)  and here is how we read the results:

The biggest challenge for online merchants is getting them through the eCommerce Conversion Funnel.  The funnel usually looks a little something like this:

StoreFront (Home Page)
> Catalog View
>> Product List View
>>> Product Detail View
>>>> Shopping Cart Summary**
>>>>> Check Out Form

** The Shopping Cart Summary is the page where the buyer sees a summary of the products selected, the taxes, and the shipping charges.  This is where the ABANDONMENT occurs.

We can measure and test abandonment rates to help your site reduce abandonment.  And PayPal has helped us to see what items need to be considered or tested to increase sales.

Here are our interpretations of PayPals survey:

Main reason why visitors leave the Shopping Cart Summary:
 - To gather more information like "Shipping Costs"

Main reason for abandoning:
 - Shipping Charges were too high
 - Wanted to compare prices with another website
 - Wanted to compare prices with a Bricks and Mortar store
 - Wanted to look for an online coupon
 - The preferred payment option was not available

Main Suggestion for Online Merchants
 - Provide shipping charges upfront before the checkout
 - Provide as many options for payment as possible

Shipping still seems to be the main driver for visitors to leave a website behind.  We suggest that all online merchants carefully examine their shipping policies and consider making "Shipping" a marketing function rather than an "Operational" function.

In that, part or all shipping charges can be built into the selling price of the product and then you can have the luxury of using shipping charges as a marketing tool like "Free Shipping".

To read the complete survey click here

Charles Brodeur
eCommerce Consultant
BigTurns Business Systems
Vancouver, BC V6E4R1
info@BigTurns.com