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.

The new coupon code feature is popular and lots of Yahoo! stores probably are curious about how to use them in email marketing. So, we've taken the tutorial, added a bit more background and posted it here on the blog. Really any Yahoo! store with a subscription to Top Right Basic can do what is described below.

A little background first. Top Right provides an integrated email marketing solution for Yahoo! stores. You connect your store to Top Right and Top Right provides a customer database and email marketing program (the part that sends and tracks the email campaigns). The key is that for each one of your customers you can track attributes. In this example we talk about how to use "Total Value of Purchases" and "Last Purchase Date" to target VIP customers. Feel free to post comments with questions.

Step 1. Figure out who is going to get a coupon.

On the official Yahoo! Store Blog article Coupon Manager Gets an Upgrade and Introduces Single-Use Coupons, they provide some ideas on who you might want to target. In their example, they say the following:

"Let's say you want to launch an email campaign to a set of 500 customers who have bought big-ticket items from you in the past, but haven't bought from you recently. You want to create a generous offer because these customers need motivation for shopping with you again. You decide to create a 25% off coupon with no minimum order amount. Without single-use coupons, you'd risk this offer possibly being posted to a coupon or social networking site, forwarded via email from friend to friend, or used repeatedly by the same customers. Single-use coupons allow you to create more aggressive offers for appropriate customer segments, limiting your risk by knowing that each coupon you send out can only be used once."

I like the way the Yahoo! folks are thinking. I think single use coupons are extraordinarily valuable for rewarding your VIP customers.

Keep in mind, with your Top Right basic subscription you have easy and direct access to how much each customer has spent with you, when they made their last purchases, what products they purchased and more. So, you can easily create a wide array segments. All it requires is a little up front thought. The point and click interface makes the rest pretty easy. You can also use your free Top Right dashboard to identify what makes a VIP customer by looking at what the average customer spends with you, how many times the average customer purchases and so forth. It's a subtle but very powerful tool.

In this example we are going to target customers who have spent more than $500 and haven't made a purchase in a year or longer.

Step 2. Export/Download that list from the email tool.

We are going to export everyone who has spent $500 or more and has not purchased in a year or more. To do this we are going to first create the segment of customers who fit the criteria. This is easy to do in the email tool. We'll use the attributes Total Value of Purchases and Last Purchase Date. Top Right populates those attributes for each of your customers automatically with your subscription to Top Right Basic. Once we create the segment, we'll get the list of email addresses.

2.1. Log into your email marketing tool by clicking Launch Email Marketing from the Top Right dashboard.

2.2. Once in your store's list, click on Segments under Advanced Features.

2.3. Name your Segment (in this case we say VIPs) and click on Add Demographic Restriction.

2.4. Click on Total Value of Purchases. A window will pop up. Enter 500 and select the greater than option. The image below shows how it should look:

Click Next.

2.5. Click on Add Demographic Restriction again. Click on Last Purchase Date. Enter 4/15/08 in the To field (we are creating this tutorial on 4/16/09) as shown below.

Click Next.

2.6. Click Save& Finish
Click View Results.
Click Generate report now - I will wait.
Click Download Addresses

You can either wait for the results or have them sent to your email after they are compiled.

Since you are an experienced Yahoo! Merchant Solutions user, I am going to point you to the help at Merchant Solutions. You should create the number of coupons to match the number of active emails, in this case 52.

Step 4. Append the coupon codes to the email list.

This step involves adding a column to the spreadsheet (csv) that contains your VIP list email addresses. Then, you paste the coupon codes that you created in Merchant Solutions into the new column. Each email address will have a unique coupon code associated with it.

4.1. Open up the email list that you either downloaded or had sent to you in Step 2 and the coupon code list.

4.2. In the email field, name a column Coupon Code (or something like that).

4.3. Copy and paste the coupon codes from the coupon codes list into the email list. Each Email Address should have a unique coupon code next to it in the spreadsheet.

Save the list as CSV.

Step 5. Import the email list into the email tool.

The primary way to add emails to your list is via the connection between the Top Right Customer Database and the Top Right Email Tool - it happens with a few clicks. However, you can also add or update email addresses using the upload feature in the email. People use this to upload lists they get from their retail stores or conferences. In this case we are using the upload feature to append the new column.

The screen below shows what it will look like. Make sure to update information for addresses that already exist.

Step 6. Create, Target and Send your message. Using Top Right, you can create, target, send and report on email messages. The tool will walk you through the wizard. In that way, it's very similar to other tools. The key difference is that the data is all there for you to use. Just remember that you only want to send this to the VIPs segment that we created in Step 2. If you are familiar with "Mail Merge" in Microsoft Word, then you should have no problem getting the coupons to appear dynamically with a click. It's pretty straightforward.

6.1. At the Settings stage (the 1st step), make sure to select the VIPs segment:

6.2. In this example, we assume that you've created the HTML message and are just looking to insert the code. There are other tutorials for "How To" create a basic email message etc.
Use "Mail Merge" to insert the coupon code dynamically into each message. In the "Edit HTML" screen, put your cursor where you want the coupon code to appear in your message and insert the code using the button at the right.

Or...
Use the built-in HTML Editor and the mail merge feature.

Once you do that for the HTML version, the text version is self-explanatory.

Step 7. Schedule like you normally would and you are done.

I felt like I needed to do this for a couple of reasons. Finding any support for MT 3.x was getting harder and harder. Also, my Yahoo! hosted MT 3.x had this weird behavior with the archive links. Even after setting the archive links to point to my domain at http://www.topright.com/blog, it always returned to showing a path of http://p7.hostingprod.com/@topright.com/blog/. I fiddled with the settings on the installed version of MT. I hired a consultant to "fix" it. He was unsuccessful despite claiming he had done it before. So, being the determined person I am, I figured I'd try to upgrade to MT4 or find a new blog host (at an additional monthly cost which made me unhappy).

So, the two resources which I found invaluable are below. The first is from Chad Everett of Learning Movable Type. He has an article called Install Movable Type 4 in Yahoo! Small Business. If you can follow those instructions and get it to work straight away, then you are golden.

I had a problem where I kept getting an error message saying: Can't find included template module 'HTML Head'. There is a post on the MT forum that is perfect. Actually a guy by the name of Micah provides the answer at the bottom. Here is that link.

Now I don't have any excuses for not posting any more. I can take advantage of all the cool features in Movable Type 4 for FREE because it's open source and I figured out how to make it work on Yahoo! Small Business hosting. Cool.

Rob is an amazing wealth of ideas and energy. In fact if it wasn't for his early support Top Right wouldn't be here.  That said, he is busy so he only shares when it really makes sense (or dollars, that is). So, I am pretty happy to see him on the email thing. Sometimes email just gets lost in the mix.

So, over at the official Yahoo! store blog, he opens the books and shares real numbers on his email marketing campaigns.  Go check it out - http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2009/02/email-works/