Exclusive Concepts Blog » E-Mail Marketing

Email Thursday: How Small e-Commerce Stores Can Differentiate Themselves from Superstores through Email

Elizabeth — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:43:04 +0000

My name is Elizabeth and I’m an SEO copywriter here at Exclusive Concepts. Today I’ll give you a few tips on how small e-commerce stores can differentiate themselves from superstores through email.

When savvy customers are shopping online for a specific item, they’re often going to choose the company that offers it at a lower price. So, how do smaller e-commerce stores survive in the world of the Amazons, Wal-Marts and Overstocks? One way is through differentiating themselves through email. Through this medium your small company can encourage customers to purchase from you by creating content that shows who’s boss.

Relay to customers that you have a better stocked inventory. With a better employee to warehouse ratio, your employees will have a better sense of what products you have and how many you have left so you rarely have to disappoint customers. You shouldn’t put these exact words in an email, but by telling them that you’re a smaller store and keep items in stock, they will hopefully assume this on their own.
Show that you have a lot more knowledge about the products you carry. Big box stores aren’t going to know much about their products, and aren’t going to be much help if customers have a specific question. However, if they purchase from an e-commerce store that specializes in what they sell, they will feel more comfortable trusting your emails and expertise that detail product information, email content and reviews you supply.
Send out personalized emails and newsletters that give customers additional information on what they purchased. You can also use these emails to push add-ons and accessories. With a foothold on your company’s niche, you’ll hopefully be able to recommend the best brands, upgrades and more before the bigger stores do.
Let customers know you have excellent customer service that will not only help you with your order, but can actually answer specific questions about what you are ordering. After all, who knows your products better than you?
Start a customer loyalty program. While larger stores can offer low-cost shipping and higher discounts at the time of purchase, customers can accumulate purchase points by ordering from you. They can then trade in these for money off later purchases. And if you add social media into the mix, it gets even more advantageous for them. For example, you can give them points in exchange for a shout-out on Facebook or Twitter.

These are tips that you can apply to all areas of e-commerce with email being just one of the mediums you can use to reach customers. The way you word the content is important too. Since you’re trying to set yourself apart from larger stores with these emails, they need to be more personal and make customers feel more “exclusive,” while painting yourself as the humble expert.

Exclusive Concepts offers an excellent revenue-generating email marketing service that ensures your approach is making the most money possible.

To learn more about Exclusive Concepts and our excellent services including our Conversion Booster, SEO Foundation, and Profitable Pay Per Click, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We also want to open up the door to your feedback!

If you have any questions after watching this video, send an email to blog@ exclusive concepts.com. If we choose your feedback for a video we will email you to let you know when it goes live! Thank you, this has been Elizabeth for Exclusive Concepts Daily Concept: Email Thursday. Have a great week!

4 Ways to Improve Your Welcome Emails – Email Thursday

Tim — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:07:16 +0000

My name is Tim, I’m an Internet Marketing Strategist here at Exclusive Concepts and today I’ll be discussing 4 ways to improve your Welcome emails.

The first way to improve your welcome email campaigns is to make sure you’re sending them out as soon as possible.

When someone signs up to receive emails from you, they expect a welcome email. This is especially true if the expectation has been set that they will receive an initial discount or offer. When sending a welcome email, wait no longer that 24 hours to send. The sooner the better, and immediately is ideal. The longer you wait to send, the less motivated people become, and the greater the chance people will forget they signed up and forget your brand.

The second way to better utilize your welcome email is to gather additional segmentation data.

By now it’s widely understood that segmenting your email list is an incredible way to drive better ROI from your campaigns. The goal is to send the right message, to the right person at the right time. Segmentation is often accomplished by analyzing user behavior, but another great way to develop your email segments is by gather data straight from the horse’s mouth. Your welcome email is a great opportunity to send people towards a more detailed preferences page, or give them the option to fill out a survey that gives them the opportunity to tell you directly what they’re looking for. The more you can directly speak to the interests and demands of your customers, the better performance you’re going to get out of your future email campaigns.

