Chapter 2. Lists – Laying the Groundwork for Success
2.13 Table: B-to-C Rating of Opt-in Techniques; Volume, Quality, and Usage
Q+V Quality Volume Use
New sletter offer 134 75 59 64%
Check boxes on registration/order forms 142 74 69 57%
Sales alert/product announcement offer 131 71 60 50%
Sw eepstakes/contests 144 62 82 49%
Trade events 120 59 60 40%
Customer service call-ins 126 73 53 40%
Asking offline in stores, printed forms,
catalogs 130 72 58 35%
Free trials/dow nloads 146 75 71 28%
Co-registration 101 42 60 21%
Appending offline addresses into email names 115 59 56 18%
Tele-prospecting 122 67 56 10%
Source: MarketingSherpa, Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, November 2007
Methodology: This fifth annual survey was opened to selected MarketingSherpa reader lists on Oct. 23, 2007, and closed on Nov. 2, 2007. 1,210 total responses were collected from in-house email marketers and employees at agencies/ESPs working with email. Any respondents not directly involved with email marketing were screened.
Notes from the Field: Accurate List Growth Strategy Boosts Revenue, Busts Bounces
Collecting email addresses in retail locations has long been a pain point for marketers.
Misspellings and bad penmanship usually create emails that are hard bounces waiting to happen. Here is how a marketer for a car wash used computer-generated sales receipts and incentives to produce accurate addresses and grow their list by 71% while boosting
weekend revenue.
Challenge
The owner of five car washes in the Houston area saw the growth of his mailing list hit a plateau because of a problem beleaguering many marketers – offline forms riddled by misspellings or illegible handwriting. Email addresses were collected when customers paid for car washes. Too many addresses were simply unusable.
After considering the elimination of paper signup forms altogether, they worried that having staffers ask for email addresses to input directly into the point-of-sale computer would turn off patrons while still producing bad addresses.
Campaign
The company started capturing accurate addresses by combining sales receipts with a Web-based signup form. They also tested a method for picking up additional email addresses at a Major League Baseball game to grow their list. Here are the 5 steps they took:
Step #1. Craft receipt and Web signup combination form
First, they tweaked their point-of-sale cash register software. When a sales rep inputted the name of the customer, it would immediately identify a person whose relevant
demographical information had not yet been captured. The system then would print a sales receipt that incentivized the customer to go to a URL.
At the URL, customers were asked to provide the following info:
- first and last name
- email (with a confirmation slot to help ensure the address is correct) - physical address
- phone number
- make, model, year and color of vehicle
The system would not print a receipt with the URL if the person had already filled out the form.
Step #2. Lure signups with a coupon
MarketingSherpa articles have shown that incentives drive offline email signups. So, they
Customers who filled out the form were sent an email with a coupon code for the car-wash package that had a value of $28.95. The email was one paragraph of copy with a link to a landing page that let them enter in the code and print the incentive.
Step #4. Augment list growth with MLB promotion
To augment the in-store effort, they partnered with the local Major League Baseball franchise, the Houston Astros. A handful of ―Bubbles Babes‖ were stationed around the stadium during a game to hand out 10,000 promos that bore the URL for the signup form.
The business card shaped promo had the URL and a couple of notes on how to get started on one side and the offer on the other side.
Step #5. Establish monthly specials
After gathering all the new addresses with the Web form, they started running monthly specials. The frequency of the specials was based on how often people wash their cars in Texas. They didn‘t want to email too often and burn out their list.
The monthly emails bundled premium and express-wash offers for limited time periods - three-day weekends –to redeem the coupons.
Results
Combining sales receipts and a Web form has grown their email list by 71.4%.
Most of the names came from the receipts, although the MLB baseball game promotion supplemented the list – just as they planned. In particular, they specifically credit the instruction they gave their reps to explain the coupon incentive when handing out receipts.
Most importantly, the store-originating addresses are coming in more cleanly than ever.
They do their emails in-house without the help of an ESP and, therefore, don‘t have analytics for opens, CTRs and deliverability.
They are averaging $70,000 per weekend on their email specials now. This is revenue that they weren‘t getting two years ago. Their list members are obviously opening and clicking through.
And here‘s a key lesson learned for marketers who want to collect more email addresses at events: It was important that they didn‘t collect addresses at the ballgame, rather, they used the cards to provide an incentive for people to go online and submit them there.
Notes from the Field: Testing Results in 1000% Increase in Opt-Ins Readers are often unwilling to opt-in for newsletters. Tech marketers tested differences in their opt-in process to see if better timing would overcome this resistance. The result has led to a tenfold increase in subscriptions, while decreasing the marketer‘s dependence on Google for traffic.
Challenge
Conversion rates were dismal. The site was getting terrific traffic (44,000+ daily visitors) but had an abysmal subscription rate (only 10-15 newsletter subscriptions a day). In addition, the marketer wanted to reduce their reliance on Google for traffic to their website for techies looking for answers. Increasing their newsletter subscribers seemed to be the only clear-cut way of doing it without breaking the bank.
Their audience was fickle by nature, however. Viewers typically came to the site to get a specific how-to nugget of information and then left abruptly. Plus, techies are among the touchiest demographic to market to online.
