Email Marketing

Zrinity Inc., a Utica, New York-based email marketing server provider, produced a white paper titled, “Improving the Buyer Experience (and ROI) Through Transactional Email Marketing” in which it addressed the mandatory presence of six components in every transactional email. While the components individually are not earth-shaking, the necessary combination of all six in each email may come as a surprise to many.

A transactional email, in short, is a company’s opportunity to utilize a communication that must already be distributed to a customer (i.e. order confirmation) to further promote the company, sell additional products or services, or build brand loyalty. Zrinity, however, is raising the bar by announcing that businesses must be especially careful when constructing transactional emails to ensure that they are meeting the goal of building rapport without burning bridges, which can occur if any of the six components Zrinity has found to be crucial, are not present.

The six components are divided amongst two categories: Content and Delivery.

Content

1. Relevance—Content must speak to the relevance of the transaction. For instance, you do not want to send a promotion of a fur coat in a transaction email confirming the purchase of an “I love PETA” t-shirt. Customization options, such as those offered through Zrinity’s Campaign Intelligence allow businesses to access the type of profile information that makes these more customized emails possible.

2. HTML Formatting—Research shows that recipients are more receptive to HTML formatting than standard text. This allows for improved visibility, appearance and usability through links. It also provides more tracking options for the sender.

 3. Urgency—Use of phrases such as, “Purchase now and for the next 20 minutes, you’ll also get XX for free,” implies that the recipient must act now before losing the opportunity.

4. Brand Consistency—Ensure that you are using your brand consistently in every message. Not only should your email communications match each other, but they too should match other communications where brand is represented including Websites, brochures, etc.

Delivery

5. Real-time—Timing is everything, so companies must ensure that relevant messages are also timely, which usually means less than a 24 hour time frame from the original transaction time.

6. Testing and Tracking—test, test, test, and then track everything.

More Sources: Email Marketing Server, Transactional Email Marketing

Zrinity Inc., a Utica, New York-based email marketing server provider, has announced an upgrade to its email campaign delivery system. The news has thus far been met with acclaim from clients and the industry, proving a cunning move on the part of the company.

Transactional emails are not necessarily a new practice, but Zrinity’s customized approach is proving the email marketing is still alive and kicking…and customers are taking notice. Essentially, a transactional email is a business’s way of taking advantage of a communication that should already be distributed to a customer, such as a delivery confirmation or emailed receipt, and adding an up-sell or additional option to that email. There are, of course, rules to the way in which the email must be constructed, including placing the transaction portion at the top, but these communications are a great way to add value, build brand and gain additional sales.

With its new approach, known as Campaign Intelligence, Zrinity is able to utilize the information obtained about existing and prospective customers (behavior factors) to create and deliver personalized email. Those factors include information in a customer profiles, their preferences, behavioral touch points, and more. In other words, Zrinity is enabled to build a customized message and offering for each and every customer grouping, thereby increasing campaign success and improved ROI.

While this approach may, to some, seem like an offering that any and every ESP (email service provider) offers, this is not the case. Most ESPs do not have the technology necessary to produce such customization, and instead continue to mail campaigns in the older fashion of batching and blasting. With Campaign Intelligence, conversely, businesses can use recipient behavior information obtained in reaction to transactional emails to then catapult that information into future communications and additional sales.

More Sources: Transactional Email Marketing Server, Transactional Email Marketing Definition

Zrinity Puts a New Face on a Common Practice…

Zrinity recently announced the integration of Google Analytics into its Behavioral Email Marketing Strategy. The result of the winning combination is a heightened ability of email marketers to monitor the behavior of their recipients through strengthened metrics and data compilation.

Formerly known as Urchin from Google, the new Google Analytics assists businesses in monitoring performance data. That data can then be used to improve upon existing campaigns and sites. But that’s not all. Google Analytics also allows businesses to track the performance of ads, referrals, search engines, promotions, and a number of offline initiatives as well.

At one time, it was thought that those metrics obtained from Google Analytics were stand-alone and had no ties to other email campaign metrics. In other words, businesses would monitor campaigns through the Zrinity site and then watch Google Analytics for other measures. Zrinity, however, has changed all that by tying Google Analytics directly into its Behavioral Email Marketing Strategy.

Now, having connected the two, delivery coders have enabled Zrinity to pass all campaign metrics directly to Google Analytics. Thus, businesses not only have the means to track bounce rates, delivery rates, and campaign testing, but also the ability to continue tracking site movement once the campaign is completed. From email metrics to site metrics – now it’s all accessible by one click.

