[Day 2] Email Insiders Summit – Measurement & ROI

Measurement is… “a framework, a use of tools, a practice and an organizational movement,” according to David Baker, Avenue A|Razorfish.

ROI is… “The result of measurement, your interpretation of financial value, and your lever for change.”

The Roundtable is comprised of Naeem Kayani from Dell and Michael Atwell of The Hartford (Insurance industry).

How would your CEO or Sr. Leadership team describe the performance of the email channel today?

Dell: Easier to get budget compared to other as it’s so trackable; email team doubled in the past year, and while it’s “extremely important,” no one in the organization understands the complexity 

Hartford: Reletively new channel for them (6-7yrs compared to 20+ in the direct mail channel) and while they recognize the value, they’re not necessarily using email as a retention or communication channel.

KPI’s that matter?

Hartford Group – Loss Performance, Media Spend, Sustainable Volume, Response Rate, Cost Per Policy, Policy Issue Rate, Cost Per Response

Dell – Engagement and basic reporting to learn what worked and didn’t, and they are paying attention to lifestage a well as behavioral

Capitol One – Value of an email address

 How is ROI defined by your organization?

eDialog – Frequency and engagement, they will consult with their clients to deal with the “drop-off point” that can happen when frequency is increased

Hartford – Looks at it from a five year perspective and potential long-term profitability

WedMD – Revenue by email sent

What tools do you use to help?

 Dell – A very transaction based company, uses internal tools, site (VisualScience) analytics

Hartford – Excel based forecast, planning, performance models and SAS analytics

 

Relevancy Score formula for email

Ron B. posted the following formula in Tamara’s http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/ blog, in the Email Insiders Summit live feed:

Revelance Score =(Unique_Opens/Total_Valid_Recipients)+((Unique_Clicks*3)/Unique_Opens)-(Unsubscribes/Unique_Opens)-((Spam_Complaints*10)/Total_Valid_Recipients)

It’s primarily an open/render based metric, and originally posted on: http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/04/we-need-a-way-o.html

[Day 2] Email Insiders Summit – Mobile Email De-mystified

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget and Deirdre Baird, Pivitol Veracity discuss how the mobile growth, challenges and how to optimize mobile email. Notworthy was that 2007 was the first year that smartphone sales overtook laptop and pcs for the first time. Some interesting metrics from Morgan:

Symbian OS (Nokia devices use) is only 1% of market share in US, but roughly 65% worldwide. RIM (Blackberry) comprises 41% in the US, but 11% WW. Apple iphone is 28% US marketshare and 7%WW.

Email – the next killer app of mobile? It’s entirely possible that email could overtake sms/text in the next few years, particularily in the US where each sent/received text message costs money and email is free. Today however, the email in mobile is not a full feature experience and roughly 50% of users find mobile email functionality inferior to computer clients.

Multi vs Single Platform Users – 52% access the same account through mobile and computer; 48% maintain a unique mobile email address (note this survey was taken at the cusp of the iPhone launch).

Deirdre takes over to discuss how we can optimize for mobile email readers. She gives an example of one email viewed in four different devices:

• Symbian, the global leader, shows on the text of an HTML part, and only full URLs are clickable
• Blackberry, the US leader, strips the html of an email and only keeps the text part and will link to image URLs
• Win Mobile 6 has html support, images off by default
• Apple iPhone, html support and images

Three reasons to optimize?

• Customer,  ”not you,” controls which email client to read from
• over 50% receive the same email and both platforms
• email client they use directly drives their experience. These experiences are as varied as there are clients

Other thoughts? Images off is the new norm. The “wiew this email on your mobile device” is not a good solution since mobile browsers have rendering issues across platforms.

Marketer’s use of top real estate: 48% have “add at address book” at top, 60% have “click to view” at top to combat rendering image issue despite the image enable like nearby in the browser/client. Also 2/3rds of recipients with preview panes, rely on them! (Jupiter Research)

Mobile optimization tips– 640 pixel width maximum recommended, and keep the “weight” at 20KB or less (that’s after images are downloaded). Don’t bother with images spacers, blackberry will just mess it up. Use full URLs or it won’t be clickable.

[Day 2] Email Insiders Summit – Email From the Outside In

David Baker, VP Email Solutions for Avenue A|Razorfish, opens up with a couple of comments and takes a poll of the audience, wherein roughly one-third are first time attendees. There is a 3:1 ratio of email marketers to service providers or vendors.

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The first keynote speaker is David Barlin, Sr. Product Mgr at Microsoft (Windows Live) who has a background in email since 1997. Once of the topics he plans to address is the proliferation of marketing silos. As an example, the lack of integration between the email and search channel.

A study by Microsoft showed how search conversion goes up 22% when consumer is also shown a display ad prior to the search activity. An Altel case study revealed a 56% increase versus search alone.

David, segways into discussing display advertising in email and shares the following key thought “Be top of mind where people plan their life.” He follows up later with some additional points:

• Understand your customer
• Hit the right Moment
• Spark the conversation
• Use brand to maximize ROI

Basically, Microsoft says it’s a good idea to combine search and display ads (ala AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.) with your relevant emails to drive brand awareness and increased conversion.

