Rue La La Valentine's Day Email

One of Rue La La’s best marketing features is that it’s “exclusive” – you can only get in via an invitation from someone else. Of course, you can get an invitation from thousands of people on Facebook or Twitter, so it’s not really that exclusive. But it FEELS exclusive, whether you’re a new shopper or someone handing our your URL so you can get the $10 credit when someone uses your URL. In fact, you’ll see my URL in the email above (feel free to use it if you’re shopping, in case there’s a Charles David boutique coming up soon!)

The beauty of the email is that it’s personalized, but not just in the boring kind of “Hi, Susan, here’s why you should love us” kind of way. Instead, in a very Martha Stewart’s Good Things kind of way, they’ve given me valentines that I can print out, cut, and give to my friends. And they are really cute and clever – working the “Rue” part of their name into the messages, along with one little snarky one about leaving me alone to shop. (I printed that one out for my husband.)

Of course, there’s a clickable call-to-action, the “Start Inviting” text with the arrow in a pink circle, that lets you invite people by email too. And it’s all tied together with creative use of a hand-drawn heart and bright pink highlight text that plays on their name.

Brilliant. I’d bet real money that Martha approves, too.

How structured are you when it comes to your e-commerce marketing plans? Sure, if you’re a bigger company, you probably have at least one employee dedicated to marketing, if not an entire department. But smaller companies often try to squeeze marketing in as an after-thought – after I package the orders, after I return phone calls, after I order new inventory, after my designer finishes the new promotional graphics for the homepage, after… You get the picture.

Make sure your 2011 New Year’s resolutions include “Improve my marketing efforts” by starting the year off on the right foot with a retail marketing calendar. Often used by brick-and-mortar stores to plan window designs, newspaper ads, and merchandise promotions, a marketing calendar is extremely effective for e-commerce too.

While it’s easy to say you’re going to do a better job at marketing, when your time gets short this year, you’re likely to forget about this. I’ve easily gone several months without doing so much as sending out an email to my subscribers, simply because I procrastinated and/or forgot, being busy with other tasks. Your boss or your vendors may bug you about certain tasks, but your customers aren’t likely to remind you to market to them! This is why a retail calendar comes in so handy for online merchants – it gives you a guideline for accountability, so you don’t forget or procrastinate.

Brandeo has a nice (and free!) Excel template marketing calendar to use, along with a one-month example to get your started. But it’s easy to create your own as well, whether it’s inside Excel, Word, or on your desk blotter calendar. Think of the categories of marketing you need to include: sales and promotions, online ads, social media, blogging, affiliate programs, etc. Then break the year down by weeks, and include tasks in each category that address your company needs. Also think about holidays, yearly events (back to school, the Superbowl, industry conferences) that affect your business. You might come up with something along the following lines:

For a great list of holidays, special remembrance days (like “Grandparents’ Day”), and events (such “Super Bowl Sunday”) check out this holiday list provided by Kyle Design. It also includes special religious days for Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Islamic faiths.

With a marketing calendar in hand, it’s a lot easier to stay on task with your marketing efforts. Each week, when you set up your task list or assign responsibilities to staff, make sure to refer to the current and upcoming weeks on your marketing calendar to make sure all efforts are being planned and prepped for. Also, track when you do or don’t accomplish an entry on your calendar, and note special successes and failures for use next year.

Here’s to a wonderful marketing year for your business in 2011!

Me and Big Jason Henderson

In January I was lucky enough to attend the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami for absolutely nothing. Quite literally, all I paid for was gas for the drive down, parking, and my hotel room. I was the lucky winner of a free ticket to the summit itself, the pre-workshop the day before, a VIP party, dinner in South Beach, the Gala dinner and party poolside…pretty much everything the event had to offer. And for this wonderful package I have to offer a belated but truly heartfelt thank you to Jason Henderson of Big Marketing, Erick Mott and the team at Lyris, and Todd Lebo and everyone else from Marketing Sherpa. All were tons of fun to hang out with and I learned a lot at the conference that I was able to bring back and put into action. So I wanted to share the top forty takeaways from my two-and-a-half-day jaunt down I-95 to Miami.