A third way to improve your welcome campaigns is to promote your other brand channels.

Email is an incredible way to stay in touch with your customers while at the same time realizing great returns. But the amount of emails you can send to keep people in touch with your brand certainly has its limit. Because of this, utilizing the welcome email to introduce your customers to your other brand channels such as your facebook page, twitter page, blog or can be an excellent way to keep your customers engaged and up to date with your brand without having to rely upon email exclusively to do so.

The fourth way to improve your welcome email campaigns is to send more than one.

For the same reasons why you went to send the initial welcome email as soon as possible, you want to follow up with another email relatively soon after the initial welcome. Once they’ve been welcomed in, you don’t want people waiting a month until they receive their next correspondence in the form of a newsletter let’s say. You want to strike while the iron is hot, so consider setting up an automated email trigger that goes out 5 or so days after the initial welcome. Make the second round more focused on conversion than the first, consider using a promotion to get better results and to reinforce the value moving forward.

That’s it for email Thursday. I hope you start to see some welcome email improvement, and I hope you have a great day.

Email Thursday – Basic Email Tracking without Expensive Services

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:46:39 +0000

Today is email Thursday and I’m your presenter, Andy.
Today, we're going to talk about some easy-to-use basic email tracking methods and how you can track, with little or no investment, how your users are interacting with emails you send.

If you use a large email service provider or employ an outside vendor for all of your site tracking needs, you're likely aware of the metrics that most of these big-boys offer: Click Thru Rate, Unique Open, Unsubscribes etc. as well as historical data and trending for list quality, deliverability reporting, and maintenance. Many of these email service providers automatically recode every link in an email which enables robust reporting and allows you to give each link an alias to simplify report analysis. This way, instead of just seeing tons of links with associated click rates, you can see that the link named “Product1” received 12 clicks and “Product 2” received 100 clicks. In some cases, these email service providers will differentiate between the same URL links in the HTML and Text versions.

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In addition, there are services out there that will allow you to track a user from their first click on an email all the way through a transaction giving you insight into every page they've viewed, how long they were on each page, average time on site, cart abandonment etc. Basically, it amounts to an extremely in-depth understanding and provides a visual map regarding how your users view the email.

And this is all fine and dandy, but what if you don't have a marketing budget that matches the GDP of a small, developing country nor do you have the staff to do much more than hit the big "Send" button? In many cases, email service providers will offer a full-service option where their production staff will assist you in setting up, QA’ing, deploying and analyzing each email send. However, this is a more expensive option than the self-service method and isn’t necessary if you can be creative with how you set up your campaigns.
Now although I can't help you with money or staff, but I can give you some quick and easy tricks to help you identify areas that can help you optimize your emails and understand, even at a basic level, how your users are interacting with your messaging.

Now, as you can see, the link in the HTML version is different from the link in the text version. All links in each version should reflect this difference. That way, when the "extra" code (everything after product123.html) is carried over to your website, you can filter the incoming traffic by "entry page or entry URL." This will tell you how many clicks each link garnered so you can do some basic comparison between the performance between the 2 versions. In order to get this basic insight into click activity that drives users to a specific page on your site, some sort of analytics tool is required such as Yahoo Analytics if you are a Yahoo Store owner, or Google Analytics which is free for everyone. Google analytics will provide you with code that you need to put on every page of your site, but the time spent performing this action can give you some great insight into the behavior of your users.
With some basic additions to your email links, you can at least track the different response rates between both versions. In addition to gaining an understanding between which version is more preferable to your audience (mobile platform users may prefer the text version, computer users the HTML), this basic system of tracking will broaden your insight into how your messaging may be custom tailored for each version. In emails we create here at Exclusive Concepts (like the one you received for this blog post), we often change the messaging and reduce the number of links in the text version thus making it simpler and easier to navigate through the email.

