Simple Recipes – Email Campaigns and BBQ Sauce

by redembermarketing on March 28th, 2009

SIMPLE HOMEMADE BBQ SAUCE
1/2 Cup Ketchup
1/2 Cup Honey
1/2 Cup Finely chopped vidalia onion
1/4 Cup Cider or red wine vinegar
1/4 Cup Worchestershire sauce
1/4 Cup Prepared mustard

When it comes to recipes for email marketing, it’s helpful to take a cue from what most great chefs will tell you: “Master simple recipes with fresh ingredients first and only then try mixing in more sophisticated twists and turns.”

Before you go and attempt the marketing equivalent of trying to cook something off the menu of the French Laundry or slicing up some blowfish sashimi, why not tackle and master something basic?  Incredible returns can be gained by effectively executing some simple techniques – in the kitchen or at the office.

Let’s start with the kitchen and take BBQ sauce as an example (finally, some food-appropriate analogies for the blog!)  I often make my own, but depending on how much time I have, I use very different recipes (I have one recipe that has 25 ingredients on it!).

My son, happens to love dipping his chicken/pork/sweet potato fries/… okay he loves to dip everything, including his fingers and apparently, asparagus, in a little dish of sauce.  But he doesn’t need much to be happy.  When I make sauce for him, it consists of some ketchup, brown sugar, a little cider vinegar, liquid smoke, and a little onion powder.  Just 5 ingredients and you have something that rivals the corn syrup concoction that we all have in a plastic bottle on the door of our fridge.  It can be whipped together in 45 seconds, and based on the “mmm’s” and “wow’s” I get when he sees and tastes it, I’d say it’s mission accomplished.  Sometimes, the simpler, the better.

The same thing goes for your email campaigns.  Looking for an email marketing recipe that you can whip together fast with great results?  Segmentation is a simple ingredient you can focus on first and get some serious improvements in performance.  Could it be the Béchamel sauce of email?  Perhaps, but we’re talking BBQ here, right?  Let’s see, maybe it’s the vinegar, since most BBQ sauces usually use vinegar of one sort of another.  Ok, analogy-out-of-control.

It probably won’t take a long look at your inbox before you’ll agree that most emails out there are designed for the masses, but I bet you have some data that can be used to segment your database.  How about: Gender, purchasing history, purchasing frequency, industry, location, interests, etc.  At the very least, you should have some activity history from previous email campaigns.

Think historical email data is just for evaluating campaign performance? Get this: By segmenting their database based on email activity (active, passive, or inactive), AARP was able to re-engage passive or inactive subscribers and increase their active subscribers by 59% by targeting the right messaging to the right people.

So maybe you’re a BBQ purist and getting ready to write a comment explaining to me that real BBQ is the mustard or vinegar variety that are more common down south… well, I enjoy a Carolina pulled pork sandwich as much as the next guy, so I promise to post some simple recipes for those sauces next!

Image credits: MegaBBQ.com

Email marketing to mobile devices

by redembermarketing on March 5th, 2009

One of the more common follow up questions after last week’s MeetUp presentation was how to optimize emails for delivery to mobile devices.  (Victor even posted it on their discussion board)  There are several issues to consider if you think that a large number of your subscribers/contacts are reading their emails on a mobile device.  [And let's face it, they are!]

First, do you know how many or which contacts actually ARE reading your content on a mobile device? That makes a great piece of data to collect from your subscribers since it serves as a good segmentation field. Send mobile-device optimized content to that group, HTML emails to the rest, or perhaps there’s another subgroup that just prefers the plain text email. It’s a simple radio button or check-box option on your sign up form, but could have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns. Imagine that – asking your customers how they want to receive communications… and then actually listening to them!

Of course, the trade off is that once you move away from HTML emails, you start to lose some analytics resolution your open rates are tied to a tiny image being rendered in the email client. Hence, the discussion that is in progress over at the Email Experience Council who is trying to standardize metric terminology by shifting from “Open Rates” to “Render Rates.” PDF: The Render Rate Call for Action (by the way, can someone tell them to remove the spaces from their document file names?)  You might even choose to forgo your tracking links, since they tend to be long, clogging up valuable space on the mobile device’s small screen with meaningless characters when you really want them to be reading your content or visiting your site.

Hmm, is email marketing starting to sound more complicated than it should? Well, yes and no.

I believe that in many ways, effective email design can be more challenging than general website design nowadays.  With well established standards being adhered to across the 3 or 4 major browsers (browser statistics and browser market share), website development has come a long way over the past 10 years.  Email clients on the other hand, are much more numerous and their ability to render HTML, CSS and other design elements are all over the map (email client statistics).  And now we have mobile devices to deal with!  Email testing services like ReturnPath and LitmusApp are offering ever-better mobile device rendering, but themes, screen sizes, fonts, and preferences can vary widely.