Me and the Lyris Team

1. “Adequecy is the enemy of excellence.” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments
2. On email signup forms, consider the offer – are you just offering the newsletter? Gee. Wow. What’s the incentive in signing up for a newsletter? Instead, offer something useful.
3. Use specific statements of quantity, not vague statements of quality.
4. Your copy should focus on what the customer gets from your company, not what your company gets from the customer.
5. Your call-to-action should communicate value.
6. Don’t offer a conclusion about your company. Offer hard facts that lead the reader to an inevitable conclusion.
7. Use images to create value. If the hero shot or smiley-faced girl doesn’t communicate anything of value, replace it with something that does – and use it to guide the customer’s eyes.
8. Every button should make a promise, should tell you what you’re going to get.
9. "Free" is good. "Completely free" is better. "Fully-functioning, completely free" is even better.
10. Link to your privacy policy on your signup form. (It can open in a popup window.)
11. There is no one optimal sending frequency – it differs for everyone. TEST.
12. Address the consumer’s needs and how you can fix those needs.
13. The only goal of your email is a click from the recipient, not a sale. The landing page leads to the sale.
14. It’s important to know how few of your repeat customers are responsible for what percentage of your sales. For example, 12% of Coke customers are responsible for 80% of its sales.
15. Customer retention is both relegated to the back office, and in and of itself fragmented/diluted. Joseph Jaffe, Author of Flip the Funnel
16. When it comes to social media, people don’t want to talk to shoes, but shoes keep trying to talk to people!
17. Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
18. In B2B it’s important to focus on lead nurturing – 80% of marketing leads wind up lost, ignored, or discarded.
19. Existing site traffic is full of potential subscribers, so optimize your best entry paths (look at your analytics) and lead them to your subscription forms.
20. Segment your lists for more effective email marketing – “batch and blast” is the past.
21. In B2B marketing, the name of the sender affects open rates twice as much as the subject of the email.
22. In social media, your audience is made up of three groups – silent majority, vocal minority, social authority. The latter has the highest ability to spread your word.
23. Connect with subscribers wherever they are – this is the intersection of social and email.
24. Enable campaigns with social sharing buttons – 89% who use it say it effectively extends their reach to new markets. Sergio Balegno of Marketing Sherpa
25. Turn your fans into an outside sales force.
26. Before you send out your newsletter, send out tweet asking people to subscribe.
27. Track who is sharing to segment the vocal minority or social authority from the silent majority.
28. Email is about sending your site to people. Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx.
29. Traffic is expensive – eyeballs cost money.
30. Consider affiliates, co-brand deals, licensing, natural search, paid search, tv press, sponsorships, list rental, and opt in email…of these, opt-in email is by far the cheapest.
31. Strike up a co-registration deal with someone in a similar but not competing market. The best co-reg deals are barter/trade and don’t cost you (or the other company) anything.
32. For many companies, double opt-in subscriptions are really overkill…how hard is it, really, to just unsubscribe? (Don’t take this as advice from me, it’s a paraphrased quote!) However, double-optin is preferred for co-reg, sweeps, and 3rd-party leads.
33. Make sure your email has value, not just relevance.
34. Sources of opt-in names can be newsletter offers, customer service call-ins, trade events, tele-prospecting.
35. Make emails easy to forward to a friend. Then ask your subscribers to do so!
36. Best placement for email signup forms is top left or right, "above the fold", and on every page of your site.
37. Use benefit-oriented language in your signup form.
38. Make sure there’s at least one form field and not just a button, because people are used to seeing form fields and that field is the widget that their eyes are used to associating with signing up for something.
39. Tell people how often the emails will come when they sign up.
40. 

    Cricket Lollipop

    
    And finally, even kids don’t want to eat lollipops with dead crickets in them, even if they are a novel idea. Thanks anyway, Bamboo Cricket, at least I can guarantee I won’t forget your name!

Note: Cricket lollipop photo courtesy of Offbeat Treats.

Most online businesses set up email lists of some sort, then proceed to just send out emails. This document will show you, from the perspective of the person RECEIVING the emails, what mistakes many people make. Avoid these mistakes to ramp up your email list to profitability.