Hotmail conducted a study with 15,000 participants around the world to better understand the top topics discussed in email. Not suprisingly travel, consumer electronic/gadget purchases, and social activities were at the top. Hotmail has made the study public domain, I’ll post as soon as I can get my hands on it.

[Day 1] Email Insiders Summit – Social Media

“This social stuff is even harder to measure than email”

Jupiter Research presented by David Daniels indicates thats email will be a 2.1 billion industry in 2012. he also points out that the amount of email reaching a person’s primary address hasn’t gone up that much in the last couple of years and there’s more adoption of using the cell phone to check email. For the often desired 18-24 year old demographic, email is still an effective driver for purchase, but we need to understand that email as an application is less compelling to them.

I think there’s another round of new widgets and sites ahead, but there’s got to be a consolidation of these mediums. That or social aggregators will become the new “hotness.”

Marketing still has a little time to figure out why and how they should care about social networking and media, but if the panelists and research are tracking to the overall behavior of the college students today, then we need to figure out how to reach them in their mediums if they won’t come to email.

[Day 1] Email Insiders Summit – Privacy Panel

One of the challenges many marketers face is that they have different brands and accounts and what are the legal requirements around sending separate emails or consolidation.

Scenario: unsolicited marketing messages send to social networking profile, any legal rules?

Today, there are not CAN-SPAM or similar compliance laws, although the new judgement applying CAN-SPAM to the recent Myspace case may build the way.

[Day 1] Email Insiders Summit – Next Generation, Does Email Have a Future?

Micherlle Prieb, Project Manager and Researcher at Ball St. University Center for Media Design moderated the panel of 3 University students on the panel.

Each student with introduced and asked to describe what media couldn’t they live without. Examples from the panelists include the smartphone – checking email, spend upwards of 2000 minutes a month in cell phone use, and mobile sites. General internet and computer use is an average of 7-8 hrs. a day. Most are early adopters of mobile. 

The college students were all in agreement that they consider the use of email to prmarily be where they conduct “important,/corporate world interactions (ie. college, job recruiters). However, social networks, and specifically Facebook, is the primary point of communication socially and with friends. One panelist describes his morning wake-up ritual as check email and facebook. All are reluctant to integrate business and social contacts into Facebook. As one panelist says: you can’t “poke your professor,” referring to a Facebook nudging feature. Amanda’s position is that social networks are solely about communicating with friends today. Brandon is more hesitant to open email than he is to a participate on a social network (it’s more fun) and perception that email is full of advertising, solicitation, and junk. Email is secondary in their world.  Here were a couple of questions posed:

How do you see your behavior change as you enter workforce?

August says that email will not be as preferred in the workplace, as today’s college students get entrenched as the next business leaders, but he’s not sure which network- likely something not yet conceived; Amanda & Brandon don’t think the shift will happen as quickly and email is still a professional platform for communicating to your boss or coworkers and the social network method of communication as not something they’ll integrate into their professional lives. 

How do you feel about branding/marketing messages being delivered to email?

The key message from the students? The more targeted, less intruisive it is, the better. All were more tolerant of opted-in email, but their responsiveness and acceptance will change day-to-day. The students all have a perception that if they are unsure of the email, then they will delete it as it may have a virus. Also, the myth persists amongst the college kids that the unsub functionality is a confirmation to spammers to send more.

The panelists prefer a more targeted, blog/content related email and less focus on coupon or deals. For instance one panelist won’t delete email from Apple, it’s “slick,” interesting, and not to freuqnently delivered. Amanda loves newsletters – Mediapost, blogs and anything with an immediately relevant content or subject. No panelist could define a specific metric of “too much frequency” but all wanted to know upfront what to expect when they do opt-in.

 

…trying not to get eaten by a bear

So, our team at work generally sends each other outlook calendar appointment/meeting requests to track when people are out of office (with time blocked as free). When you're talking about 10 or more people on the team it's pretty handy without being intrusive.

My boss sends the following title in her vacation calendar request, "OOF trying not to get eaten by a bear." I'm working at home today, but I can imagine the roars of laughter eminating from various offices in the marketing hall. You see my boss occasionally goes camping, but has a fear of bears (and rightfully so!). The irony, if you will, is last year she almost got eaten by a bear. Perhaps more accurately, the bear poked it's not so little snout in her tent window. A pleasant way to wake up? Not so much…

I'm pretty much with Stephen Colbert on the subject of bears:

"' 'Dear Stephen, why aren’t you nicer to bears? I like them a lot! They make me laugh my head off. Love, Joshua.' Like a lot of kids, Joshua has been misled about bears. They won’t make you laugh your head off, they'll tear your head off." —Stephen Colbert, reading a fan letter on his show, The Colbert Report

“Render” is the new open

I was reading an article in Email Insider the other day from Loren McDonald proposing we re-brand the much maligned “open rate” metric in favor of an “email render rate.” As much as those at my company and in the industry want to ignore the open rate, there are others who pay attention to it in the same way that advertisers gravitate to impressions. The render concept does more accurate reflect what happens to an image when it’s loaded in an email client reading pane.

I like the idea of devaluing the open rate in favor of stronger and more relevant metrics: click, unsubscribe or spam rate, transaction rate, gross profit, contribution or revenue… just to name a few.

Now if we can all just agree on what’s the new black.