Marketing Sherpa's 2008 Email Awards - Dell Racks up Two B2B Wins

Back in March, Marketing Sherpa released their list of 2008 winners for their annual Email Awards Gallery. Dell was featured as a winner in two of the categories for their B2B business, both of which are featured below.

Dell's come a long way since the Dell Hell days on the community front, but this is the first time I've seen some press on the email front. Love them or hate them, there's definitely some great content in the email examples featured below that you should be able to take away and get some great results for your own business.

1) Injecting website ratings and reviews into Dell's email channel. Bold, direct, and much more effective than generic customer testimonials. I've only seen stats from Petco on the effectiveness of using this UGC in the email channel, but in their case it boosted click-thru rates 5 TIMES over their normal response rate.

Dell Email Example: Ratings and Reviews

2) Simple, direct messaging in Dell's auto-email response to abandoned cart owners. As any brick-and-mortar retailer will tell you, there's money left on the table when someone loads up their cart but leaves it alone somewhere in aisle 12. While your average $8/hr employee won't be motivated to chase the cart's former owner out into the parking lot, auto-emailing online shoppers is also a great way to recapture some of those potential dollars. I've seen cases in the past where retailers will send you offers for free shipping or 10% discounts if you return to the site and complete your purchase. Dell didn't offer either of these options, but did win Marketing Sherpa's award for this category for another direct, easy-to-digest auto-email reminder.

Dell Email Example: Abandoned Cart Auto-Responder

What does this mean for other businesses?
While we won't see results for either of these two uses of email, it definitely begs some thought.

1) Ratings and reviews are migrating from websites to other channels. Dell's example here is specific to email, but you're also seeing others out there (WalMart is one example) where reviews are showing up in physical stores as well. In many ways, it's the same idea you find when you go to any good independent bookstore and they've got featured reviews from employees that are also avid readers, only in this case retailers are leveraging the power of their customer's reviews to drive more customers back to their site and getting more of these visitors to convert.

Don't have ratings or reviews to share? Or are you in a service business that isn't in the "Rate This Product" game? I'd argue that even those businesses selling service offerings could still stack those offerings against a 1-star or 5-star spectrum, but consider using customer testimonials about your services instead. The end goal is to leverage content from your customers to market to other customers, given that you'll get much better results using this approach than from a canned and carefully crafted corporate marketing message, so you just need to consider how best to pull this off in the absense of a warehouse full of 5-star products.

2) Automate the emails you can, but make your message friendly on the eye and easy to take action. Ever gotten a text-only email from a company that screams "useless form letter"? Worse still, ever get a similarly useless email where you have absolutely no idea what it is you're supposed to do with it? Are you doing this today without even knowing it? Take five minutes and look at what you're doing today, then compare it to the Dell example above. You may be fine, but if need be, don't hesitate to get out your marketing scalpel and make a few targeted incisions. Your customers (and hopefully your CFO) will thank you for it.

And one last parting thought. If you're a small business that isn't using auto-responder email technology for cases like abandoned carts, new user registrations, or order/ship confirmations, you've got to get with your ISP right away.

Clinton, Obama, and McCain to the Rest of Us: We Want Your Email Address!

In a former life, I worked for a music company and we struggled with a difficult question on our websites: When creating an email signup form, how much can you ask for (i.e., is there a magic number of fields you can request before someone abandons)?

It's not difficult technically, because frankly you can load up your form with as many questions as you can find space.

It's more difficult philosophically because there's a strong aversion to asking for too much up front (to use an overly cliched analogy, you can't ask for a marriage proposal when you're only considering a first date), but still needing enough to run a segmentable marketing campaign.

We settled out with the basics: first name, last name, zip/postcode, and email address. We did ask for gender and mobile number for a few key sites as optional data, but our general rule was the less on the page, the better. To be honest, we never set up any A/B testing to validate the theory, but it's a safe bet that four fields looks much less intimidating than a full page you have to scroll through.

This approach gives you some very basic info that you can use to segment your message (if an artist will be on tour in NY, does anyone care who lives in Ohio?). Our segmentation needs were not tremendous, but the zip code was definitely key, and having a first name enabled us to do some basic personalization.

Quick aside: Never, never go the route I've seen some companies where they'll use your name in the subject line like "SETH, CHECK OUT THIS FABULOUS DEAL." I'd love to see the open rate results for a hideous campaign like this!

Recently Anne Holland over at MarketingSherpa posted a great story touching on the three email signups for the current candidates. Check out the images below and what subtle (or not so subtle) messages they're sending:

Please note, I had to use an earlier version of Obama's signup form; after viewing once every repeat visit to the site would skip this page and take me straight to the main website

Hillary: "I'm having a really good time with this."
Thoughts: Intentionally or not, her image is looking in the direction of the info, implying that she's interested and aware of the people that are signing up. Top marks for going for first name, last name, email, and zip. Design is clean, submit button stands out, and she's also provided a means to skip the form and go straight to the website.


Obama:"I'm a family guy, I love what I do, and I'm ready and willing to show you more."
Surrounded by family, he's showing that it takes more than a candidate to pull off change. The button for submission is not "Submit" but a softer "Learn More". He's only opting in for email and zip, presumably because his team will use this information to start building your profile and will build on that consumer record through the various community aspects of his site that BarakObama.com offers.