Campaign
They started first by investigating alternatives and looking at analytics data. They discovered that the average time visitors spent on their site was 66 seconds.
They decided to test an opt-in process that used a dhtml (dynamic html) time-delay ―hover box‖, which mimics the actions of a pop-up. Unlike a pop-up, a hover box – sometimes called a ‗slide-in‘ – doesn‘t get produced by another window being opened. Rather, the hover box code is part of the actual Web page being viewed; it remains hidden for an amount of time to avert pop-up blockers.
A key part of his plan was the delay: not serving viewers with the offer right away but after they took some time to explore the site. But how long should they delay it? They followed three steps to get the answer:
Step #1. Set up A/B test
They knew readers normally stuck around for about a minute before leaving the site. So, they homed in on a time-delay at or near the 60-second mark with A/B testing. They tested three combinations three days apiece -- ―long enough for the results to become statistically significant.‖
The test combinations:
60 vs. 75 seconds 60 vs. 45 seconds 60 vs. 30 seconds Step #2. Design the hover box
Box size of 35,781 bytes
Two-tone blue background color Two paragraphs of copy in white type
Underneath the copy, viewers were encouraged to sign up by inputting the following information into entry fields:
Name
Email address
Where you heard about us (optional) Step #3. Set restriction
They set a restriction on the hover box. Regular readers who didn‘t subscribe would see it only every six months at that IP address. The exceptions were users who changed
computers or cleared their cookies.
Results
The test demonstrated that the time-delay hover box worked, and it worked best at 60 seconds. It has been capturing a 1000% average daily increase in subscriptions.
Third-Party Lists and Co-Registration
2.14 Chart: Effectiveness of Third-Party List Rentals
Mailing to third-party lists has garnered more attention in 2008 as a direct result of the need to grow house lists. Economic pressure on marketers has driven growth in this area as a relatively inexpensive, if somewhat hit-or-miss option. As has been the case for some time, there is a group of marketers experienced in list rental who have enjoyed
considerable success and describe the tactic as ‗routinely justified‘ by ROI. For the majority, however, rental list performance is unpredictable, or worse.
13%
13%
17%
15%
44%
49%
58%
53%
40%
39%
25%
32%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Large orgs.
SMBs Advanced
Emailers Main Sample
Routinely justified Significant variance Not justified
Source: MarketingSherpa, Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, September 2008 Methodology: Fielded August 13 - September 4, 2008, N=1,763
2.15 Chart: Effectiveness of Ads in Third-Party Newsletters
As a tactic, ad placements in third-party newsletters fare about as well as list rentals.
There‘s roughly a 2 to 1 negative to positive ratio, with over half falling in between having seen success and failure. One word of advice when placing ads: If your media plan utilizes a saturation of a list or title, make sure to vary your graphical and text ads. Rotate heavily or the readership will quickly identify and ignore your ads. Our research suggests that banner blindness occurs quickly, usually within three sessions, unless the visual content is varied enough to catch the eye. For this reason, static, long-term sponsorships are effective at brand association but aren‘t necessarily good at conveying specific messages.
14%
18%
11%
17%
53%
53%
68%
53%
33%
31%
21%
31%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Large orgs.
SMBs Advanced
Emailers Main Sample
Routinely justified Significant variance Not justified
Source: MarketingSherpa, Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, September 2008 Methodology: Fielded August 13 - September 4, 2008, N=1,763
2.16 Chart: Effectiveness of Trading for Co-Reg Names
Co-registration can work very well, but not for everyone. Trading for names gets better marks from advanced emailers than from other segments, suggesting that with expertise come results, as with most tactics. Success in co-reg historically has come from following a few guidelines:
1. Strong alignment with the trading partner is the most essential element. A poor fit simply bring in names that don‘t convert, aren‘t happy and aren‘t good prospects.
2. Real-time forwarding of co-reg names – slow, batch processing can mean that days or even weeks pass before you get the names. They will convert poorly and may even identify your emails as spam.
3. Follow-up confirmation email within 24 hours, but leave some time so there isn‘t overlap and confusion with the original registration response.
4. Treat co-reg names as a separate segment for a period of time. Provide them with 11%
16%
20%
15%
53%
53%
70%
46%
37%
31%
10%
39%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Large orgs.
SMBs Advanced
Emailers Main Sample
Routinely justified Significant variance Not justified
Source: MarketingSherpa, Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, September 2008 Methodology: Fielded August 13 - September 4, 2008, N=1,763
2.17 Chart: Effectiveness of Paying for Co-Reg Names
Comparing the results from the last page, we see that advanced emailers, who are generally bullish on co-reg trading, aren‘t likely to go for paid relationships or, at least, haven‘t had consistently good experiences.
15%
15%
13%
45%
46%
80%
47%
40%
39%
20%
40%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Large orgs.
SMBs Advanced
Emailers Main Sample
Routinely justified Significant variance Not justified
Source: MarketingSherpa, Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, September 2008 Methodology: Fielded August 13 - September 4, 2008, N=1,763
2.18 Table: Issues in Rented List Execution