Top Right Blog

Being an email marketer in the heart of Silicon Valley is tough. Shiny object syndrome pervades the culture here and people show interest in the latest and greatest over the tried and true. I've had people refer to it as "shag carpet" - so yesterday.

Social is all the rage when people aren't even sure how or if it's going to be effective. I have to admit, that's what makes living here great - we figure things out.

What Top Right is figuring out is how to help lots of people take full advantage of email marketing. In many ways I view the problem as people not figuring out how to set the clock on the VCR. If you don't set the clock, you can't set the VCR to record stuff you want to record when you aren't home. And, isnt that one of the most compelling benefits? Remember that?

The email equivalent is "batch and blast". That's what the large portion of email marketers are doing today - blasting away. They haven't set their clock to do automation and targeting...

None the less, that hasn't stopped the growth and prevalence of email marketing as a tool. Today the WSJ did a profile on ExactTarget. They highlight that the little ole email marketing company from the cradle of tech innovation - Indianapolis, Indiana - is doing $100 Million in sales. Constant Contact had over $129 Million in sales in 2009.

I guess lots of people still like shag carpeting.

We just posted a how to on inserting "friend" into the first name field so you can address people on your list with something other than blank.

I subscribe to quite a few emails just to see what's going on. Some of the emails, like the company that I use an example below are actually interesting to me. Most of the time I love the content and find it useful and educational.

So, I am not picking on these guys at all. It just so happens that it's a good screenshot of an example of using "Dear blank" when you can use "Dear Friend" or "Dear Customer" or whatever it is you want to say. it just seems to me that if you can use your powerful email tools to make your emails more relevant, than you should. It's not hard but not every tool makes it easy to do...

We just wrote up a good tutorial of how to insert whatever name you want to call the subscribers on your list that don't have first names. So, whether you want to call the subscribers "Friend" or "Valued Customer" or whatever you'd like, here's how to do it.

I just posted a mini case study on how to create an a/b test for follow on emails. It's for more advanced users of the system. Even if you aren't you should take a look as it might give you some ideas on programs you can run.

First I want to thank the client for letting us use screenshots of her program. Here's what she's doing. She sent out a cyber monday promotion on Tuesday, 11/24 to her entire list. Rather than send out just one follow-on email, she wanted to test whether Friday would do better than Monday. So, she's using distribution groups to "stage" the follow on emails - half on Friday and half on Monday. You can check out the mini case study on how we did this on our online help system. Click here.

I'll update this post with some results as we get them over the next few days.

In October during the Fast Pivot Webinar I strongly recommended that you send targeted and triggered follow on emails to interested subscribers.

I've posted a detailed how to on our help system, but thought I'd give an overview on the blog for those of you interested in learning more and getting some background. In the example in the help, I use a Cyber Monday promotion that works as follows.

1. Send the initial promotional email to your entire house list on Wednesday, 11/25/09. The promo is for a discount that ends at midnight Monday (12/1/09).

2. Send a follow on email to subscribers who open but do not purchase after the initial email is sent (i.e. people who have shown interest in the offer but not acted on it, give 'em a little nudge). In the example, we send it Monday morning.

Typically you'll get 5X times the response of the initial email. It works something like this. Send the initial email to 50,000 subscribers. You get a 20% open rate (10,000 opens) and 1% conversion rate with an average order value of $100. That generates 100 orders for $100 for $10,000 in sales. That's a $.20 Revenue Per Email Sent. In most cases, this is a pretty good result.

Then, you send the follow on offer. Send an email to the 9,900 who opened but did not purchase. Due to the previous interest in the offer, you get a 40% open rate and a 2.5% conversion rate. You get 99 orders at $100 average order value. That's $9,900 in sales and a Revenue Per Email Sent of $1.00. That's 5X what you got from the initial email.

Some people would argue that you should send the email to everyone - why be so selective. Well, as our reporting will tell you, you'll get a much lower unsubscribe rate. You'll also just feel less spammy.

Obviously reminding people is a good thing, especially on time limited offers. You increase the sense of urgency and get the attention you need to get to make your emails uber-effective.

In the help more details include how to create:
the message;
the segment that targets the openers;
schedule the message.

You can find the details by clicking here.

On Monday night, November 16 2009 we released an update to the Top Right software.

One key upgrade was to the reporting. As you probably know, every email tool worth its salts reports on clicks, opens, bounces and unsubscribes. Of course the email tools that we work with do that. So, we focus our reporting efforts on revenue reporting. More importantly we report on Revenue Per Email Sent. For every email address you send to, how much revenue do you make? It's a very powerful Key Performance Indicator for online retailers.

Before this release our reporting was limited to 4 graphs that for a number of reasons weren't all that easy to read or useful. Last release we made it so you could download the raw data and Excel/Access your way to insight. This release we actually made it so you could do the "drilling down" and analysis right in the reporting.

Instead of just graphs (which you can still access), you get a table that shows every campaign/message and the vital statistics related to each - last sent date (important for triggered campaigns), number sent, revenue, opens, clicks, unsubs and the relative rates: RPE (revenue per email sent), open rate, click to open rate, etc.

For current users, you will also notice that all your triggered campaigns show up now. I am sure you are excited to see that data. However, this can be a lot of information when you look campaign by campaign. That's why also introduced "grouping". You can find a tutorial at the following link in our help system - Grouping Messages by Subject.

We suspect that most of you are familiar with reporting tools such as Google Analytics so you won't have any problem getting into this and getting insights immediately.

Wanna see the slides from the Fast PIvot Webinar for Yahoo! store that featured Single Feed, Power Reviews Express and Top Right? It is shared below.
Fast Pivot Holiday Webinar