1. Putting an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email. Why is that bad? When a subscriber wants to change their email address, what do they do? If you expect someone to unsubscribe one email address, then go back to your site and resubscribe with another, that’s expecting a lot. The best thing to do is have “Manage your subscription” link that takes them to a page that they can unsubscribe, change their email address, and even change which lists they subscribe to. Then, have an “Quick Unsubscribe” link next to that.

   Another thought here – I have signed up as a member of forums, and then gotten emails. When I wanted to change the email address or unsubscribe, I clicked on “Change subscription info” and it asked me to sign in to the forum first. If I don’t remember the forum login info I used when I created my account, I simply CAN’T get in to change my email address or unsubscribe. So, of course, I just report the emails as spam. I’ve had this happen at least four times that I can think of.

2. Making too much information required upon sign up. You only need their email address. You might want their first name, so you can personalize their email, but even this should be optional. Don’t require postal address, last name, and especially phone number. Requiring a phone number will cut your signups by at least 80%. And don’t require fields that are silly, like Title (Mr., Mrs., Ms.) or birthday. Why make it hard? Take as an example The Venetian, a casino in Las Vegas. Here’s their signup form: https://secure.venetian.com/APPS/EmailSignUp/. It requires birthdate, but they have to for age verification. But it requires Title! I clicked submit without my Title, and it gave me an error message. So the first thing I get in my email relationship with The Venetian is a beep and popup error message. That’s not a good start.

3. Making unsubscribing difficult. Let’s look again at The Venetian. In their emails there is an unsubscribe link. It goes here: http://venetian.com/APPS/Unsubscribe/. In order to unsubscribe, I have to enter my email address. If I have multiple email addresses (I have 12), I have to remember which one I used and enter it. So what do I do instead? I hit the Spam button in my email program to make them go to my Spam folder to be deleted. Simple for me, but it also sends a notice to my Spam filter company that The Venetian’s emails are spam. Too many of those, and you get banned, especially from AOL, where it’s almost impossible to get removed from a spam list. Instead, make it easy to unsubscribe. Do you really want someone on your list who doesn’t want to be? I suggest putting an unsubscribe (or at least Manage Subscription) link at the TOP of every email. It is MUCH better to lose a few subscribers easily, than to get Spam-reported.

4. NOT unsubscribing when someone requests unsubscribing. ProFlowers… If you ever sign up for their emails, expect to be on their list for life. I have unsubscribed at least five times from their lists, and they still keep sending. So I keep reporting them as spammers. Unfortunately, they’re so big, and not enough people are reporting them, apparently, that I still keep getting them in my inbox. I absolutely hate ProFlowers now, and will NEVER do business with them again.

5. Sending to people who may not know how they got subscribed. Do you auto-subscribe all customers? Do you have a “free report” that you send people, but don’t mention in the signup form that they’ll be subscribed to an email newsletter? If you send ongoing emails to these people, you may be a spammer.

   You don’t want people to get emails who don’t WANT to get emails, do you? So, for customers, in checkout, just say, “as a new customer you will be subscribed to our newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time.” Or, better yet, have a check box in checkout for “Subscribe.” Finally, you can have a subscribe form on the Invoice/Receipt page so AFTER they have happily sent you money, they can subscribe.

   If you send to customers without a specific subscription notice/form, I suggest sending them an email invitation to subscribe. You’re allowed to do that without it being spam, since they’ve done business with you. Take the last email newsletter you sent, and, ABOVE it, put a paragraph that says, “As a new customer with XXX, we’d like to invite you to subscribe to our newsletter and receive Special Sale Notices, Coupons, new product info, and more! We promise not to overwhelm you with emails, and you can unsubscribe at any time.” Have a link to subscribe. Send it only once.

6. Too many emails. I once signed up for TigerDirect emails. It must have been during an experiment, because I got at least one email a day, and sometimes two, for about a week. I finally unsubscribed. It was over a year until I resubscribed, and now they’re only about once a week. So, while experimenting with what would happen with overwhelming emails, they lost me for a year. Remember, people get between 20 and 200 emails a day. We’re ALL overwhelmed. Why would you want to become a negative contribution to that feeling of being overwhelmed??

