5. Behaviorally Targeted Emails Keep User Engagement Mint-y Fresh – Our look at how Mint.com keeps their emails engaging and helpful for users by incorporating behavioral targeting and triggered emails.

4. Why you shouldn’t fear the unsubscribe (if you maintain the health of your list!) – Kevin Deseuste explained how to avoid unnecessary unsubscribes and why you should stop worrying about unsubs if you are maintaining your email list’s health.

3. Hitting a Homerun in Email Advertising – With both San Francisco and New York making it to the post-season, our office was hoping for a good interoffice World Series, but it just wasn’t to be. Still this was one of our most viewed posts of the year.

2. What a Five Year Old Could Teach Us About Email Ads – Sometimes the best approach to marketing is one that recalls simple lessons from childhood: respect others, be honest and clear, and stay creative.

1. A Checklist for Monetizing Your Email List the Right Way – For many companies who are just beginning to look into monetizing their email list, there are a lot of questions about how subscribers will respond. We believe it’s important to respect subscribers and to add value to your email program, so we put together a list of questions to ask when you’re considering monetizing your email list. That checklist was our most viewed post of the year and the inspiration for our recent whitepaper.

Thanks to all of our readers for a great year! We look forward to sharing more information, tips, and content about email advertising in 2013. If you have specific topics you’d like to see covered, drop us a line in the comments.

Photo courtesy of ideagirl.

• How The Daily Deals “Fading” Business Model Affects Email Marketing – The daily deals market has been steadily gaining players while many look on awaiting the market’s demise. Because daily deals rely so heavily on email, it’s natural that no matter how the business plays out email will see some effects. This is an interesting look at how that might play out.
• Email Marketing Trends to Watch in 2013 – Mobile, relevance, and integrated campaign strategies: these trends won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been watching the email industry this year, but it’s good to get an end of year roundup of what we’ve seen this year that will continue to develop into 2013.
• How Email Templates are Like Mr. Potato Head – Templates are a great way to keep your email marketing content on track without recreating the wheel every day, week, or month. To keep them from getting stale, WhatCounts has some simple tips for mixing and matching.
• Dos and Don’ts For Email Subject Lines – Sometimes, it’s important to rethink and retest, even with something as well-tested as a subject line.
• The Age Of Data Wars Dawns – With customer data rapidly growing, ReadWrite looks at how it will affect us and what we’ll need going forward. This piece tries to tackle questions from a consumer point of view, which is a good reminder to think about our customers when deciding how to use data.
• Bonus Pictures: ividence 2012 Holiday Party – We had a lovely day at the races to celebrate the holiday season and spend time together.
  

What have you been reading this week? We’d love to hear. Drop us a note in the comments or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

ividence throws something of a wrench into the already complicated works by bringing a programmatic approach to an advertising channel that had typically been bought on a more traditional audience model: standalone or dedicated email advertising. With that in mind, I wanted to help bring a little clarity back to the market by providing a view of what programmatic buying is and how standalone email ads fit into that approach.

What is programmatic media buying?

Because of the evolving nature of applying technology and big data to media buying, there are a lot of different definitions out there.

The IAB defines programmatic marketing as “a method that enables advertisers to show a highly targeted piece of content (advertising, email, web page etc.) to a consumer based on their online behavior.” Effectively, programmatic buying is the purchasing side of that equation.

Another great resource is this AdExchanger post that taps into industry expertise to define the term in a practical way.

A good basic definition of programmatic media buying would be: “an automated method of purchasing ad media that is targeted on an individual level rather than an audience level, typically guided by predictive and behavioral data.”

How does email advertising fit into that?

OK, so that was a mouthful of a definition, but it doesn’t explain how email can be incorporated into your programmatic media buying.

The traditional method of buying dedicated email ads on a CPM basis doesn’t. However, as a standalone email ad exchange, ividence works within the programmatic buying model because it provides:

• Granularity – An email address is a unique identifier. That enables email marketers and advertisers to build an understanding of an individual, rather than relying on audience information or targeting based on an IP address or cookie.