We offer Optimized Lifecycle E-mail Marketing as a service to clients who are looking for a way to get a lot more revenue from their e-mail approach. We’ll show you how it works if you’d like – just give us a call at 800-504-4324.

Thank you for listening – have a wonderful E-mail Thursday!

Email Thursday: Con”text”ual Relevance

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:05:40 +0000

Today is email Thursday and I’m your presenter, Andy.

Today, the topic is tech talk and I’m not talking new technology like iPads or Droids (iPhones are not even on the table… they’re so 2008), but rather an old stand-by, the friend that has been clipped to the hips of many a business person and soccer mom alike: the BlackBerry.

As a brief background, BlackBerries first hit the market in 1999 (according to the infallible Wikipedia) and ever since, Research In Motion or RIM has seen a monster-sized implementation in the business world especially, but also in the personal world. From CEO's and CIO's to the YMCA and PTO's, BlackBerries are everywhere. With such a huge number of people utilizing these devices as a main source of communication, it makes sense to understand a little bit of the technology behind the BlackBerry and how that relates to email. If you've never used a BlackBerry, they generally employ some kind of trackball as a means to navigate around the screen. This trackball is how you scroll down through an email and look at the various attributes of the email.

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Since BlackBerries don't offer much native support for images, most of the images in emails show up as the URL they hyperlink to. This can bee seen in the above example. On the left you see the BlackBerry rendering an HTML email that is rich in both images and links. However, it's not that pretty to look at. If you were able to scroll down through the message on the BlackBerry, you would see link after link after link until finally you reached the main body copy. Now, as I stated previously, this blog is not about comparing the BlackBerry to other mobile devices… even if I do have a picture of an iPhone. This image is simply to show what how other mobile devices render HTML emails.
When it comes to text emails, you can see that there is not much to choose between the BlackBerry and any other device. Afterall, the BlackBerry was made to be a text-based device and was not designed with HTML or other rich content in mind.

So what's the point? The point is to understand how various mobile devices render HTML emails and to bear that in mind when sending an email. So, for example, if you know that there is a certain segment of your users who are likely to use a BlackBerry, perhaps you may want to consider creating a special segment for these users and try sending them the text version of a message instead of an HTML version. Also, if you know that many of your users view their messages mainly on these devices, you can take steps to simplify your HTML emails. One way you can do this is to begin each message with a mobile header. A mobile header is text that will be the first thing to display on any device. Make this the main call-to-action.

Another thing to bear in mind is the number of characters that can fit on one line. In this case (and each device is different even from one BlackBerry device to another) the BlackBerry can display 21 characters on a line. In contrast, the iPhone's email client can display 45 characters on a single line. This is something to think about when crafting your subject lines, especially if a large segment of your users are utilizing a BlackBerry.

We offer Optimized Lifecycle E-mail Marketing as a service to clients who are looking for a way to get a lot more revenue from their e-mail approach. We’ll show you how it works if you’d like – just give us a call at 800-504-4324.

Thank you for listening – have a wonderful E-mail Thursday!

E-Mail Thursday – Tracking Email Revenue

Tim — Thu, 27 May 2010 20:30:00 +0000

Welcome to Your Daily Concept, presented by Exclusive Concepts. Today is Email Thursday.
My name is Tim, I’m an internet marketing strategist here at Exclusive Concepts – and today I’ll be taking a look at how to track email marketing revenue.
After you’ve sent out an email, your email provider can offer up data telling you how many people received the email, how many people opened it, how many people clicked through to your site etc. This is all great data to have, and it helps modify future campaigns for improved success.
However, the most email providers don’t actually provide you with the revenue generated from your email efforts. This is work that has to be done through other means, and it’s important – because this is the only way to get an idea of what type of returns you’re seeing on your investment.