For instance, on my BlackBerry Pearl, I can only see about 9 characters in the “From” name in the email list view, maybe 12 if there are a lot of skinny letters in the name.  But maybe that number increases to 14 or 15 on another device or with another setting.  Then there’s the subject line and the email body to consider.  Some general rules of thumb I’ve found indicate that most text messages display 60 to 80 characters per line (if your email service provider doesn’t already provide a guide to see where those limits are, try using a sticky note on your screen as an easy alternative).  Mobile platforms display somewhere beterrn 20 to 40 characters in 12 to 15 lines per screen (again, this varies based on the device, resolution, themes and selected text styles).   Keep these numbers in mind when you’re composing “chunks” of content to make them easier to read.

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MOBILE DEVICE EMAIL IDEAS
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Tastefully using patterns of characters to identify sections of your text version of your email is certainly one tactic to help users view your emails on mobile devices.  Didn’t that section header catch your attention? Use a typographic device such as repeating characters, but keep in mind that it would be wise to keep them significantly less than the character widths described above to avoid unnecessary breaks, which would pretty much undermine your whole reason for putting them there in the first place.

Why not take the extra step of creating a simple HTML (limit tag usage to paragraph, and font styles) and put a link to that “mobile version” of your email at the top of the message? Simple text like “Mobile Version: URL” would work well.  Most mobile devices’ browsers will display simply-coded content fairly well, and your message will look better than it would in the plain text displayed on the default email client on the device.

Put a short table of contents at the top of the email to provide an incentive for readers to scroll down to that important information you’re sending them.  This might be especially important if your email is on the long side, since long messages tend to get truncated, and readers may need an incentive to wait for the device to download more content.

What do you think?  Have you tried some new ways to help get your message out to mobile devices?

MeetUp presentation on email marketing – 1 week later

by redembermarketing on March 4th, 2009

Last week, I had the opportunity to give my first presentation as Red Ember Marketing titled, Email Marketing, What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.  It was for the The Boston Area Internet Marketing and Advertising Group last week. I would have posted this earlier, but the blog didn’t even exist yet.  Presenting at this event was actually the stimulus I needed to get moving on launching MarketingBBQ.  I wanted to be conscious of avoiding fear-mongering, I just wanted to open people’s minds to some of the lesser-known nuances that can inhibit the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.  Based on the questions and comments afterward, people were paying attention and found the information useful (always a good thing!).

Victor, the group organizer, does a great job getting people together, but he’s been stuck in the Tavern in the Square for a while, and from a presenter perspective, it’s not a great venue.  The walls consist of super-high bench-seats, a giant mirror, the front windows, and a wall of black tiles.  There was nowhere to point a projector! Plus, since the staff kept the music on, it was nearly impossible to hear the introductions as we went around the room.  Some friends suggested we check out the Precinct in Somerville, since they have a back room, and based on their music schedule, it looks like Tuesday nights are open.  If anyone has been there and has a comment, let me know.  Another MeetUp Group I attended was the Cambridge SEO Group. This was a VERY well organized group, and I highly recommend checking them out. They meet at the Robbins Library in Arlington, so it’s easy to hear everyone, and they even got a group member to sponsor some food and drink at their last meeting. Everyone headed over to Not Your Average Joe’s after the meeting to continue our conversations. Great group.

It also seems like lots of other smaller marketing firms are now getting into the MeetUp scene.  Although it’s been around for a long time, I only attended my first MeetUp last December.  Within the last 2 months though, two new marketing MeetUps have been started by some local firms:  Brick Marketing and Agency3 are now hosting their own MeetUp Group Meetings. (Agency3’s MeetUp Group) (Brick Marketing’s MeetUp Group)  Personally, I think they should band together and just have one Boston-area Marketing MeetUp.  The messages are all about the same, the consultant/vendor presence is about the same, but if we were doing it as a group effort, we could share the responsibilities of organizing an event each month, increase average attendance and potentially get better sponsorships.  (note to self: contact these guys about the idea).

Anyway, here are the slides I presented on Feb 24th.  Before you criticize me for busy slides, I wanted to make sure they had some on-going value without audio.  There were hard copies handed out at the event, and I wanted them to be a real resource afterward.  I was glad that people were asking for more of them during the event, and none were left behind (cool).

Marketing BBQ’s First Videocast

by redembermarketing on March 4th, 2009

So after being inspired by C.C. Chapman’s video blogging, I thought I’d give it a try.  Although this first videocast took three different takes before I got the frame and content right, I did manage to time it to exactly 5 minutes.  It even provides a brief explanation about how the concept/name, Marketing BBQ came about and includes some of the things I have been working on recently.  Mentioned: Completion of a multimedia demonstration for Liquid Machines, social media ad campaigns (MySpace and Facebook) for new non-profit customer Adoptions With Love, TechMedia Talk’s new EmberMail.com template based on a blog’s existing style, and early efforts to bring a coworking environment to Chelmsford, MA.

Video Introduction to Marketing BBQ
from Red Ember Marketing on Vimeo.

Introducing Marketing BBQ!

by redembermarketing on March 1st, 2009

Tasty marketing treats served up as often as possible.  As Red Ember Marketing comes across helpful tools, informative articles, cool companies, and completes interesting projects, the juicy details will be entered here.