• Actionable insight – Email is practically made for tracking and insight. A marketer can see who is opening, clicking, and taking action within an email campaign. They can then optimize for maximum conversions rather than maximum impressions.

• Pricing clarity – Just as with search or display exchanges, an advertiser can bid based on performance rather than eyeballs. Thus, it’s more clear exactly what’s being paid for and how it affects the company’s revenue and sales.

All of this adds up to the ability to overlay bid and ad performance onto past behavior and predictive models to automatically target and deliver standalone email ads. Because the bid is made on a particular action that an advertiser wants a prospective customer to take, it’s easy to compare price and performance across multiple channels, including display and search.

With search and display difficult to scale efficiently, email is an ideal candidate for expanding your programmatic media buying efforts and delivering clear results.

What does email add to your programmatic buying program?

Email brings an added oomph to the equation because it is:

• An engagement medium – ividence’s avg. CTR is 15x display’s avg. CTR.
• A personal connection – Your email ads come into the inbox next to emails from trusted sources.
• 1-to-1 targeting – Email is a unique identifier across the web.
• Highly trackable – Understand how consumers respond at each step in the process.
• An effective ad medium – 66% of U.S. online consumers say they have made a purchase after receiving an email vs. 16% for SMS and 20% for Facebook –ExactTarget 2012.

For more info on getting started, check out our easy cheat sheet on how to start a standalone email ad campaign.

Have you considered incorporating email advertising into your media mix? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Related articles
Growing Your Email List: Getting Creative with Incentives
How to Maintain the Health & Hygiene of 1M+ Email List
3 Big Data Don’ts: What to Never Do With Marketing Data

Mary Byrne

Mary Byrne leads ividence’s sales and marketing team in the U.S. as SVP, Americas. She has nearly 15 years of experience in the technology sector, with special emphasis on advertising technology and email deliverability. Previously, Mary led the sales, marketing, and client services efforts at DoubleClick, Microsoft and Level 3 Communications. She can be reached at mb@ividence.com.

Throughout three days of panels and key notes, some whip smart email and marketing geeks shared their insight on the use of big data, the role of email in social media, the rise of mobile email, and the importance of relevance.

There was a lot of food for thought, but three ideas stood out in particular for me because I work at an email advertising company that focuses on behavioral targeting to make email more effective and relevant:

Using behavioral data moves the needle more efficiently than using demographic data – While I can’t say enough good things about all of the speakers, the person who absolutely blew me away was Toby Fallsgraff of the Obama 2012 campaign. By the end of the campaign, the email team included 18 people. They tested everything, from subject lines to some ugly (Toby’s word, not mine) yellow highlighting.

One of the things that jumped out at me was that demographic segmentation didn’t really move the needle for them. It was much more important to target based on what a subscriber had done in the past: whether and how much they had donated, whether and in what capacity they had volunteered, etc.

Is the preference center dead? – Early in the conference, a panelist declared the preference center dead. Throughout the rest of the event, the debate raged.

The main argument against the preference center was that subscribers were consistently bad at identifying what they wanted. Using behavioral targeting to identify implied preferences was more accurate and more effective.

The argument for the preference center was that implementing a good preference center significantly reduced the rate of unsubscribes.

At ividence, we don’t think it’s time to declare the preference center dead. Lots of subscribers like to have control over their inboxes, even when they respond to emails in ways that don’t match the preferences they’ve set. Using a preference center in concert with behavioral targeting that uncovers implied preferences is probably the best route to take. It respects subscribers both in terms of what they ask for and how they respond.

When you start gathering behavioral data on clients and use it, they expect you to use it consistently when it makes their lives easier – Evan Shumeyko of OgilvyOne called out one of the most critical points about using behavioral data. If you’re using behavioral data to enhance your marketing, your customers and prospects expect that that data is available to your customer service department to enhance their experience as well.

