Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

Big Companies are Getting E-mail Now

What always amazes me is how much money non-profits spend in direct mail marketing, when the evidence shows that e-mail works better, costs less, and is easier to do. I don't fully understand why making a significant investment in e-mail marketing is something so few managers are willing to do. In my conversations, there always seems to be a reluctance to break away from the tried-and-true. So it is for those of you among my readers that I direct this post.

Apparently the word about e-mail marketing has gotten out to America's biggest corporations. Last week, a report was released by Direct Partners. It was a study of responses from 30,000 surveys sent in April, to senior executives at companies with 2007 revenues exceeding $100 million. 28 percent of respondents said that e-mail works most effectively for them, with 24 percent reporting that direct mail does the best job.

Here's the entire article, which is worth a read.

Of all people, I am the last to admonish non-profits to "act more like a business" -  but in this case, corporate America seems to be "getting it" a lot faster than we are.

Senior Web Users Continually Surprise

It seems I'm on a roll with how the older audience uses the Web. Since the average age of our the audience that responded to our 2008 Arts Patron Tracking Study is 49, I like to focus on that age range.

This morning I noticed a small piece of research that had something in it that jumped off the page at me. Tell me if you see what I see:

  
OK, perhaps the green circle gives it away, but I find this a bit shocking. According to this DoubleClick study published in eMarketer, promotional emails are more effective in influencing adults over 55 to make a purchase than search engine result pages.

My theory here is that older adults don't do Google searches as frequently, nor are they perhaps as adept at them. If either of these are true, then e-mail marketing has become an even more important tool to use to market to an older audience.

17% of Arts Patrons Surveyed Read E-mail on their Phones

Every year at about this time, we do a national study of arts patrons' use of the Internet and e-mail. Just like in the past, we worked with about 15 of our clients and sent out surveys to some 75,000 arts patrons across the country. We got back just about 8,000 responses, and we're now starting to sift through the results. I'll be reporting on some of these findings in coming posts, but today I wanted to highlight just one interesting tid-bit of data.

For the first time, I included a question about the degree to which people are reading their e-mail on their cell phones or PDA's, such as a Blackberry. The results show that we're just getting started, but that this is a trend we should all be paying a lot of attention to.

Our survey shows that 83% do not read any e-mail on their phones at all. About 2.5% say they read more than 50% of their e-mail that way, and about 12% say between 1% and 25%.

My guess is that this number is going to go up dramatically in the next year or two, and as it does, we're going to have to respond by altering the content, style and length of our e-mails messages.

Even on an iPhone, where the resolution is as good as you're going to get on a small device, getting the message across in a few words, an image, and a clearly worded subject line is even more important than ever before.

Brevity, clarity and relevance are already watchwords and for the 17% of your patrons that are reading some of their e-mail on their phones now, it's absolutely crucial. 

When Opt-in E-mail Becomes Spam

I haven't written specifically about e-mail in a while, and before I take my eye off the ball, I thought it would be good to revisit one of the trickiest aspects of e-mail marketing. If there was one mantra that can't be repeated too often it is that e-mail marketing is all about R E L E V A N C E. If you send juicy, up-to-date, interesting stuff to your readers, they will open, read, and respond. I've been saying this in various ways for years, and so have most of my colleagues.

Today I read something that brings home this message in an even more stark way. According to a study by Q Interactive/Marketing Sherpa (which you can read here): 

"Fifty-six percent of consumers consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is 'just not interesting to me.'"

What consumers are saying is that even if you get them to opt-in properly, and don't over-mail them, they equate irrelevant content to spam. This also gives a lot of additional credence to continually segmenting your lists. 

As you think about your own e-mail editorial plan, I urge you to think like a publisher as much (or more) than you think like a marketer.

E-mail Segmentation Still the Next Big Thing

For the last several years, I've attended the Marketing Sherpa annual conference on e-mail marketing, and last year I spoke at it. I decided not to go this year, partly in favor of attending other conferences, and partly because the coverage of the event is getting better and better each year. I just looked at this year's summary which you can read for yourself here.

There's a lot to learn from just reading this summary, and I encourage you to do so. Meanwhile, I'd like to excerpt just one take-away:

The issues of segmentation and relevancy were -- by hook or by crook -- party to nearly every discussion heard during the three days. And an increasing number of marketers are splintering their lists into up to 12 or 14 different files.

"The focus has shifted to relevancy and the importance of segmentation," says Jayne Lytel, Executive Director, The Early Intervention Network. "It's almost more important to have a smaller list than to have a huge list that is not performing as well. I plan to go back and clean our lists and segment it better, while not taking the one-size-fits-all approach."

