Email Marketing and Jasmine: Curate! And Low Prices, Too

Jasmine is customer who likes email marketing. Sure, she's younger (average age = 19 - 35), and is "engaged" with social media.

But email marketing represents a way for the marketer to push information to Jasmine.  And Jasmine wants, in some ways, to be told what to do.  This concept, of course, is called "curation".

In my projects, I routinely notice several things about Jasmine.

1. She's less loyal than Jennifer, and much less loyal than Jasmine.
2. She isn't a huge catalog fan, and as a result, email marketing represents one of the few (inexpensive) ways for you, the marketer, to share information with Jasmine.
3. She can't afford high prices.  She wants a $400 handbag, but she can afford $100.  Oh, and, she wants the $100 handbag to be 95% as good as the $400 handbag.
4. Newness isn't that important to Jasmine --- presenting a compelling assortment is important to Jasmine.

Therefore, make life simple for Jasmine.  Your email marketing program can speak to her needs.

1. Judy wants a $400 handbag on sale.  Jennifer wants a $400 handbag with 30% off and free shipping, and wants the $400 handbag to be the cheapest price online.  Jasmine wants a $100 handbag.  Give it to her!!
2. Tell Jasmine a story.  It's not about the product, it's about how the product fits in with Jasmine's life and your assortment.
3. Make everything shareable for Jasmine ... she's willing to be your customer acquisition partner (whereas Judy isn't going to go to the effort to help you, digitally).

Want to learn more?  Purchase Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence today (click here).

Email Marketing and Jennifer: It Was All About The Hunt!

When I present Jennifer at catalog-related conferences, I hear groans!  Catalog folks tend to not like Jennifer.

Email marketers, however, love Jennifer, and for good reason.

1. In email marketing, Jennifer tends to have the best conversion rates of the three personas.
2. Jennifer demands free shipping.  Email marketers love to offer free shipping!
3. Jennifer likes getting 20% or 30% off.  Email marketers love to give discounts to email subscribers, as verified by email subject line testing.
4. Jennifer loves to hunt.  She wants to make sure that whatever is offered in an email marketing campaign is offered at the best price.  Jennifer will go to great lengths (Google, affiliates, comparison shopping engines) to hunt for the best products at the best prices.
5. Jennifer loves newness.

The email marketer is aligned with Jennifer.  In fact, email marketers have largely trained Jennifer how to behave.  Email marketers have, in so many cases, trained Jennifer to not trust the discounts/promotions offered to her ... Jennifer knows the email marketer will offer 10% off plus free shipping this week, then 30% off next week.

From a tactical standpoint, the email marketer can serve Jennifer well, and rebuilt trust.

1. Product assortments should feature new products ... Jennifer gets bored easily.
2. If you must have promotions, always give Jennifer the best promotions, so that she trusts you in the future.
3. Eliminate hunting.  By giving Jennifer the best prices and best promotions, Jennifer doesn't have to hunt.  She hunts because she doesn't trust.  Change her behavior, via trust.

Want to learn more?  Purchase Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence (click here).

Email Marketing, Judy, and Sale Events

Remember Judy?

On average, she is between 51 and 67 years old.  She is, literally, a catalog marketing professional, having spent the past 30 years purchasing via paper.

When I analyze Judy, I notice that she likes consistency.

1. She likes "winners", products that have always performed well, products she knows and trusts.
2. She likes sale events.  Whereas some customers respond to personalized promotions, Judy seems to trust the fact that you always have a sale event from January 3 - January 10, and that you offer her 20% off during that promotion.  In this way, Judy can plan her life, she can prepare for this event.

When you code personas (like Judy, Jennifer, and Jasmine), pay close attention to the merchandise each persona purchases.

Then, within your email marketing campaigns, you can have various events, but you feature winning product for customers in Judy's persona.  You're likely to experience increases in opens/clicks/conversions if you do this!

Want to learn more?  Purchase Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence (click here).

Email Marketing Conversion Rates

Folks like to tout the importance of "engagement", don't they?

The hypothesis offered to us is that if we can get a customer to pay attention to us, the customer will spend more money with us.

Might be true.

Might not be true.

Of course, we have the data available to measure engagement, don't we?

This image shows the average conversion rate for customers who click on email campaigns "x" times per year.  The image illustrates an interesting finding ... those who clicked on an email campaign the most have decreasing conversion rates.

Interesting, huh?  Those who are most engage have lower conversion rates than those who are moderately engaged.

If we multiply the clicks by conversion rates, we find that those who clicked the most actually purchased the most.

So, in one graph, we are able to both prove that engagement matters, and prove that engagement is highly overrated!

