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Transactional Email
June 27, 2006
I came across this interesting article that ClickZ published last week about transactional email and leveraging it for your marketing. Now I am sure everyone has thought about customer touch points and the appropriate time to "market" to someone, but you know what, it is always the right time, it just depends on how you position it...
How many e-mail messages does your company send each month? I mean all messages, not just those sent with the express purpose of e-mail marketing. If you tally the numbers, you may get a surprise. For many companies, their commercial or marketing e-mail quantities pale in comparison to another type of e-mail: transactional messages.
Transactional messages are defined under CAN-SPAM as any e-mail "facilitating, completing or confirming a previously agreed upon transaction." Unlike commercial messages, transactional messages aren't required to carry any of the following:
- An advertisement notation at the top
- A U.S. Postal Service address
- An unsubscribe link
There's another big difference between commercial and transactional messages: metrics. Though DoubleClick reports commercial messages averaging open rates of 26.9 percent and CTRs (define) of 7.2 percent in Q3 2005, Postfuture showed transactional messages pulling open rates greater than 70 percent, with CTRs surpassing 50 percent in 2004. A 2003 MarketingSherpa study found recipients viewed transactional messages more positively than other types of e-mail; they scored a 4.2 rating on a scale of 1 (not positive) to 5 (very positive).
Many companies have taken baby steps to incorporate marketing messages into transactional e-mail. A client I'm currently working with includes commercial information in a brief PS at the end of its customer service response e-mail. These e-mail messages are currently text, not HTML, and though the message is there, no one feels it's terribly effective.
So I've challenged the client: Can we maintain the transactional nature of these e-mail messages while making them more effective marketing tools? Can we make better use of these moments when we have the customer's attention and interest, but not make it so in-your-face that we alienate them?
It's a fine line, but I'm finding it can be done.
The first key is to understand CAN-SPAM rules around mixed messages: e-mail that contains both transactional and commercial information. For these types of messages, CAN-SPAM relies on the e-mail's primary purpose to determine whether it's classified as transactional or commercial. Key elements here are:
- The subject line. Is it referencing the transactional or commercial information?
- The content. Which is first/most prominent, the transactional or commercial information?
- If both reference the transactional, you've got a shot at maintaining the transactional designation. But it's not guaranteed.
Some articles about determining the mixed message's primary purpose reference say as long as you keep the message two-thirds transactional and one-third commercial, the primary purpose will be viewed as transactional. But lawyers I've been working with on this aren't comfortable with that blanket statement.
We've been focusing on the impression the e-mail will leave on recipients. Will readers feel they're being marketed to or feel this is a relevant message about their previous transaction with a relevant, but unobtrusive, advertisement in it? If it's the former it's commercial; if it's the latter, it's transactional.
How do you put structure behind this type of vague litmus test? We created samples of mixed messages and discussed them with the attorneys. We didn't just get a thumbs-up/thumbs-down on the transactional primary purpose on each, we talked about why the e-mail sample passed or failed the test. This allowed us to create some basic guidelines, knowing these alone don't guarantee the transactional primary purpose (we'll still have to pass the impression test mentioned above). But they make it more likely. Our guidelines:
The subject line must be completely transactional, with no mention of the commercial information.
For text e-mail, the transactional message must appear first, in its entirety. Only when the entire transactional message has been delivered can the commercial part of the e-mail begin.
We did get the OK to include a brief, soft-sell reference to the commercial message in the first paragraph ("My name is Jeanne and I will be handling your request today. I've also included a 'Did you know' offer at the bottom of this e-mail. Take a look, it may interest you.").
The commercial part of the message shouldn't be more prominent than the transactional message.
For text messages, bullet points were a no-no in the commercial portion of the information, as they make it too prominent. Bullet points were OK, though, if the message was HTML.
HTML provides more flexibility in how the commercial message could be presented and where it could appear while keeping the primary purpose transactional:
Including a narrow right column in the e-mail as a location for the commercial message was approved. In doing so, we were able to get the message into the preview pane and make it more prominent, without making it too prominent. Also OK was a box in the top right with the commercial message in it.
A light colored background behind the commercial message was approved, so long as the commercial message didn't take up more than about half the right column.
Including a longer commercial message, one that took up all the right column, was fine, so long as it didn't have a colored background.
Bolded text, used sparingly in the commercial portion of the message, was OK.