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There’s a few different ways to track email revenue, today we’ll be focusing on two– query string tracking, and email address match back.
With query string tracking, each of the links found within the email you send out has a unique URL ending (known as a query string). It usually looks like the normal URL for your landing page, but with a question mark at the end followed by some text to provide reference. I’ve given an example on the screen. After the email has gone out and some time has gone by, you can track the revenue generated by your email by going into your analytics and looking at all the revenue that has been generated by people who have originally landed on those query string URL’s that were uniquely created for your email.
The other method we’re looking at today, is email match back. This method takes every email address that received your email, and within a designated amount of time, will match up any recent sales where this email address was used in filling out the order pages. Essentially, if you sent someone an email, and let’s say 4 days later someone made a purchase using that email address, the sale would be considered a result of the email campaign.

So which method is better to use?
Each have some limitations, but at Exclusive Concepts – we prefer to use the email match back method. There’s a number of reasons why, but let me touch upon the major one.
The major reason we prefer to use email match back is that the tracking is not limited to traffic coming directly from the email itself. For example, if you use query string tracking, you’re only tracking sales that come from someone who got the email, clicked on a link and made a purchase immediately.
This type of tracking does not take into account any sales from people who got your email, clicked through, didn’t make a purchase, but later came back – let’s say a day later, and bought something. Or revenue generated from people who just saw your email, went to the site and made a purchase because you got your brand in front of their face again.
With email match back, you can set a time period that you feel is appropriate, and if they got an email from you then made a purchase during that time period, it’s very likely to be the result of the email you sent. Is it 100% accurate? No, but when you’re talking about email marketing – there’s no method that’s going to give you 100% visibility into the return you get out of it.
Overall, we feel email match back offers better visibility into the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

If you’re interested in improving the effectiveness and tracking of your email marketing program, give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 and we’ll give you a free email marketing audit.
That’s it for today, but I hope you enjoyed your daily concept – keep an eye of for tomorrow’s wildcard Friday video.
Have a great day everyone.

CAN-SPAM for Dummies – Email Thursday

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:27:59 +0000

Today is email Thursday and I’m your presenter, Andy. Today, I’ll be talking about the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 and giving an overview of what the law means, how to make sure you’re following the rules and how to interpret some of the rules that aren’t exactly explicit in their description. Making sure you follow these requirements is not only best practice, but also maximizes the chance that your email will complete its journey and land in the inbox.

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To start off, Don’t use false or misleading header information: One aspect of email marketing that a lot of people don’t understand is that the “From” “To” and “Reply-To” addresses must be accurate. This is very important as it offers the first piece of information as to who is sending the email. If you are sending a business email to users who have shown interest in your company or in a product, you want the “From” name to reflect that this message is being sent on behalf of the company. Seeing something in your inbox from “hotpants1972@yahoo.com” will likely NOT garner the effect you are looking for. Instead, an “From” address such as “info@yourbusinessname.com” is immediately identifiable as coming from your company. The same goes for the “To” field… users want to see their email address in the “To” field, not some email alias that could have thousands of users associated with it. I usually prefer to see the “reply-to” the same as the “From” address although this is just my preference. You can always redirect responses to an inbox that is monitored by someone else. Example, if the president of the company, Tom, sends and email from “tom@yourbusinessname.com”, the reply-to address can certainly be “info@yourbusinessname.com” or “reply@yourbusinessname.com.”

The originating domain name must also reflect who the sender is. The domain name in the above examples is @yourbusinessname.com. Again, this allows the recipient to know who is sending the email.
The law also states that you must provide a physical address within the email, usually included in the email footer. Even if this is just a PO Box at your local post office, you must give users a way to communicate with you via a method other than email. It all comes down to accountability.
In addition, it is imperative that you make it clear how your users can opt-out of receiving future communications. Burying this information within body text or using a barely-readable font size or color is not best practice and will likely result in numerous SPAM complaints. When you DO receive opt-out requests, you must fulfill those requests within 10 business days. You DO NOT have to send an email notifying the user that they have been unsubscribed… and this is actually a point of discussion in the email community as we speak. Afterall, if someone opts-out telling you that they no longer want any communications from you, I’m not sure it makes sense to send them an email telling them that they will no longer receive emails from you.