Most important, I want for you to start looking at your marketing channels on an annual basis, not on a campaign basis.  You can't learn the information in this chart by analyzing campaign metrics, can you?

Click here to purchase Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence!

It's Here! Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence

If you are tired of opens/clicks/conversions ... if you're exhausted by folks telling you that email marketing is dead ... if you want to see where email marketing fits among the "omni-channel" marketing mix ... if you want to communicate to Sr. Management how important email marketing is ...

... then this booklet is for you!

Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence is now available, from Amazon.

• Print (full color) for $14.95 (click here).
• Kindle for just $2.99 (click here).

Yes, I lowered the Kindle price (I was going to charge $4.95), as an incentive to encourage you to order the booklet in digital form.  Yes, I'll be measuring the difference in sales (and the print version has to be priced where it is, given the costs associated with print on demand and color images ... the price difference represents the challenges anything associated with print will face going forward ... FYI, my profit is basically equal in each version).

The booklet focuses on three main areas.

1. How email marketing fits into the Direct Marketing Success Pyramid.
2. Goals and Objectives for email marketing success (not opens/clicks/conversions or subject line manipulation).
3. Email Forensics - analytics that prove to your organization that email marketing matters.

Executives in the audience will be particularly interested in the Email Forensics section ... click here to contact me for your own, personalized Email Forensics project.

At 72 pages, this is a quick read.  You're going to learn a lot about how to communicate the importance of email marketing in your organization.  And you're going to learn how to analyze your business in a way that clearly demonstrates the importance of email marketing.

What you won't get (there's hundreds of books and millions of blog articles that tell you how to do this stuff):

• You won't hear anything about opens/clicks/conversions.  These metrics do not illustrate the profitability of email marketing, on an annual basis.
• You won't get tips for maximizing subject line performance.
• You won't learn anything about creative strategies.
• You won't learn about traditional best practices.

You're going to see a different side of email marketing, one where executives fully understand the profit contribution of email marketing, one where you learn interesting facts about how to weight historical transactions for trigger-based programs and multi-version campaigns.  You'll learn how to execute five year sales forecasts, and you'll learn communication techniques that prove email marketing isn't dead.

So buy yourself a copy today, don't delay!!

And click here to hire me for your own, customized email forensics project.

Coming Soon: Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence

If you're like me, you get tired of hearing that various disciplines are "dead".

Ten years ago, it was catalog marketing.  We were told that email and search would render catalog marketing useless.  Few people bothered to measure the evolution of catalog marketing --- they either believed fairy tales (multi-channel customers are the best customers, so you must have a catalog), or believed catalog marketing was dead.  Two extremes --- neither represented reality.

It turns out that catalog marketing is humming along just fine among 55+ rural customers.

These days, we hear from some of the social media elite that email is dead.

There is a subtlety in the message that goes unchallenged, however.  Email as a social communication channel is undoubtedly changing.  Just watch the blather on Facebook or Twitter, and that fact becomes obvious.

Email as a commerce channel?  If email as a commerce channel is dead, then we are observing huge sales declines, right?  Sales are truth.

Are you observing huge sales declines in your email marketing program?

When it comes to communicating the success of an email marketing program, I believe that email marketers do themselves no favors, at all.  Communication on opens/clicks/conversions does not resonate with an executive audience.  Quoting ROI metrics from the DMA is lazy and effortless, especially when the email marketer fails to calculate the profitability of his/her own email marketing efforts!

I've been in too many meetings where the email marketing folks are thoroughly disconnected from the rest of the company, speaking a foreign language, not understanding how their channel interacts with the rest of the business, being beaten silly by executives who don't realize that email marketing is generating 25% of annual profit.

This 72 page booklet will re-focus the email marketing veteran on a different agenda.  In the booklet, I describe three key areas that the email marketer needs to focus on.

1. The Direct Marketing Success Pyramid - A discussion on how to be excellent while integrating with all other employees.
2. Goals and Objectives - I describe how I would set up goals and objectives so that an email marketer is set up for success.
3. Email Forensics - A series of analytical tools that demonstrate how email marketing interacts with all other channels in the marketing mix, demonstrating how much profit email marketing truly generates.

You will not read anything about opens/clicks/conversions ... this style of measurement and communication is not helping anybody.  Instead, we'll focus the email marketer on a different path, one designed to prove to all employees just how valuable email marketing truly is.

Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence will be available next week, in print from Amazon ($14.95), and via Amazon Kindle ($4.95).

More than likely (as often happens with these booklets), we'll see a significant increase in Email Forensics projects, so get yourself in the queue now for an Email Forensics project (click here to contact me).