Remember, none of this is gospel, and none comes from CAN-SPAM regulations. These guidelines are based on one legal department's interpretation of the CAN-SPAM rules for primary purpose. You'll need to set your own guidelines, based on what your attorneys recommend. But these may serve as a starting point for discussion with them.
One more thought: why does CAN-SPAM matter? Why not just concede that although these messages refer to a previous transaction, their primary purpose is commercial? So you add in the "advertisement" notation at the top (required if your list is not 100 percent opt-in), the USPS address, and an unsubscribe link. What's the big deal?
It's really not a big deal for the e-mail itself. It becomes a big deal longer term. If you designate customer service e-mail as commercial and someone unsubscribes, you won't be able to send her another commercial message. So the next time she submits a question via e-mail to customer service, you'd have to respond with a transactional, not commercial, e-mail.
Can it be done? Sure. But it adds a layer of complexity; you must have two different messages, one transactional and one commercial, for each customer service issue. Most companies want to avoid this, hence the importance of maintaining the transactional nature of the e-mails.
Full articlel available here
Comments (0) | Posted by Jeff at 9:37 PM | Permalink
eROI June 2006 News - Where Are Your Customers This Summer?
June 27, 2006
For those of you that have not subscibed to our newsletter yet, here is a teaser and a link to the full version. You can aslo add it to your RSS Reader with the link at the end of this post.
School is out and people are on the move. Many are planning vacations and this affects both consumer and business marketing plans. A large number of clients and partners that we have spoken with have not really taken this into account for planning and adjusting their summer campaigns. You may want to be asking yourself the following: Will your audience be online at home? Or will they be on the go in the parks, at summer camps, in the woods or at beaches and fairs? How will these factors impact your email campaigns?
We suggest allowing for more time for responses to summer campaigns come in as many people will be traveling and schedules, no matter the audience, will change. Think about adding 3-5 days onto any measurement rates you have in place and allow additional time to convert recipients and respondents into sales or leads.
On the flip side, expect to see people having more time that they can allocate to sitting in front of a computer. The computer, and especially the email Inbox, have become more of a fixture in everyone's daily life, so it will be interesting to see if a noticeable behavioral change in response rates occurs.
Either way, get out and enjoy some of these longer days and sunshine for yourself. We here at eROI certainly plan to do so.
Add eROI Newsletter to Your RSS Feed Reader
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:00 PM | Permalink
Show Me the Money
June 27, 2006
I love a clear and concise email outreach. Not just the "Check Out our Sale" or "SAVE SAVE SAVE" but give me a strong visual clue as to the Pavlovian Benefit... the Money that will stay in my pocket.
Great concept and orginal use of a first full of bills.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:24 AM | Permalink
Dad Only Needs Coffee
June 26, 2006
Now I know that the spend on men for fathers days is so much lower than the spend on women. Not that it really makes a difference, as a man, we are simple creatures. But could it be any simplier than just giving us a Starbuck's card? Is Father's day just another day for a cup of Joe and a pat on the back, "Good Job Dad, Stay Awake".
I like event based marketing but I never get alot out of a Starbucks email. Hey, we have some new beans, or looks like you could buy a stored value loyalty card for "X". I want to see some relevant meat from Starbucks in my inbox. I am there EVERY day for my daily heart pounding cup of Joe, so start to learn about me and try to establish a two-way dialogue instead of just taking the easy route.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 8:01 AM | Permalink
Focus on the Goal
June 19, 2006
I found this interesting testing article on offer numbers. I think that it speaks for itself and really the results were not a surprise. We refer to the targeted campaign with one offer in client strategy all the time. Use the newsletter to build relationship and the "postcard" to drive them to a specific action. Losing the number of choices (when you KNOW your customer) through a targeted offer based on profile and past activity factors is a sure winner.
Now this does not mean that you could not have more than one clickable button or link in the email in my opinion, but make sure that they all drive to the same landing page. And also of importance is to code each of those links with a tracking URL (like ?source=link1). Adding this code will allow you to look at the conversions based on the placement of the link and help you to refine your link placement in the inbox.
Continue After the JUMP...
Testing Emails Offering Services June 07, 2006 By The Marketing Experiments Journal Marketing Experiments reports that emails offering one service compared to emails offering a choice of services bring higher conversions.The outcome? The email that was focused on just one service, from beginning to end, significantly outperformed the email which tried to describe and pre-sell four separate services.
