-Two Approaches to Get Started With Segmentation, by Stephanie Miller

 It seems so simple, but really, just three words were all it took: "Do it anyway."

The quote above is from an article by Stephanie Miller posted on the ClickZ.com site, and those two sentences were the driving force behind our (finally!) revisiting this blog, and had us face to face with the perfect way to tell our customers and potential clients just how we feel about sending segmented emails.

You see, this poor blog has been dormant for months; waiting for us to find "The Big Post" to revive it, bring it back to life. Our heads full of ideas, we imagined this sort of Frankenstein-like moment, in which characters suddenly spring to life after a long monologue and a lightning bolt, where just moments before they had been completely unanimated.

The role of the lifeless character is easily filled by this blog; however, unlike Hollywood's desire to trigger outrageous effects or drown the viewer in emotional overdrive, the Top Right blog is being reanimated after reading those three simple words: "Do it anyway."

It's so simple. No more waiting, just get started.

The same concept we try to help our customers and potential clients with, that first step to sending segmented emails, was the answer to our own problems all along. Just as we realized that returning to our blog should wait no longer, you too should stop waiting for that big moment, that ideal combination of weather patterns and words, and simply get started.

"Do it anyway."

Over the course of the next week we will be posting about how easy sending segmented emails can be with Top Right, and how we will make that first step, that big, giant leap into this process, seem like a much more achievable stride.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I focused my recommendations on automation. Retailers are busy enough during the holidays, the goal is to give some stuff that can be setup in advance and let the machine do the work for you.

The 4 items I recommended were:
1. Create a "drip" campaign to instill confidence in shoppers.
2. Take advantage of a shopping cart abandonment email program.
3. Send product review follow up emails.
4. Send targeted and triggered follow on emails to interested subscribers.

The idea is to look at customers at different phases of the customer lifecycle. One of the presenters offers feed management which in turn drives shoppers to your website. Since 95%+ of those visitors are not going to buy, what are you going to do about it? Well, you should definitely think creatively about getting them to sign up to your list. And, once you get them on the list you should send them content that is relevant to their phase of the purchase decision....

Another presenter was Power Reviews Express with whom we already offer follow up reviews emails. Although the goal of reviews emails is to get reviews, since you are targeting your most recent customers, it has the added benefit of driving additional sales.

I've already covered shopping cart abandonment in a blog post called Shop and Abandon Cart Study - do you follow up on abandoned shopping carts?.

I also covered reviews emails with a blog post - Is your Product Review Follow-up Email Automated?. What you may not know is that if you are just getting started with any reviews program, you can send a "historical blast for free" to help seed your reviews program. Contact Us for more information.

Over the next few days, I'll be writing blog posts and detailed tutorials on the other two recommendations - the shopper DRIP and the follow-on offer. That's our goal, if we recommend something, we'll tell you EXACTLY how to do it. There are lots of people who offer best practices, we want to make sure the best practices are doable!

I am a guest presenter. I'm going to discuss automation and give you 4 ideas/examples that can help you boost sales during the holidays.

Titled: Small Improvements For Big Holiday Results, there will be four main topics:

• Managing your shopping search engine feeds


• Adding more intelligence to your email solution


• Effects of best of breed reviews solution


• Installing features that your customers expect when shopping online

Come to the webinar to get 4 ideas/examples that can help you boost sales during the holidays.

So, join us on Wednesday 10/21 at 10 am Pacific at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/842570385

Of course a reviews program is only valuable if past customers actually submit reviews. Of course the best way to get someone to do something is to ask. And, what better way to ask thousands of past customers than email?

For the past 6 months we've been working with a number of reviews engines making it so any Yahoo! store can quickly and easily send out two very important reviews emails. This is a general overview. If you are looking for a detailed tutorial, click here to get one from the Top Right online help system

The first email message is what we call the "blast". It's an email that goes out to recent past customers asking them to review the specific products they purchased. This isn't "Hey, come write a review". It's "Hey come write a review of the Widget XL 454" that you bought. In most cases it even includes a picture.

