Email Marketing Thought Leaders: Jim Sterne On Email Marketing In A Recession
Not Just Another Marketing Blog proudly launches its interview series, “Email Marketing Thought Leaders.” These interviews, featuring insight from the industry’s most esteemed professionals, will help us provide you with tips and tricks you need to take your email campaigns to the next level.
We launch our series by speaking to Jim Sterne. Author of the books Advanced Email Marketing and producer of the world’s first “Marketing on the Internet” seminar series, Sterne is an internationally known speaker and consultant to Fortune 500 companies.
Below, we discuss what changes about email marketing in a recession, and answer the question, ‘regardless of economic climate, do the fundamentals ever truly change?’
iPost:
What changes about email marketing strategy in a recession?
Jim Sterne:
Targeting becomes all the more critical when times are tough. People are forever overwhelmed with email they do not want and as they are doing more work with fewer colleagues, they have less time. Their tolerance is near zero. Marketers have to focus on providing value from start to finish. Instead of being entertaining or interesting, all email marketing messages have to be useful. That doesn’t mean they should only be discount coupons, but they must be as relevant as possible and that means targeting.
Make certain that your messages are relevant (segment well), timely (no general info, but serious and valuable offers) and curb your frequency (test the response to sending less often).
iPost:
What tips would you offer to companies to improve email marketing in slow economic times?
Jim Sterne:
Tip #1: Segment, segment, segment.
Being relevant is about knowing what your recipients care about. They do not all care about the same thing. They are not all interested in the few things that you care about. Any segmentation is good – it allows you to narrow the message to the recipient. You can segment on geography, weather, age, gender, purchase history, stated preferences – anything. And if you cross-reference those segments and send out a unique offer to North Eastern men over 50 who have bought twice this month and love flannel, then you are wildly relevant and will be richly rewarded.
Tip #2: Fire your subscribers.
Chances are excellent that you love watching that opt-in subscriber number climb and climb. Feels good, right? It’s fool’s gold. Your subscriber data looks great until you realize that you are not accounting for churn. It takes a tenth of a second to delete an email from a familiar source while it can take up to a minute to unsubscribe. If you send me one message a month, a year’s worth of deletes still costs me less than 2 seconds. If I really want to skew your numbers, I’ll click on the Junk button and never be bothered with your messages again. You’ll never know.
So fire your subscribers. Send them ample notice that on a certain date they will be unsubscribed unless they re-opt-in. It’s up to you to explain why they should bother.
iPost:
Conversely, what is the single biggest mistake companies should avoid with their email marketing campaigns during slow economic times?
Jim Sterne:
Avoid hitting the panic (send) button again and again like a rat in a cage. Email marketing is not a simple food delivery mechanism that cranks out sales whenever you crank out another blast. The more messages you send out the more people you will alienate. Resist the urge.
iPost:
List, creative & offer. Which fundamental is most critical to email marketing success during a recession any why?
Jim Sterne:
Your list is your friend. These are the people who raised their hand and expressed enough interest that they were willing to allow you into their email inbox. But your list may be the least critical of the three. If your creative is great, it can (not will) become viral. That can leverage your list and let everybody know about your offer. If your offer is uninspiring, there’s no hope for you.
iPost:
Your book, Advanced Email Marketing, helps readers prove the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. For those launching email marketing campaigns during a recession, what metrics demand the most initial focus, to either define a campaign as a success or make improvements?
Jim Sterne:
Your very first focus should be email bounce rate. If you’re sending out messages that are going to bad addresses, you may find yourself on a blacklist. People subscribe to black lists to help keep spam at bay.
Next up is your open rate. If nobody is opening your messages, you haven’t got a change.
Everybody cares about clickthrough rate and they should. This is the pro-active step that sends a clear signal. Open rate could simply reflect that you have created a subject line that is intriguing. If they delete it after one look, you have not done your brand any favors. Clickthrough says that are interested enough in the offer to find out more.
Engagement is next. If they hit the landing page and then wandered off (website bounce rate) then they are not engaged. Engagement is a metric that you have to determine based on your own situation. It could be number of pages viewed, number of survey questions answered, the time they spend on your site or it might even be something like:
Sales! Yes, whether they actually bought something because of your email is probably the best measure of success. For those who do not sell online, substitute sales with Contact Us page views, calls to your special website-only phone number or lead qualification form. The real measure of success is if your email is bringing you more customers more often.
iPost:
Wild Card – Anything else you would like to add?
Jim Sterne:
Back to square one: Whom are you mailing to? What do they care about? What’s in it for them?