Our findings are not entirely surprising. Most of us already know that a website landing page which focuses on a single product or service will almost always do better than a similar page which tries to sell multiple products or services.
It is logical that the same would apply to emails.
Our test was run with one merchant, using the same email list, over same time period.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:40 AM | Permalink
A hint on when NOT to email - email marketing best practices
June 16, 2006
I have a number of family members that use Safeway.com to buy their groceries so I thought I would give it a shot. I went through and picked all my groceries and put them in my cart. I got pulled away from my purchase to take care of something else and forgot about the cart.
OPPORTUNITY #1 - Remind me of my cart, they did this without fail, a nice email reminding me how much I had in my cart. There was no offer, but they did not need to, it is food - a necessity of life. My one rant about this is the timing - 5 days after I had abandoned my cart. I think 1-2 days is an acceptable timeframe for a follow up for food. Most likely a week later my needs have changed and the cart is fairly irrelevant.
OPPORTUNITY #2 - This is a huge failure. First of all it was 2 weeks after my abandoned cart, what grocery list is exactly the same two weeks later. The thing that really got to me is how the email started out. "We hate to be a squeaky wheel..." Hint: as soon as you say "We hate to be" don’t send the email. Remove this from the process even if you are offering complimentary shipping (a $5 offer).
Comments (0) | Posted by Jeff at 8:01 AM | Permalink
barberbrigade.com: Here’s to all the Manimals!
June 13, 2006
With a name like Barber Brigade, I had the immediate sense that these guys would slide down a pole, clamber into a truck with a flashing siren and haul ass over to my bathroom to trim my facial vegetation at the first sign of uneven growth. Sadly (or maybe thankfully), this is not the case. What these guys do want to do is sell me some grooming products. I am informed by the site that most men do in fact buy hair, bath and shaving products. Apparently, extensive research went into this discovery and if they wrote it, it must be true. Personally, unless it costs around $10 and/or tells me it will make the hair on my head look thicker, I ain’t buying.
Here’s the likely scenario: I see the site, think it’s awesome and show my woman (done and done). The wife drops by Target for some feminine hygiene products and stumbles across the Barber Brigade line in the store. Instantly she will begin picturing me looking like the hip, fashionista, almost metro friends she wishes she had and she will buy me some gel, lotion or other moisturizing, pore cleansing slime. I will use it, undoubtedly I will like it and I will feel that I am still manly because Barber Brigade assures me I am.
barberbrigade.com is a well-designed, fun website with all sorts of interesting and humorous things to click on, read and interact with. Bottom line, the site makes me want to learn about the product. Check it out and lose the peach fuzz in a mostly manly way.
Comments (0) | Posted by Jeff at 3:58 PM | Permalink
Too Much Focus On ROI?
June 12, 2006
I wanted to post this to share with those of you a great article from our favorite Melinda Kruger from today's MediaPost Email Insider email.
By Melinda Krueger, Tuesday, June 6, 2006
IS JOHN MARSHALL OF CLICKTRACKS Analytics guilty of heresy? At the recent INBOX 2006 e-mail conference in San Jose, Calif., he posited the radical idea that interactive marketers are too focused on ROI. Despite the fact that I was there to moderate another panel on e-mail reporting and analytics, I had to agree.
We seem to believe that because we can track so much of what happens in an e-mail and on a Web site, we have all the answers; everything is black and white. When it comes to human behavior, Marshall points out, there is a lot of gray.
The title of Marshall's session was "Boost E-mail Campaign Results Through Web Analytics." Co-presenter Elaine O'Gorman of Silverpop had this good advice for developing a successful integration of Web and e-mail data: start small. Getting started, said O'Gorman, is easier than you'd think. Choose one or two things you would like to measure, e.g., e-mail clickers who reach the order acknowledgement page. Instead, many companies try to capture every possible piece of data they may ever need, and the result is a ridiculously long and expensive implementation and a mountain of indecipherable data.
Why do it at all if we're too focused on ROI? The data is extremely important for building a successful e-mail effort, but it doesn't tell the whole story. As we know, human beings are erratic and data capture is imperfect. Just because consumers didn't get to the order page in a straightforward, measurable path, doesn't mean they weren't influenced by the content of the e-mail and their time on a site. So if you say that every e-mail sent delivered $33.16 in incremental revenue, which you know from the hard data, you're selling your efforts short.
