24 November 2008

Movember Jerimo Style

They say you gotta love yourself first...

As well as huge fans of our fantastic clients, we are fans of our own superb team of specialist email magicians. And we especially love the sub-set of Jericho staff who moonlight as the "Social Club".

These esteemed blokes make life for the team funner than you might think a bunch of geeks and people-who-make-geekstuff-pretty-and-profitable might be. So let me share.... JERIMO, our gesture small tho it might be, to Mo-vember.

View the mo's and the movie (it's short and funny)

I've just made a donation so I get to display this badge on the blog (ta da):
Movember - Sponsor Me

Yours in great male-health,

SmartenUp

21 November 2008

Looking for the eject button



I'm loving trail runs each weekend, which mostly consist of shredding your body while you run one km after another, on all manner of naturally occurring bush-weapons, and so the looney in this photo has my understanding to a degree. When someone emailed me this my first thought was 'I wonder if he'd changed his mind at the edge?' There is obviously no eject button for this dam rider. (The article link is at bottom if you want to see more of him).

I'll try to segway here into my topic. Speaking of 'eject', we've been talking to a couple of clients this week about their un-subscribers, and how to read reports on them, assess the cost or value to your business, and act to effect the churn through your database. I will write on this more in another post soon. For now, it's clear that losing a subscriber is usually losing a customer, and if that customer who likely (either directly or indirectly) makes you $200 or $2000 or $20000 per year then you need to do your best to stop them clicking the 'eject' button at the bottom of your emails!

Q. Why do you unsub from something?
A. Because it's not relevant, or doesn't meet your expectation. A Jupiter Research study found 53 percent of email users said they unsubscribe when the content doesn't interest them.
Once you have the strategy of what your email is to achieve for your business, then state the benefits very clearly and remember the golden email rules: Personal, Relevant, Anticipated.

In our daily work we find another bunch who unsubscribe when they can't change their profile... if you don't allow your recipients to change their own email address they will unsubscribe even if all they actually want to do is tell you they have a new addy. You can check your unsub reports and read the comments - this is really common.

Next is unhappiness with message frequency. Calculate the ideal frequency with a formula that includes:
how central to their life are your products and services?
how often do they buy from you?
how much are you willing to invest to make this great?
how good is your content?
Then set the frequency and stick to it like glue. You can blow years of loyalty by caving to temptation or sales pressure by sending two messages in a day or a week, if your readers like to see you once a month, each month, like clockwork.
Allow your recipients to update their own preferences! If you don't you will be losing money, without a doubt.

To summarise: The most common use of the Internet is email of course. If you don't want an email any more you can choose to delete, ignore or unsubscribe. Deleting them is easy, and ignoring them is pretty straightforward. Unsubscribes are great because they are far more visible to you than the other two - so this week get out your calculator and work out how much a customer makes you, how much it costs to lose one, and how you can let them tell you what they want when - and then knock yourself out making a plan to give it to them.


See the Daily Mail article here.

20 November 2008

Email budgets grow as display, TV, DM and print shrivel


Marketers are looking hard at what they spend their budgets on as belts are tightened across the board, and digital media with it's clearer picture of your ROI (or not) pleases the CEO as well as the CFO...

According to Sherpa, brand tactics suffer - as this chart shows clearly. Branding campaigns are for the good times, it seems marketers think, and for now we'll hunker down and make some good old-fashioned sales!

We hope that these marketers planning on cashing in on the ROI that email delivers so obediently do it smart. Flooding inboxes with untargeted offers on the cheap has obvious risks for all of us fighting for the click.

Couple that with trying to skimp on the email smarts that do cost you money - great strategy, clever life-cycle campaigns, deliverability management and show-stopper creative design .... When it all comes around again, you risk a 'burnt' database and you'll be far far away behind competitors who have actually got email marketing as a line item in their marketing budget and a planned channel in their marketing plan!

Click here to read the Sherpa story.