Tag Archives: Email marketing

January 8, 2014 · 10:29 am

The Dishonor Unroll

If you are a typical email user your box probably gets a fair amount of mail each day that’s not exactly spam but also not of huge interest to you.

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That mail may come from companies or services to which you’ve subscribed (probably when you signed up and didn’t uncheck the “send me news” box) but for which you don’t have any great need of immediate news. If you’re a power email user you’ve probably figured out how to set up filters in your email client to dump those mails into a folder you can check later. For the rest of us there’s Unroll.me.

Unroll.me is a service that does just that. As they put it, you can unsubscribe from unwanted email subscriptions, discover new ones and organize them all in one place. From that they create what they call a Rollup:

The Rollup is a digest that gives you an overview of all the subscriptions you receive each day. The Rollup will keep your inbox clean by organizing the subscriptions you receive into a daily digestible email.

The screed today isn’t a love note to the service although I do use it and find it useful.  As you might imagine, the company collects an awful lot of information about who is subscribed to what since it is granted permission to look at your email stream.  It also knows what percentage of people who subscribe to something either unsubscribe or send the mail to the Rollup and not to the inbox.  They stopped over 1 billion emails from reaching their users’ inboxes in 2013.  And from whom do those emails come?

Funny you should ask.  Unroll.me just published lists of the companies who get dumped and who get aggregated.  These are the companies from which users unsubscribe:

  1. 1800 Flowers — 52.50% unsubscribe rate
  2. Ticketweb — 47.50% unsubscribe rate
  3. Pro Flowers — 45.10% unsubscribe rate
  4. Expedia — 45.00% unsubscribe rate
  5. Active.com — 44.70% unsubscribe rate
  6. Eventful — 44.20% unsubscribe rate
  7. Oriental Trading — 43.60% unsubscribe rate
  8. Shopittome.com — 42.10% unsubscribe rate
  9. 1800 Contacts — 42.00% unsubscribe rate
  10. Party City — 41.60% unsubscribe rate

I’ve only listed the top 10 – the link will show you more.  Now if I’m on the above list I’d be asking myself why.  I can answer the question:  you’re not providing anything of value.  My guess is the mails tend to be about you and not about your customers.  Perhaps you’re opting people in for your mail as a default instead of allowing them to make the choice.  Compare that list with the Top 10 most rolled up companies:

  1. Hulu — 61.60% Rollup rate
  2. AmazonLocal Deals — 46.00% Rollup rate
  3. GoDaddy — 44.40% Rollup rate
  4. Codecademy — 40.50% Rollup rate
  5. Google Offers — 39.00% Rollup rate
  6. Evernote — 36.40% Rollup rate
  7. Microsoft — 34.90% Rollup rate
  8. About.me — 34.40% Rollup rate
  9. Groupon — 32.80% Rollup rate
  10. LivingSocial Deals — 32.40% Rollup rate

These guys are offering value although not enough so that users feel the need to see their news immediately.  Not awful, but if you’re in a time-based offer business like GroupOn or LivingSocial, this could be a problem.

If your business uses email for communication, think about what, how, and how often you’re using that list to communicate.  Time is a precious commodity and all of us have less of it than we’d like.  To get customers to give your mail some of that time you need to provide value – a return on that time investment.  Otherwise, unsubscribes result and you’re on the list next year.  Not a place I’d like to be.  You?

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September 19, 2013 · 9:11 am

Imposing Our Will

There is an expression used in sports that coaches sometimes employ when they’re trying to fire up their team.  They talk about “imposing our will” on the other side.  It’s a catchphrase that hints at a physical beating – being faster and stronger – as opposed to being smarter.   It’s often a good thing to impose one’s will when it refers to mental toughness and not so good when it refers to taking advantage of someone who is incapable of fighting back.

English: Evolution Directions of Mobile Device

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I got to thinking about this while I was reading a study on, of all things, email.  Hopefully if you’re a regular here on the screed you’re used to these little jumps in logic, but let me explain what prompted the thought.  The study came out a few weeks ago from the folks at Yesmail Interactive. It is all about the way marketers send email and how recipients interact with it.  There’s a bit of a disconnect:

The report reveals that marketers have failed to account for the shift to mobile by not optimizing emails read on a mobile device. While 49 percent of all email opens happen on a mobile device, the click-to-open rate (how many consumers clicked after opening an email) is significantly lower for mobile. Twice as many people click on an email after opening it on a desktop (23 percent) than a mobile device (11 percent)…The study finds that 61 percent of consumers now read at least some of their emails on a mobile device, with 30 percent reading email exclusively on mobile devices.

In other words, the differences in those click-through rates show that mail not optimally formatted for the device gets tossed, and with it, your opportunity for engagement or a sale.  That’s what prompted my thought.  Our job as marketers isn’t to impose our will, it’s to satisfy the desires of our customers.  Sending out mail and demanding that the reader struggle through a communication that is better read on a different device is dumb.  Wondering why the email channel isn’t performing is dumber.  We need to spend the time and resources to bend to the customer’s will – a desire to read on a mobile device in this case – and not demand that they change their habits.

We can’t impose our will on our customers.  It’s quite the opposite.  Make sense?

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July 17, 2013 · 8:48 am

One Man’s Relevant Is Another’s Spam

There is a factoid coming out of some research that will be our topic today.  I find it of interest because it’s a dilemma that I share to a certain extent with the folks surveyed.  While the topic of the survey was the use of email, one of the key findings resonated with me:

The greatest percentage of marketers still felt challenged to create relevant and compelling content that will really draw in recipients. This ranked as the No. 1 challenge among B2B and B2C respondents to achieving their marketing objectives, but it was also considered the most effective tactic, cited by 71% of B2B marketers and 65% of B2C marketers. If marketers can create strong content, they believe it really does work at converting consumers.

This survey was conducted by the folks at Ascend2 and Research Underwriters.  I can attest to the challenges of creating compelling content – you see the result of that struggle each day here on the screed.  However, I wonder about the definition of relevant.  After all, you don’t have to go further than your own daily conglomeration of inbound emails to recognize that what’s compelling to those sending the stuff isn’t always at the top of your interest list.

Let’s take it out of the realm of commercial email for a second.  You probably get a few emails each day from friends or coworkers that are totally useless.  By that I mean you can ignore them and be no worse off – no less informed or enlightened.  They’re the “thanks” emails when you say you’ll follow up.  They’re the mails sent to 25 people on a team about a meeting involving 5 of them.  I’m all for communication but that gets to the “compelling and relevant” issue found in the survey.

Take that notion to mail you’d send on behalf of a commercial enterprise.  If you’re and airline and you’re sending me information about special fares that don’t apply to the city in which I live, you fail.  If you’re a vet sending me a special offer for the dog that died last year, you fail.  You see, what I’ve found is that compelling and relevant also means reader-focused, segmented, and based on whatever user data I have such as best read posts, etc.  It’s not  just some formula that satisfies MY agenda.

Marketing is hard and getting harder.  So’s blogging!  Neither one succeeds without a laser-like focus on the user.  Right?

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