Look at your colleagues in traditional advertising. Do they try to quantify the value of their efforts to the penny? Cha! As if!
Augie Ray of Fullhouse, marketing guru and numbers geek by day, retail and online business owner by night, provided me with a concrete example of the concept. He found that when he ran his paid search marketing strictly by the numbers, eliminating ads that did not deliver a positive ROI, his total sales were not as high as when he allowed a few seemingly unproductive ads to remain in play. Similarly, he reported that although the sales directly attributable to his e-mail newsletter were low, the number of customers who mentioned it while shopping in the brick and mortar store more than justified the effort. "The e-mail newsletter helps to differentiate me from other small business, keeps me top of mind--or at least prevents me from being forgotten--and reinforces our store's brand," said Ray.
So while the E-mail Diva does not suggest that you abandon data collection and analysis, she does recommend that you consider the larger picture. In addition to the value captured on all those lovely reports and spreadsheets, there are unquantifiable yet positive brand impressions. Your e-mail program is even more valuable than you know. So make sure those in charge of the purse strings see the whole picture, with all that beautiful gray.
Good luck!
The E-mail Diva
Send your questions or submit your e-mail for critique to Melinda Krueger, the E-mail Diva, at emaildiva@kd-i.com. All submissions may be published; please indicate if you would like your name or company name withheld.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 8:20 AM | Permalink
Drive relevant content in relevant ways
June 9, 2006
One of the things I have been noticing on our newsletter is the value of the RSS button we insert in our email. Yes everyone that gets our newsletter is a double opt-in subscriber, but it allows those users that are forwarded the email from their friends to be able to keep up to date on our newsletter without subscribing.
I ran into a client example this last week when we were in Chicago at the Internet Retailer show. This client has 250 email subscribers, highly qualified, small list. The interesting thing is that they have over 6,500 RSS subscribers.
Yes, you cannot track nearly to the same level as with email, but if someone wants offers in RSS, give it to them. If you have a BlackBerry you filter your email on your phone and RSS is another touch point for those that filter email, but not RSS. Give it a shot. If you need assistance in turning on your RSS functionality in emailROI, please contact us.
Comments (0) | Posted by Jeff at 2:01 PM | Permalink
Why does Nordstrom think I am a woman?
June 9, 2006
"Save 40% on Women's Apparel Brands: Half-Yearly Sale for Women + Kids"
I am on the Nordstrom.com email list. 3 of my last 4 emails from them have completely targeted at female products and brands. I un-married with no children. I buy jeans, shirts, and shoes.
After I recieved the subject line above, I went to the bottom of the email to adjust my profile or settings. All I found was this:
"TO UNSUBSCRIBE: This e-mail was sent to you because you are a valued Nordstrom customer. If you would no longer like to receive our E-mail Updates, please click here."
What I am I getting at?
Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool...because... It allows you to have a direct dialouge with your subscriber. Ask them who they are and what they want. Allow them the ability to tell you more.When you get this info - do something with it!
The fastest way to get an ubsubscribe is sending content that is not relevant to their world.
Comments (0) | Posted by alex at 9:17 AM | Permalink
What chip are you
June 8, 2006
I am Cool, Creamy & Green
I'm cool. Yeah. I know it. Laid back, easy-going and breezy. Nothing ruffles my feathers. I'm the one everyone wants around in a crisis. I keep my head about me. I may even walk around like I own this place. Underneath my cool exterior, though, is a passionate, self-possessed person who knows what's right and what's good.
Comments (0) | Posted by Jeff at 9:42 PM | Permalink
I found my flavor, What Kind of Kettle Chip are You?
June 8, 2006
We worked with Kettle Foods (LOVE THE CHIPS) again to put together a great new Crave Club Site. Hats off to Kettle as they are great designers and to Maxwell PR for the direction.
I am Bold, Grown-up Cheese.
I'm a bold, big city person. Museums, theater, fine dining and cool shops... I can even appreciate performance art. I've got grown-up tastes but I'm not stuffy or stiff. I know how to have fun and I'm just as comfortable at a white linen-laid table as I am at the hot dog cart. I've got style. An individualist who isn't afraid to show my true colors or to stand out in a crowd.