The two types of emails everyone needs to be aware of are transactional and relationship. Here’s the diffference:

A transactional email is just what it sounds like: it is based off a transaction the user initiated with your business. Pretty simple. A relationship email is one that builds on the relationship the user has with your company. A great example of this is a triggered message say, 45 days after a purchase following up to make sure the user is satisfied and possible showing them some items related to their purchase. If you do choose to show them products related to what they purchased, you are potentially sending a mixed message… literally. Although this message may have some commercial aspects to it, the main intent and main message pertains to your existing relationship with the user.
In contrast, a commercial email is one that may be purely soliticous. If you purchase or rent a list from another company or from a 3rd party vendor and send an email trying to drum up some new business, this is purely commercial. Commercial emails are not usually as well received as transactional or relationship emails and for obvious reasons. Think of it as being similar to phone call you inevitable receive while eating dinner from the telemarketing firm that wants to know if you’re interested in buying a pallet of hot pants at rock-bottom prices. You get the idea.

When it comes to email marketing, common sense prevails every time. If you use your best judgment and apply basic rules of ethic and conduct to your online marketing initiatives, you will most likely be doing nothing wrong. The CAN-SPAM laws are not devised to make it difficult to reach out to your audience. Rather, they are designed as a framework through which you can maintain contact with your audience while respecting their inbox and right to be fully involved in how they communicate with you. Sending emails to your audience should be viewed as a privilage, not a right. Keep this in mind and your user-base will respect you for it.

We offer Optimized Lifecycle E-mail Marketing as a service to clients who are looking for a way to get a lot more revenue from their e-mail approach. We’ll show you how it works if you’d like – just give us a call at 800-504-4324.
Thank you for listening – have a wonderful E-mail Thursday! Every site has a “Split Second Reaction”. From the moment your eyes land on the homepage or landing page your mind has already made an instant assessment of the “overall quality” of the site. Given the ease with which Google and other search engines provide alternative websites, this concept of “instant affinity” is critical to conversion rates.

Just think of your last visit to the video store or your netflix account. Were you scanning the rows to find that perfect movie? We all do it. If we’re not sure what we’re looking for, we constantly scan all the new releases for something that “pops out” at us. We rely on our brains to filter visual images in such a way that we only see items of interest. Of course the same reaction occurs when we’re scanning through websites for products or information. From just glancing at a site, the brain has already decided its “overall quality” and whether its “cover” is of interest.

This means your site has to depict a good first impression right off the bat, on the very first page your visitors see. A site must look as if it has valuable information, even before any of its content is even read! This may sound impossible, but a few tips can help you well on your way.

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Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when developing home pages and landing pages:

Keep key content (or even all the content (if applicable)) above the fold.
Providing key content without the need to scroll down (referred to as being “above the fold”) allows a visitor to instantly assess your site. In addition, adhering to this rule also ensures the amount of content is kept to a minimum. (hopefully disuading you from going off on long tangents) Of course, later in the site flow, pages will need to be longer to effectively communicate all the necessary information, but this amount of detail should be kept deep enough in the site so that the visitor will have to be interested enough to navigate to that level.
Use a prominent positioning statement.
A brief and succinct statement about the problems addressed and solutions provided shown in a distinct graphic style will help the visitor see that your information can be distilled in a few words. This provides confidence that time spent on your site will not be wasted. Shoot for no more than 12 words in a larger font than the rest of the page that is positioned in such a way that it will be instantly viewable. Be cautious of placing this text over the top of an image which can make it hard to read.
Reduce the “Cluttered Image Look”
Too many images on a page create a feeling of clutter and disorganization. When the goal is to present the image of specific, well-structured information, the overuse of images can be a hindrance. In general, I’d suggest one main image be used to set the tone of the site and other smaller images being used to call attention to key areas such as links, offers and calls-to-action.
Provide a few, specific links.
Providing a few, specific links to key areas within the site will send the message that you understand what your visitors are looking for. Too many links can overwhelm and frustrate the user. Try using some symbols or graphics to emphasize these links as being the next place to go on your site. Since everyone’s time is scarce, providing well-structured, succinct information will always be preferred. Remember that although we’ve been discussing the first impression as less than a second, these elements must also give the user what they are looking for — once they decide that a more detailed look is worthwhile. This means that the positioning statement, graphics and links should all be highly targeted to what your visitors are seeking.