The second is actually an automated email message that goes every day.

Aside: there are lots of terms people use to described automated messages like triggers, recurring campaigns, auto-responders. At the end of the day, if you have a powerful email marketing tool you should be able to automate all kinds of emails. For example, something happens and an email gets sent automatically:

• a shopper starts a shopping cart and leaves, minutes later he'll get an email offer;


• a shopper subscribes to a list and gets an almost instant coupon offer;


• 21 days after a purchase a customer gets an email asking her to review the products purchased;


• 6 months after a purchase a customer gets an email reminding him to replenish his supply;


• a subscriber clicks on a message but doesn't make a purchase, the day before the sale ends he gets a "last chance" email.

If your email tool doesn't give you ALL of these options, you are missing out on the type of automated email marketing programs that MAKE email marketing so powerful. It should happen in one system, not many...

Ok, back to the point. The second email is actually an automated email message that goes out every day. The tool automatically finds everyone who made a purchase 21 days ago (or however many days you like) and sends a message to them. Once again it inserts the products that were purchased with images, etc. and asks them to write a review.

What does the email look like and what does it say? Working with our reviews partners, we've devised a template that focuses on one objective - getting the reviews. The email contains your logo, a greeting and up to 3 products that the customer recently purchased from your store. The email links directly to the reviews page for the specific product. And, the email can feature an image of the product (that links to the reviews page as well). Since it's a template, you simply update the logo, modify your greeting and closing and the Top Right system takes care of the rest.

How do I get the product data into the emails? Leave that to us, that's our specialty. We have a very specific recipe for getting the data out of your store and into the emails. It's all point and click and doesn't require any programming help.

The final point is that you shouldn't view your reviews emails as an island. If you are sending your reviews emails from one system, auto-responders from another and marketing messages from another - where is your "unsusbscribe list of record"? That is, could you possibly send an email to someone who asked not to receive messages any more? Yes, you could and that's not good for your sender reputation - a critical element to delivery. You could also be sending too many messages - annoying customers in the process. Sending from one system allows you to control overall volume.

Want to learn more? Click here to check out the detailed tutorial on the Top Right online help system. Or, drop us a line Contact Top Right.

If you say no, you're not alone.

Recently, an ESP (Email Service Provider) conducted a study of the abandoned shopping cart practices of the Internet Retailer 500. They found that just over 10% of the sites studied sent Abandoned Cart emails.

Why don't you?

Maybe you think those types of programs are too hard to set up and that only the big boys can do them. The ESP that did the study is trying to convince you its not. I agree with the ESP, of course. In fact, if you stay tuned, you'll find that our partner www.monitus.net has a Yahoo! Store shopping cart recovery system that leverages their incredible analytics ability and our full featured Email Marketing Solution.

Maybe your store is special. Unlike the people that Marketing Sherpa studied, less than 60% of your shopping carts are not abandoned. The majority of your shoppers who put something in a cart finish right then and there. Bam! Conversion Kings and Queens - Good for you ;-).

Maybe you think it's creepy. When I first heard of sending emails to people who had abandoned shopping carts, I wasn't sold. I had reservations like many people do. Living and working on the internet with all this customer data can sometimes feel a little big brother-ish. I've gotten over it because it's proven to work.

Maybe you think they don't work. Ugh! Are you kidding me? In fact, after attending the MarketingSherpa and Marketing Experiments Email Certification and Conference in February of 2009 all I could think about was how so many of the stores I talk to are missing out on this prime opportunity. My key takeaway is that with the power of automated and triggered email messages, if you are not sending abandoned shopping cart emails, you are leaving money on the table.

Here's the deal. The Monitus solution is built just for Yahoo! stores and it's priced just like most retailers like - Pay for Performance. If it works you pay a commission. If it doesn't, well, there's nothing to lose. Go on over to Monitus to check it out.

Interested in getting all the findings from the Study, visit Listrak here.