Now, your lists may be too small to segment into 12 files, but again, the conference highlights something I've been saying for a long time - that a "one-size-fits-all" e-mail strategy should eventually give way to much more targeted messaging to your patrons and donors.

Our Conference Theme Echoed by IBM

As you know, last week we mounted our first large-scale e-marketing conference, our E-marketing E-mersion E-vent.  In the past we've done single seminars for an hour or a few hours, but this was our first effort at a multi-track, all-day event.

Judging from the intensity of the note-taking by our participants and the results from our survey, I think we are on the right track. One of the things I did in planning the conference was to invite speakers that would bring examples and experiences not only from the arts, but also from Fortune 500 companies and outside the US arts world.

I think often we get too myopic and think that unless something is being done in our specific genre it's not relevant. Actually, what I was hoping to convey last week was that arts marketers need to learn how to do better e-marketing in a big way, and and ultimately they should be learning not only from each other, but from corporate America and abroad.

One of the big themes of my keynote talk had to do with segmentation and targeting. Although it's not nearly as sexy nor does it generate as many eager questions as talking about Youtube, it's vitally important. I made that point, as did several of our guest speakers.

And talking about Fortune 500 companies, I was really pleased to read a press release this weekend about a new study issued by IBM Global Business Services, titled "IBM Predicts the End of Advertising as We Know It." I encourage you to read the press release at least, if not the whole study.

Here's a few quotes that should whet your appetite:

To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices.

IBM believes that all players will need to invest heavily in consumer analytics and automation to gain more insights about the consumer and how to reach them. For example, interactive advertising paired with consumer analytics provides compelling knowledge of who viewed and acted on an ad rather than estimates of impressions, allowing advertisers to maximize revenue and yield management.

Marketing is marketing and whether you're IBM or the Iowa Brass Museum, the contours of the evolving world of arts marketing seem to be the same for everyone.

Inspiring Japanese Trends

In the last week I've been to both the ArtsReach Marketing conference, and am writing this from the NAMP conference in Miami. I thought that I might be reporting back and picking up tid-bits of information to share with you. In fact, I've been running around like crazy and have hardly had a chance to really digest much of anything. I hope to have some pearls of wisdom later in the week when I've had time to really reflect.

Meanwhile, It's been great seeing many of you and my overall take is that the field of arts marketing has been greatly enhanced by these conferences and there's are more and more organizations doing smart marketing than I've ever seen before.

However, I digress. The real point of this post is to share a really interesting article that caught my eye today. It validates something I've been saying for years - that the PC will dwindle in importance as cell phones and PDAs become better and better as a replacement. Here's some validation from Japan.

More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  This comes from an AP article which you can read in its entirety here.

Seems to me that's a pretty high percentage. Also seems to me that the same will happen in the US sooner than later. The implications are pretty important for our digital marketing. More portability means more use, and more use means more and more potential to reach our patrons easily and quickly.

E-mail Marketing is Top Online Marketing Tactic: Proven

I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but check this out. This study shows in a better way what I find awfully hard to convey in words. This research conclusively shows the relative importance to marketers of many kinds of online promotional techniques.

And guess which one is ahead of the pack by leaps and bounds? 

You got it.

What To Do

Now that that American Airlines thing is out of my system, let's turn to the positive.

I read a lot about our industry and often what the corporate world is doing in e-mail marketing isn't completely relevant. However, today I want to share an article with you from DM News which i think succinctly captures some best-practices for e-mail that I've been talking about for years.

The article is here and I hope you'll read the whole thing.

 

http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/e-mail-marketing/42331.html

 

However, if you're pressed for time, and I know many of you are, the main points are:

 

1. Know your audience

2. Mail only relevant information

3. Develop a strong wire frame template (PatronMail helps you do this)

4. Avoid many different colors and fonts

5. Don't overload your audience

6. Set the stage (set and manage expectations)

What Not To Do

From time to time, something comes across my inbox from a major corporation that's so amazingly misguided and filled with fundamental mistakes that I go into marketing-shock. That's what happened to me when I got an e-mail from American Airlines last week, the subject line of which read: Hurry! Choose Your Reward - Bonus Miles or Discounts.

 

Needless to say, I was eager to get a reward so I was suckered. Well, it turns out to be a highly overproduced flash animation all designed to get me to sign up for more of their e-mail newsletters. The amount of money and technology that's been expended here is just staggering. And the arrogance to think that I would actually watch this, and then respond just makes me wonder what these people were thinking.

 

Here's a screen shot of the e-mail in my inbox. Notice that it's personalized and quite professional. But the subject line is clearly spammy and totally misleading.

 

Please, don't do this kind of thing. It just makes your recipients think you're slimy. Goodness knows it would take a lot to make me reduce my already low estimation of American Airlines, but this e-mail did just that.