So what have we learned today?

Visitors are unknowingly judging your site’s “overall quality” within the split-second that they land on your site.
Remove the Clutter – Keep most (if not all) of your key content above the fold and reduce the number of “cluttered” images. This allows visitors to instantly assess your site without getting overwhelmed or confused with your content and navigation.
Use a brief and succinct statement to summarize the page or site to the visitor. The simpler the better. This will provide confidence that time spent on your site will not be wasted.
Provide a few, specific links. This will send the message that you understand what your visitors are looking for and don’t want to overwhelm them with unneccessary options.

Of course, there is only one way to be certain that you’ve made the right decisions to impact your visitor’s “SPLIT SECOND REACTION”, and that is through testing. Testing a few variations of prominent statements or specific, targeted links on your site in an AB or Multivariate test is the only way of finding the best changes for your website with any certainty. That’s where we can help.

E-Mail Marketing Still “Cooler” Than Twitter?

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:49:59 +0000

Twitter, Facebook, Google, social media – these are the big buzzwords in online marketing. What does that mean for the decade-old marketing channel otherwise known as email? Bottom line – email is not going anywhere. In fact, much research shows that email marketing budgets are still growing.

Here are some statistics to back this up:

- Top online retailers sent 12% more promotional emails in 2009 than they did the year before-and 39% more than they sent in 2007. (Source: Retail Email Blog)

- Comparing monthly retail email volume year-over-year, increases ranged from 5.2% to 18.3%. (Source: Retail Email Blog)

- There was not a single week all year when year-over-year retail email volume fell. (Source: Retail Email Blog)

- A survey from email marketing firm Silverpop shows that 41% are planning to boost spending and an additional 47% are looking at making no cuts. (Source: Silverpop Survey 11/09)

There are reasons why email is still a major part of the marketing mix – it works, it allows for one-to-one communication with your customers, and it plays nicely with other channels. But as the number of possible consumer touchpoints continues to rise and the average number of emails each consumer receives increases, the challenge increasingly becomes how to stay relevant with your email messaging.

The secret to sending a relevant email? There really is no secret, it’s all about direct marketing – the right message, to the right person, at the right time. The path to achieving the perfect concert of all 3 requires an investment of time and effort. You need to try out different offers, creative, segmentation bases, and triggers to determine what elements work the best for your subscriber base. Email marketing is not a one-size fits all endeavor. A rewards program might be great if people purchase your products repeatedly and frequently but not necessarily good if what you sell are big-ticket items.

You also need to invest in analyzing your customer data to know what, when, and to whom to message. Ideally you would look at how subscribers engage with your email as well as what they look at and buy on your website. Maybe the products you feature in your email look good but what if people overlook them and click elsewhere – revise your template to reflect that. Perhaps you have a high clickthrough rate but people aren’t purchasing – update your webpage or create a unique landing page to better the shopping experience and convert more people. Or your data shows that on average people make repeat purchases every 92 days – time your promotion to hit their inbox 90 days after their first purchase.

Email marketing is an iterative process, one that provides valuable lessons each time you send a campaign IF you put some thought into what you want to learn when crafting the message. Each campaign represents an opportunity to retain your customers, generate repeat business, and to uncover opportunities to improve your results for your next campaign.