Friends and clients of Silverpop know that we love to do studies. One of our recent projects was to review a random and anonymous sample of our clients' subject lines to find which characteristics drove the highest open rates.

We did some initial research to understand the trends behind open rates. What did we find? Only one thing seemed to drive a statistically significant difference in open rates. It wasn't subject line length. It wasn't the use or avoidance of certain words. It wasn't even the use of promotions or sales.

In fact, the only thing that materially affected open rates was the sender: the name of the company or person in the "from" line.

I've long been an advocate of Email Brand Value (EBV). I even dedicated a chapter to it in my book. But it was still a pleasant surprise to learn that EBV completely overshadowed everything other element of the subject line when it came to getting recipients to open a message.

I feel obliged to mention that these findings came from an initial review of the data. It's quite possible that the full study might have uncovered some additional drivers of open rates. However, the initial review was so clear that we didn't think it was worth completing the study. Also, to address some of the other studies I've seen on subject line attributes and open rates, I suspect the bigger impact of length and key words comes from email campaigns that are more about prospecting, and where there is no real brand relationship in place. Silverpop clients rarely do email prospecting / list rental, so we don't have data on how subject line attributes affect open rates.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my previous post on using email for the lead paint recalls, I glossed over how such an email might work. The problem for retailers is that many customers will have purchased several products that are affected by the recalls. The trouble of creating a separate email for each possible product (as well as for related products that aren't being recalled) is matched by the risk that customers will get frustrated with receiving a stream of messages when only a single message is needed.

It turns out that there is an evolving feature set available in a few leading email marketing tools that makes a single email possible--it's called relational tables. Actually, relational tables have been around for a while, but use among marketers has been pretty limited. I suspect that some of this is due to the fact that set-up of campaigns that utilize multiple tables can be pretty complex--sometimes even requiring marketing teams to have someone on staff who can create and maintain SQL statements. As such, through most of its history, email marketing has been about flat lists--each recipient has a single set of attributes like email address, name, age or gender. In relational tables, each recipient can have multiple attributes of the same kind.

In the case of our product recall message, retailers could use their existing customer email list, but link it to a product purchase table that contains all the products purchased by all their customers. The simplest use of relational tables would be to send one message per product, but benefit from only having to set up a single target/segment definition. An even more interesting approach would be to use a feature like Silverpop's multi-match dynamic content. MMDC takes advantage of Silverpop's ability to handle relational data but it allows every matching product record to be put inside a single message. So, if customer A bought one affected product, that person's message would contain only that single product. However, if customer B bought eight affected products, that person's message would list eight products. This is an entirely new level of personalization and something that both marketers and consumers will be seeing more and more in 2008 and beyond.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our chief technical officer, Chris Curtin, forwarded me an article from ClickZ highlighting how poorly some retailers are handling their crisis communications surrounding the recent avalanche of lead paint exposure recalls. Chris pointed out how the article focuses on a lack of search-based ads for communicating with the public, but never mentions an even easier, more accurate and less expensive channel: email.

Any retailer that sells children's products over the Web most certainly has a list of customers who have purchased the recalled products, as well as similar products that have not been recalled. It would be almost trivial to send out an email to all those people informing them of the recall status and instructing them on how to return the products. Equally valuable, they could send messages to customers who have purchased products that are similar, but that have not been recalled.

Perhaps there are liability concerns that I'm not aware of. Or, perhaps, as a seasoned public relations friend of mine suggested, decades of experience in traditional crisis communications could easily lead these professionals to miss the Internet as a medium altogether. As retailers take out full-page ads and run television commercials, some seem to be completely missing the Internet. What a shame.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My colleague Elaine O'Gorman, Silverpop's vice president of strategy, recently authored an article for our clients on an emerging term in the email world called BACN. In the event you find yourself at a cocktail party with a bunch of email geeks, I wanted to make sure you were up to speed and not left out of the conversation should this new term get bandied about. Here's the article:

What's the Buzz About Bacn?

There's all sorts of buzz about the newly coined term “bacn”--email messages recipients want but typically don’t read immediately. It's email a cut above spam, and is quickly becoming a hot topic of conversation among bloggers.

The recognition of such messages is indeed valid. Many of us do receive information on a daily basis that we want to read, just not the very minute it arrives in our inbox. That doesn’t mean we're not interested in these messages; simply that we don’t have time to process or consider the information or offer immediately.

For email marketers, making "bacn" isn't necessarily bad. You're sending messages that are relevant enough to keep around for awhile. MarketingSherpa reports that half of emails are opened within nine hours of receipt, and another 25 percent are opened in 28 hours. The average campaign achieves nearly all the opens it will generate in just under two weeks. Will the messages you send still be relevant two weeks from now?

Whether your messages are opened immediately or days or even weeks after a send, the content must still matter to the recipient. If what you send is interesting enough to keep around for a couple of weeks, pat yourself on the back. You're delivering something of interest. Something worth hanging on to.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)