   If you have “daily updates,” or “new product notices” that might be daily, have multiple levels of subscriptions. Let people decide how frequent they’ll get emails. Some people want to know everything right away, especially online shopping addicts. But most don’t. Have multiple email lists, “daily, weekly summary, monthly” and let them choose. And NEVER violate the frequency. If I pick monthly, and I get them weekly, I’m gonna spam-report it.

7. Too few emails. Hey, doesn’t that sound like the opposite of (6)?? Yep. If I sign up for email newsletters in January, and I don’t get anything until May, I probably have forgotten I signed up. At that point, I think it’s spam, and, you got it – you’re being reported as a spammer.

   Remember, emails don’t have to be huge. At a minimum, send a text email at least once a month keeping in touch, with something basic like a special offer, new product notice, or even a “Happy Mother’s Day” mention. Check out Hallmark – there’s a holiday about every day now, so there’s always SOME excuse for an email. If you drop the ball for more than 3 or 4 months, you should probably send another invite to resubscribe. In the very least, at the TOP of your email, in bold, say, “You Subscribed to this List because you wanted xxxxx” to remind them that they did, indeed, subscribe. Keep in mind that, while YOU are obsessed with your business, most people forget you even exist most of the time.

8. No deals or coupons. I sign up for emails from local restaurants a lot. Sometimes, I’ll get emails that tell me about new menu items, or encourage me to celebrate a holiday at their restaurant, but NO offer! There’s no call to action! Why do I care about Don Pablo’s having Cinco de Mayo if it doesn’t mean I get 10% off or a free Margarita? After two or three of these email ads, usually all pretty and graphical, I unsubscribe. Why would I want someone to just send me ads? If I liked ads, I wouldn’t fast forward through them with Tivo.

9. Too many deals and coupons. I did it again – contradicting my previous point, right? This one really isn’t too bad unless you create expectations of discounts. I’ll tell you a quick story. A company I worked for started doing email newsletters. In each newsletter was a 10% off coupon that was good for one week. Since it was every time, what do you think happened? Sales disappeared for the three weeks that there was no coupon code. Then, the email would go out and we’d get pummeled with sales at a discount. Customers expected the same 10% discount off everything, and waited to get the code to order. After a bunch of these, there was no turning back – people expected their 10% off coupon code. So, the only solution was to extend the expiration period to the full month, and then accept that our income was reduced by 10%.

   How do you balance (8) and (9)? By offering discounts and deals off specific items or services, changing it each time. Focus on your newest items, or even some of your lesser sellers. Have a clearance every now and then. Change it up, so people don’t expect anything in particular in each email, but still they have a reason to stay subscribed.

10. No confirmation emails. When I subscribe to a list, I’m never 100% sure it worked. Too many online scripts are broken. So let people know they succeeded with an email saying so. Tell them on the Success page that they will be receiving an email confirmation. This way, if they don’t get one, you might already be in their spam filter and they can white-list you. Tell them how to white-list you.

    Some people say you should “double opt in.” This means that your system would send a confirmation email with a special link. If the subscriber does NOT click that link, the subscription has not completed. Some systems will send a second attempt in 24 hours. This is certainly the safest way to avoid spam-reports. However, expect about half the people to not click the link for some reason. If someone doesn’t get the confirmation email because of a spam filter, they will simply assume that you just aren’t sending any emails. It’s up to you whether you want to do this, but it’s not necessary in my opinion.

Conclusion. Clean up these mistakes and you’ll increase subscriptions, decrease unsubscribes, and overall have a more positive email relationship with your customers. One final point of advice… I suggest using a service, such as iContact (http://www.chucklasker.com/icontact), instead of sending emails from your own server. Not only are the emails easier to manage, more professional looking, and bounces are taken care of, but you’ll also be better off if people click the Spam button on their email programs. If you’re using your own server, it might get banned easily. But iContact is able to handle the big spam-protection-companies much better. Give them a try with their free trial, I believe you’ll find it’s worth the price.

This article was guest-written by Chuck Lasker of MerchantTutorials.com.