This combination is highly critical to Zrinity clients. Behavioral email allows businesses to group individuals/recipients by their past patterns or actions. In other words, a business can look at those individuals who used a credit card to make their purchase in one group, those who opted to receive a newsletter in another, and so on. Part of Zrinity’s new Behavioral Email Marketing Strategy also includes monitoring email for pricing purposes to help ensure that those clients without delivery issues are not paying the same as those facing this challenge.

Zrinity recently added a multi-variant email campaign testing to their product offering. It would be a good place to start to explain what multi-variant campaign testing is, its exact purpose as well as what it is not. Starting with the latter, it is not AB testing. Or rather it is a more evolved version of AB testing email campaigns. The concept is much like holding a focus group meeting with some of your customers before launching a new advertising campaign. Multiple versions of content pieces within a marketing or transactional message are served across a section of all customers and then the behavioral results are monitored to determine the winners, which will be served to the rest of the customers.This concept could be used to hold focus groups with your customers, concerning your vendors marketing messages, as well.

Those that have built newsletter applications, could use it to test the best use of advertising and affiliate marketing content. It’s not just about who will pay you to ride. It’s got to be about what your customers want first. There will be no sufficient revenue from these sources if your customers don’t like what you’re showing them. You think you have a good idea of what would best serve them based on the common interest that initiated the subscription, but if you could try some different things and watch the reaction, your customers might take you in entirely new directions.

I just returned from the Email Evolution Conference in San Diego. I learned some things, shared some knowledge and made new friends. I’m energized and it’s all still running through my head. I’m really looking forward to Marketing Sherpa’s conference later this month. The vendor area at these conferences are most often the most valuable and most under used resources. Attendees should come prepared with a list of questions and approach vendors with them, but generally it’s only a small percentage that have the courage to approach them and pick their brains. They fear it would create some kind of commitment. Vendors don’t expect to close deals at conferences. They are there to build brand recognition and begin relationships, so that in the event you consider a product or service in the space with which they compete, you would think of them. They love to listen to your story and love to tell theirs. The top experts in the field are standing there ready to share free leading-edge knowledge. They want to share ideas and visions and really enjoy hearing about yours. If I had attended this conference to learn about email deliverability issues, for instance, I would probably get all the answers I needed in the vendor area and then would know which of the sessions would be most important for me to attend. Many of the attendees told me that the sessions at Email Evolution were very interesting and informative. I think that the diversity of speakers and topics offered by DMA affiliations helped.

A luncheon speaker from Daily Candy reminded me of a very important lesson in marketing. Treat your customers and prospective customers like friends and two things will happen. They will talk about you and they will actually become good friends. While that was not the focus of the talk, it was what I was reminded of. Follow your passion, have fun with it and then you’ll find a way to make money doing it. I had the opportunity to share stories and knowledge with hundreds of people at this conference and since I still remember some of the people I met at conferences last year and tell their stories, I expect the experience will carry on for years

The deliverability of your messaging gateway is highly dependent on other gateways, most often using older SMTP servers and often configured in unusual manners to address issues that have occurred over time. Until recently, administrators used a brute force approach to get the best delivery results and then often fine-tuned the number of connections and messages per connection to each of the major gateways. Newer email servers can manage a very large number of connections efficiently and often caused problems for administrators of older email servers. It’s like an unintentional denial of service attack that isn’t accepted well. The response has been countermeasures that reduce the number of connections available to servers that use that approach and with small networks, often just a hard block entered by the administrator. It’s a little embarrassing to contact the email administrator at some university about your deliverability issue and get a response that starts with, “So you’re the guy!”.

We created a Connection Authority Service in XMS to monitor connection performance with each recipient domain mail exchanger and constantly adjust the number of connections and messages per connection to achieve the best delivery results with the least amount of resources at each end of the connection. When messages are ready to send, a permit is granted or denied by the service. By marching to the beat of the other guy, we make it possible to move more messages through the pipeline by taking advantage of good connection performance periods and backing off during bad periods to allow them to recover. We also avoid tripping alarms that would put us into a longer delivery delays caused by dynamic blocks, hard blocks and crashes. The algorithm also supports the built-in load-balancing in the SMTP protocol by evaluating the connection performance of each mail exchanger when multiple mail exchangers are available for a recipient domain. There is an overriding mechanism to allow more connection resources to be allocated to domains that allow it. This is rarely used, but enables administrators who know that 75% of their email stream is to yahoo, to enable a much larger pool of connections to yahoo when allowed. You can also limit messages per hour to specific recipient domains, but that would no longer be useful, since the connection algorithm does that for you.