When you raise expectations about how much your company understands your customer, it can be critically damaging if you don’t live up to those expectations. This gets back to a few of the ideas we mentioned in our post last week about how to handle your marketing data.

What content stood out to you? And what else do you think should have been covered? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

• Customer Anger Over Tracking Isn’t About Privacy, It’s About Respect – This is an interesting thought piece on what people are actually unhappy about when it comes to web tracking. Often, it’s less about privacy and more about reasonable amount of respect for a consumer’s intelligence.
• Email Open, Click Rates Recover in Q3; Triggered Emails Continue Strong Showing – This is a good summary of the newest Epsilon email tracking data.
• 11 Simple (But Critical) Tips for Creating Better Landing Pages – HubSpot shares some good tips for improving conversions through better landing pages. One of our favorites is matching the headline of the landing page to the corresponding CTA, which helps to keep consumers moving through the process smoothly.
• Perspective At 8,000 Feet – Part of our team is only recently back from Email Insider Summit. There were some fantastic panels and keynotes throughout the conference, and David Baker shares some great high level insight on the email marketing world in this piece.
• Marketing Research Chart: How mobile devices have changed customer behavior – MarketingSherpa shares some of the results from their 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report surveys. An interesting point was that 47% of the surveyed marketers felt that customers were moving away from traditional online channels to mobile, while a similar size group (43%) felt mobile channels were increasing interaction with their brands.

What have you been reading this week? We’d love to hear. Drop us a note in the comments or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

Most of the focus has been on how to use data to improve your marketing or learn more about your potential clients. However, it’s just as important to think about all of the things that you shouldn’t do with your marketing and customer data.

Don’t approach your data like it’s nothing more than numbers.

When you analyze your customer base and find that 60% are female and 25% have purchased both in-store and online in the last year, it’s easy to think of all of your customers as nothing more than part of a larger list. However, there is a very real person behind every email address, every birth date, every purchase, every email open, etc.

Big data is big because it’s a set that’s so complex and large that it can’t be housed and handled with standard tools. That volume of data is useful for finding interesting and important correlations (like the correlation between buying unscented lotions and pregnancy that Target found when it analyzed its baby registry data). But that doesn’t mean that the people behind that data can be reduced down into those numbers.

Testing and data analysis can help you more efficiently drive and measure behaviors. It’s considering the motives and emotions that go into the behaviors that’s going to help you generate hypotheses to test and develop creative that moves potential customers to become customers.

Don’t house data in multiple places with no master list.

Lots of people in your company need to use and collect information about customers and prospective customers. Customer service reps can contribute information about past purchase satisfaction, and the marketing team can map in data about website browsing and buying.

When everyone is maintaining information in multiple places, the ability to find meaningful patterns is limited. Imagine, for instance, that the majority of people who bought an item from your website after clicking on a PPC ad later called to complain and request a refund. That type of data could point to a misleading ad or keyword that changes the expectations of a buyer.

Target, while it has raised some privacy concerns over how it uses data, is a good example of a company that ensures that all information about a customer is fed into a single database. Purchases online and in-store, registry information, customer helpline questions, email opens, and more all feed back to a single customer ID.

One caveat: If you are extremely sophisticated in your data collection, make sure customers understand the information you collect, how it’s collected, and how it’s used. Lack of clarity here can create legal concerns and can leave customers feeling like your knowledge of them is “creepy” rather than helpful.

Don’t take the responsibility of storing customer data lightly.

Just as you need to respect your subscribers in email marketing, you need to respect your customers when handling their personally identifying information.

Respecting your customers’ data includes:

• Making sure customers understand how their data will be used
• Housing sensitive information in secure servers
• Never (ever) selling your permission-based email list

What other data don’ts do you think are important when dealing with big data?

Image courtesy of Ravenelle.

