Triggers: Weighting Transactions

From time to time, I work on projects where the goal is to set up various triggers.  This can be a complicated problem, because customers might perform competing activities.

I run regressions against various purchase, visitation, and social activities.  My goal is to identify when an activity should trigger a marketing tactic.  You learn some interesting things when you do this (your mileage will vary):

1. Old-School Catalog orders have a half-life of maybe 24 months.
2. E-Commerce orders have a half-life of maybe 20 months.
3. In-Store retail purchases have a half-life of maybe 16 months.
4. A click through an email campaign may have a half-life of 2 months.
5. A visit to a website may have a half-life of 2 weeks.
6. A social media action may have a half-life of 2 days.

Again, your mileage will vary.  But it's your job to know the half-life of all activities!  If a customer visits your website on December 13, but purchased in a retail store on December 1, it is quite likely that the retail transaction will carry more weight ... any triggers you plan are focused more on the retail transaction than the website visit.

Know the half-life of all customer activities.

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).

Email Marketing: Jasmine

Email marketing plays a whole different role when we're looking to "engage" Jasmine.


Remember, Jasmine's persona is somewhere around twenty-seven years old.  This means that Jasmine has been raised in the age of "The Great Recession".  Jasmine doesn't have the money that prior generations enjoyed at her age.


Email marketing needs to reflect this in three important ways.

1. Great quality product at low prices.  Jasmine is not going to pay $399 for a handbag, so don't bother trying to get her to "aspire" to purchase something she can't afford.  Focus the merchandise assortment around what Jasmine can buy, not what you want her to buy.
2. Curation.  Put an assortment together for Jasmine, have a point of view!  Jasmine uses external sources like blogs to understand what might work for her ... that means that we as marketers are doing a poor job of curating for her.
3. Sharable.  Jasmine trusts her friends.  Make all content easily sharable, and let Jasmine help do the marketing for you.  This is very different than Judy and Jennifer, they aren't going to do the marketing for you!

Segment who Judy, Jennifer, and Jasmine are.  Then speak to each persona the way each persona wants to be spoken to.  Go well beyond my research, actually test what works with each persona and then apply your learnings in the marketplace.

Contact me for your own, customized Judy / Jennifer / Jasmine segmentation framework.

Email Marketing: Jennifer

Hint:  Jennifer likes email marketing.


Well, she likes the discounts and promotions in email marketing campaigns!


Remember, Jennifer is all about using online marketing channels to find the best deal possible for the merchandise she wants to purchase.


The majority of best practices in email marketing are designed to speak directly to Jennifer.


Jennifer actually clicks through email campaigns and purchases ... this is one of the signs that the customer is Jennifer.  Judy subscribes to email campaigns to learn, Jennifer subscribes, clicks through, and purchases.


When segmenting your audience into Judy / Jennifer / Jasmine cohorts, be sure to customize the message based on what each unique cohort wants to accomplish.  Jennifer likes new products, she likes great prices, and she loves %-off and free shipping.

Email Marketing: Judy

Email purchases tend to be focused among Jennifer and Jasmine.


That doesn't mean that Judy doesn't subscribe to email campaigns.  She does!


But the products we offer, and the messaging in the email messages needs to be different to resonate with Judy.


Judy likes sales, and coupons.


Judy likes memories and tradition.


Judy likes "winning product", predictability, reliability.  She doesn't mind hearing about new products either, but there's a balance between learning and buying that must be mastered with Judy.


Segment Judy, then try these strategies, these are the themes that keep coming up in my research.  Email me you don't have the bandwidth to segment Judy, Jennifer, and Jasmine, and I'll do it for you!