We found another use for the connection algorithm when we observed that some DNS servers were being swamped by XMS, causing packet loss and invalid results returned. That, in turn, caused delivery delays until the DNS cache within XMS was refreshed at a later time. By adding the connection algorithm to DNS queries, we assured better query results over time and eliminated wasted resources within XMS and the DNS server. We’ve also made the DNS server used for lookups configurable for those wishing to use a dedicated DNS server. Using a shared DNS server in a high volume gateway is often a drag on throughput, as there are sometimes thousands of queries made in a short period of time.

In the XMS Management Interface, you can see a visual representation of the current connection performance for each recipient domain. There is a list of command line errors in the same report. That list often contains a message indicating a block when action is taken to deny connections. I expect that within a few years there will be a standard for implementing sender reputation and user action feedback, using the current delivery status notification mechanism, so that gateways implementing the standard would be able to automatically make adjustments. For example, a recipient gateway could signal the sender that the sender is currently in a dynamic block condition for the ratio of deliverable to undeliverable email (a standard threshold, since it indicates a sender that does not handle feedback), and that a permanent block that would require human intervention to remove is pending. The sender gateway would read the standardized delivery status code and take action to suspend deliveries for that ip until administrator approval.

I’ve lumped a few things together here, because they are all closely related. They are all indications that you listen and respond. Your gateway is being tested for that every day. You have to use proper table manners, or you can’t come to dinner.

There are a few different business activities that people refer to as behavioral marketing. We discuss them all then drill down into the specific means to conduct behavioral email marketing. Zrinity coders recently added Google Analytics to their email campaign metrics, thus giving valuable information about email recipients who follow links to the Web site. This empowers email marketers with a more powerful ability to monitor behavior of email recipients from click, to browsing to point of purchase.

Profiles based upon actions that can group people into groups using metrics tools cannot be contacted directly since they made no actual interaction with you or your Web site. These browsers can be targeted via banner placement and offer manipulation. This, however, is useless for email marketing.

The most superior Web-based method is giving browsers tracking cookies who later use some type of contact method such as sending you an email or placing an order. This way you collect data on the browser computer, which can become valuable once the browser has initiated direct contact through the Web site via an order or optin action.

However, people who recently placed an order, or otherwise contacted you through the Web site, and thus you have their email address and some small tidbit of information about the person are VERY hot leads for upsells, or just more sales. These people have, by simply placing an order, given you valuable and incredibly timely marketing data. Not to mention the fact that they also shared a credit card or some payment method, which is the ultimate show of trust. This group is so ripe for more sales that they must be targeted in multiple ways. It is more valuable to watch what customers do then to conduct surveys where data has to be compiled to be useful and where people frequently lie to get done with the survey. Actions speak louder than words.

These customers should be sent more potential sales immediately within a receipt, satisfaction questionnaire, etc. If they purchased a jacket, send an offer for gloves in real time in the receipt you send. If they chose “Mr.” Send them male gloves or glove warmers, or both. If you don’t currently employ this type of behavioral email marketing, then don’t go overboard by spending money on fancy behavioral software for people browsing your site.

Behavioral email marketing is the very first method to drive sales since it is simply grabbing attention at the exact right moment in time. It is a very simple business strategy that you should, first and foremost, increase sales revenue by selling more to existing customers. Also, budget allocations should be favorable to KEEPING existing customers over getting new ones. This action could be the difference between keeping this customer or losing them to competitors utilizing smarter systems. If you hit a person at the right moment while they are thinking of preparing for the winter, or some event, you will dramatically increase sales ratios and loyalty.

You can use behavioral data to drive offers through the site using groups to define people by watching their traffic patterns, etc. In order to assign any value to the profiles using email, you need an email. There is a plethora of ways to get that email, first and foremost, get an order or an optin for a news related item, white paper, etc.

Metrics are the most critical piece of the marketing puzzle. For decades marketers relied on taking polls to determine voice of the market. They spent millions conducting focus groups to try to take an extremely well-informed educated guess. But it is still all a guess, no matter how well educated the guess might be.

Metrics from email campaigns are typically thought of as separate from the metrics produced by say Google Analytics, and that was the way it is. Well, now Zrinity delivery coders have tied the email campaign directly into Google Analytics. This means that you will log in to view the metrics provided by Zrinity Email systems to determine bounce rates, delivery rates, campaign testing and the like. Now, when you get to the end of the line for the email campaign, the click to the Web site, the Zrinity system passes the traffic metrics to Google analytics so that you can then switch to the Google Analytics to track each click from an email in the Web site movement and metrics. Thus, completing the metrics loop. From email metrics to Web site metrics, all the way to the final sales conversion.