Related articles
Growing Your Email List: Getting Creative with Incentives
How to Maintain the Health & Hygiene of 1M+ Email List
3 Advertising Challenges Facing the Print Publishing Industry

Eric Didier CEO & Co-Founder Eric Didier is a successful serial entrepreneur with a broad background in enterprise software sales management, complex software development and product management for web technologies. He was the founder and CEO of Soamai in 2000, a metadata applications company which was acquired by Allen Systems Group in April 2004. He can be reached at ed@ividence.com. 

Here are some of the stories from the past week that caught our attention, including a nice post from AdExchanger that gets industry experts to weigh in a definition of big data, the reason that deleting 47% of your email list might be a good thing, and some tested email design tips.

• Email’s Value Remains Strong, But Could It Be Better? – This article is a great inspiration to think more about how you can use all of the data at your fingertips to improve your email marketing (without being creepy).
• When to use incentives in abandoned cart emails – It’s always tempting to use an incentive to drive sales, particularly with abandoned cart emails when you might assume that the customer is ready to buy and just needs a good reason. However, dotMailer suggests taking the time to do the math and determine if an incentive is actually a good idea.
• Define It – What Is Big Data? – AdExchanger has a fantastic series where they ask industry experts to share their explanations of some of the biggest buzzwords currently in use. Here, they take on the concept of “big data.” Even for those who work with and understand big data, this is a great article for understanding how others in the industry approach the concept.
• Email List Hygiene: Why the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development deleted 47% of its house list – Imagine realizing nearly half of your email list is inactive and hasn’t opened an email in the past year. That’s what the Department of Tennessee Tourism Development found. MarketingSherpa explains how they got buy in from others in their organization (and from state legislators) to drop more than 200,000 emails from their list and what they did to rebuild it.
• Email Design Tip: The Fold & Your Call To Action – Following the mantra of test, test, test, AWeber decided to explore whether above the fold CTAs are as important as most marketers believe. Though their results upheld email marketing best practices, it’s a good reminder that sometimes you should test even the things you think you know.
• Bonus Infographic: Holiday Trends Marketers Can’t Ignore – This is a fun infographic that highlights some of the trends in digital marketing (and shopping!) that will increasingly have an impact on marketing plans over the holidays.
  

What have you been reading this week? We’d love to hear. Drop us a note in the comments or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

Murray Newlands speaks with Lynn Dalsing of ividence about their email marketing exchange platform. Founded in Paris originally, the ividence platform is a disruptive technology that transforms the email acquisition market’s traditional practices, bringing to email what is available in the Display and Search markets. More>

• The Holiday Email Marketing Life Cycle – There’s a lot of great info out there about designing your marketing plan around the customer life cycle, but we thought this was unique because it covers a smaller period in customer life cycle.
• 8 Lessons a 6 Year Old Can Teach You About Your Landing Page – Aside from a fantastically funny image at the beginning of the post, this article offers nice tips for improving your landing pages to deliver more conversions.
• Defined. The correct length for a subject line. – With a nod to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Tim Watson gives the best length for a subject line, once and for all. And it’s not 42.
• Learning By Example: 9 More Responsive Emails – A look at some good examples of responsive design in the wild.
• Why Email Is Not ‘Either-Or’ – Email marketing isn’t either reach or relevance, and successful email marketers need to work from both sides to create the best possible email program.
• Bonus Infographic: Santa’s Top 10 Email Deliverability Tips – Lyris shares Santa’s list of nice deliverability tactics. With so many companies working to get a piece of consumer’s inbox and attention, it’s more important than ever to follow better than best deliverability practices.
  

What have you been reading this week? We’d love to hear. Drop us a note in the comments or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

I went with a friend of mine who is meticulous in keeping his inbox clear. Unlike me, he does not have an avid interest in receiving email marketing messages, and it takes something very special indeed for him to give up his email address.

I point this out because they event organizers gave us a postcard to fill out with our email addresses and other information. In return for this, Maker’s Mark was prepared to give us a free tasting of one of their special blends and a souvenir from the event. I thought that was a fair trade.

So, imagine my surprise when my friend told me that he was considering not returning the card. Neither free booze nor free toys were enough to convince him that he should share his information with one of his favorite alcohol brands.

What ultimately changed his mind wasn’t that he would get free stuff. The cards we filled out explained that we were signing up for the Maker’s Mark Ambassador Program, and that in return we would get:

• Our names on a Maker’s Mark barrel
• The opportunity to purchase a bottle of our batch
• Updates on the aging of our barrel
• Advanced notice of rare, special release bottles
• The opportunity to purchase exclusive Ambassador merchandise
• And many other items to confirm our honorable status

That sense of exclusivity and being a part of a community around the products that he liked was enough to change his mind.

Two of reasons we were signing up for their email list were opportunities to buy something. From a business. That makes money by selling things. Of the remaining four offers they made, one was just letting us know in advance when we could buy something.

It is a pretty impressive feat to make buying something seem like an exciting opportunity that only we would get.

My point here is that you don’t always have to give customers a coupon or free gift to incentivize them to sign up for your list. There are more compelling incentives that cost practically nothing to implement. Some ideas:

Exclusivity

Just the name Maker’s Mark gives to their subscribers feels impressive: Ambassadors. They also get advance notice of new products available.

Even if you can’t get approval to send advance information out to subscribers, you can give them exclusive access to your company in other ways. For instance, in the case of Maker’s Mark, they create a monthly program to let subscribers share their favorite cocktails, food recipes, or stories that include Maker’s Mark. The most interesting submissions could be featured on social media profiles with credit given to the submitter.

A lot of people make use of user generated content for their email and social programs, but I rarely see it listed as an incentive to join a list. If you make potential subscribers feel like they have the opportunity to be tastemakers within your community and to be recognized for their contributions, that may be a greater draw than a simple coupon.

Name Dropping

I loved the idea of having my name on a barrel of Maker’s Mark! It’s silly, but it’s just such a fun thing to be able to say.

Even if you can’t do something quite as unique as the Maker’s Mark example, you can make customers feel like they are a part of your brand. Depending on whether it fits with your brand’s tone, you could try something as silly as giving new subscribers the chance to have their name or picture up on a Customer Wall of Fame on your site.

Free Stuff

Free stuff never hurts, but make sure it’s unique and right for your brand. In the case of Maker’s Mark, they offered free mini-cocktail shakers or rocks glasses that had the trademark red wax seal on them, and they even put the wax on while you watched, which was way cool.

Some examples you could promote on your email signup are:

• Giving a coupon for a free mystery gift with the next purchase and delighting customers with something that represents your brand and customers.
• A weekly trivia contest around your brand and industry that subscribers can win a gift card for getting correct.
• Even highlighting your birthday gift on your signup page can be a great incentive.

One final thought, make sure that you deliver on your promises. One tiny little (HUGE) thing that went wrong after we signed up for the Maker’s Mark list was that they never sent an email.

Which is a good reminder to email marketers everywhere that you have to know exactly how new subscribers from all of your campaigns (including paper signups from your event marketing) are imported into your list and welcomed.

On the plus side, I was so eagerly awaiting my first email from them, that I recently headed over to their website to sign up again.

What creative incentives do you use to grow your email list? Share with us in the comments below.

Image courtesy of Ian T McFarland

Related articles
Why You Should Consider Standalone Email Advertising Instead of a Daily Deals Site
How to Maintain the Health and Hygiene of a 1M+ Email List
A Checklist for Monetizing Your Email List the Right Way

Lynn Dalsing
Lynn Dalsing develops marketing strategy and content within the U.S. market for ividence. She has several years of experience in marketing for both B2B and B2C audiences. While working at high-end maternity clothing manufacturer, Ingrid & Isabel, she oversaw the development and evolution of branding for the company’s highly successful launch into Target stores.

 Lynn has a passion for combining outstanding messaging with reach and engagement statistics, once describing an ESP’s reporting dashboard as the “best toy a marketer could get.” She can be reached at ldalsing@ividence.com.