This is the preliminary step to integrating all Web site metrics measurements directly with email metrics.

In a recent article by Ken Takahashi, Ken says that pricing based solely on bandwidth without qualifying each and every customer is not the best way to do it. We think he is right! In fact, we, at Zrinity, have been brainstorming on this exact issue in house for a few months. We are ready to act and announce our new Best Practices Pricing (c) for our email server and list management systems. Although we have not worked out the exact pricing schemes, we will begin monitoring our email senders for pricing purposes, not just to provide them with their metrics. Their metrics will affect their pricing going forward.One example is a customer with no complaints and a very clean IP address with high deliverability over a six month timeframe. This customer will receive maximum discounts on licensing going forward. We do not believe it is feasable to ‘punish’ customers who are doing poorly, from a sender perspective, but we will provide maximum discounts to customers who qualify as Best Practice Customers.

There are many people who do think that a new provider will solve their deliverability issues and we think that, in some cases, it will help, but in many cases they are their own worst enemy. Best Practices Pricing (c) will be a way to get the customer to engage with the email delivery experts on the team as well as invest some money to properly train their staff and consult with their email marketing managers since the investment will be offset, on some level, by savings in licensing fees.

Watch our blog for more about the new Zrinity Best Practices pricing schemes…

Zpedia - Email marketing definitions and white paper library

Ken Takahashi, VP, Corporate and International Development, Return Path, Inc

Email continues to grow in importance and use in business communications today, despite the headaches caused by spam and viruses. The two most common types of business email are transaction and marketing. Transaction email is email sent to a customer during and after a business transaction. These emails typically guide the customer through a purchasing process and then advise them of the progress of their order. Marketing email is simply any email sent to a customer or prospective customer to solicit business or promote a product.

Transactional email is expected today. I recently made a purchase online on a site that provided very little feedback in the form of email notifications and the email I received was irrelevant to my actions. They sent me a marketing email (Yes, an advertisement for the product I just bought), instead of an order confirmation. I also didn’t receive any followup concerning my order status, including shipping date. My purchase was over $300 and I was understandably concerned. I emailed the company to inquire about my order, since there was no customer support link or order status form available on their site. I didn’t receive a reply within 24 hours, so was about to contact my credit card company to challenge the transaction when the mail man knocked on my door and delivered my order. If a software engineer would react this way, consider the number of chargebacks this company may need to process. For those of you with no experience building online businesses or handling credit card chargebacks, let me just say the process of defending a transaction is painful. Credit Card clearing companies will not tolerate a high rate of chargebacks for two very good reasons. It indicates poor business practices and it costs them a lot to process chargeback requests. If you do business online, you must make your customer comfortable and confident.

Marketing email is also in demand. It’s truly amazing that people spend so much time opting into to marketing lists. Doing so, means they are genuinely interested in one or more of your products or services and would like to know more. The shame is that almost all organizations totally ignore the customer after they make this request and blindly blitz them with similar marketing messages until they eventually unsubscribe from the list or more often report the message as spam since opting out so often creates more spam from their perspective. Suddenly, your effort to comply with a request for information turns on you and develops a negative vibe for your organization from the perspective of your customer. You’re now a spammer! If you don’t observe the actions of your customers and act on them, you will lose customers. For marketing email, this means evaluating the content that the recipient found interesting by tracking link-throughs, not opens and segmenting lists to send appropriate content at appropriate times.

Good marketing message design will include content that is interesting to the recipient even when it doesn’t directly impact sales. If every message I receive contains only an ad, I will grow tired or reading them faster and may no longer be reading them at the time when I’m motivated to purchase that product. That means I may have purchased the product from another company. Marketing messages should always be designed to build brand awareness and loyalty. Community contributions are valued by customers. They love to love the companies they buy from and they root for them like they would a basketball team they support. They most like the companies that see them as an individual and listen. Watch how I do this. All of the content in this blog post to this point is for the community. You don’t have to purchase any of our products to do these things, which would dramatically improve your customer confidence level and loyalty, but we have spent a considerable amount of effort to study this and implement it into our CampaignIntelligence email management system. That’s my ad! I’ll bet that wasn’t too painful and if we continue to keep a good balance of marketing and community content, I expect you’ll come back and read more of our bloggins