McCain:"In addition to running for President, I'm also starring in a remake of Citizen Kane!"
The black and white image screams newspaper mogul from the turn of the last century, not someone who's in touch with today's world. And the biggest thing that stands out on this page? One giant red "Donate Today" button. Doesn't look for zip code, so no presumed intelligence behind the scenes with this data, just give me your email so I can add it to our list of thousands.



MarketingSherpa declares Hillary the winner, but I have to disagree and say that Obama's sends a much stronger emotional message (given that he's surrounded by family and is not striking it out on his own). But what really clinched it for me was that this design has grown over time, presumably based on feedback from the public at large.

Today I came across a another blog post from Bivings Report where the author criticized an earlier Obama email signup form that did NOT offer a way to bypass the registration and go straight to the site.

This is not the case with today's form, so someone in Obama's camp was either listening to the blogosphere or testing their site and found break points like this, then took action to make the necessary changes.

And in my book, if you're listening to feedback out there and committed to taking action accordingly, you're in the winning camp.

What does this mean for other businesses?

1) There's a fine line between asking for too little and too much from an email registration form, but if you're really planning to do anything meaningful with the data, you're going to need to grab a zip code at the bare minimum.

2) When designing your registration form, you want to make it easy and to have certain actions stand out, but adding a giant red "Give Money" button on your site skews your message to be more about money and less about building a relationship with a prospective customer.

3) Make it look fun! So many forms out there on the web are mind-numbing (ever been to a health care site to set up a user profile?), so take the time and do something to make it look half-way exciting. At least you can say all three candidates are smiling!

To Blog or to Email? That is the Question...

A friend of mine had a client pose an interesting question: Why should I do a blog? Why not run an email marketing campaign to my customers instead?

It got me thinking; here’s five points I’d probably respond with:

1) Blogs are viral. Technorati today tracks over 110 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of social media content. With all of those blogs out there, that's a huge amount of content, and your challenge will always be rising above the tide. When your subject matter is interesting, engaging, provocative, blogs become a great medium for taking off and being passed from person to person or picked up by aggregator sites like Technorati and put in front of a mass audience (much broader reach than any email marketing campaign).

Emails can get forwarded to friends, true, but when you consider the fact that email filters are out to catch this kind of activity AND people as a whole are (mostly) trained to treat messages that have been forwarded from multiple sources along the way to you as suspect (i.e., “Please forward this to 5 of your friends in the next 24 hours and you’ll have good luck” anyone?).

Blogs can take off easily around the internet, and the fact that sites like Technorati can aggregate these ideas and get them in front of a bigger audience increases the likelihood that someone could find out about your idea/product/service/etc. This coupled with the fact that they can take on a life of their own through user commenting ensures that an idea can grow and mutate into something bigger and better (or worse) as it gains velocity makes for a very power viral tool indeed (especially when it becomes a conduit for bringing in new customers that otherwise never have heard of you)!

2) Blogs can have voice; email is a marketing message. People’s trust in corporations or corporate messages is on the decline, and it’s fair to say that in the Information Overload Age we’re constantly honing our own personal B.S. and filtering meters. The fact that ratings and reviews are so popular on e-commerce sites is based on the fact that consumers are willing to trust peers rather than a carefully crafted marketing message from a company (do a Google search on the Edelman Trust Barometer and you'll see some interesting results from a research firm that monitors trust online and its implications).

People come to blogs (especially those from businesses) looking for voice and a personality, and honesty. Done well, this can humanize your business. Your readers are seeking something that's more direct and personal rather than finely polished PR statements that are edited and sanitized for Wall Street investors.

Personality and honesty should always be the goal, of course, but it’s also fair to say that this can often be easier said than done (one reason many CEOs have a hard time doing blogs).

3) Email Marketing is selling, but blogging is branding. Along the lines of #2, your blog reinforces your brand. It's not just how honest you are, or how frequently you contribute to your blog (although these are important), it's also the way in which you respond to feedback. Since your blog offers the ability for your customers (existing or new) to comment back to your message, there's an implied responsibility to respond back and maintain an open dialog. This back-and-forth dialog will establish yourself and your company’s position as either being responsive to customer needs or, sadly, not responsive. The way in which you’re responding will speak volumes to who you are and what your company represents.

A classic case (and probably the #1 fear businesses have that prevent them from starting a blog in the first place) is customer complaints. If you’re open and honest in your dialogue, others that are reading your blog but not necessarily contributing could have their opinion swayed. And the person with the compliant could turn from a detractor to a supporter, or even an evangelist and lifetime customer. Why do blogs have this power? Because they’re all about building your brand’s perception in the minds of your customers.

4) Blogs have history. An email campaign by its very nature is a snapshot in time with (generally speaking) a defined start and end, and (hopefully) a purpose. I’m on Borders’ mailing list and have numerous email offers like “40% off for the Next 2 Days Only”. It’s a drive to get people to their site and get them to purchase quickly, but after the 2 day window expires the promotion ends and we all go about our business. Those of us with weaknesses for books have ended up with a heavily discounted book added to their collection. If all goes according to Borders’ plans, we’ve also added something else as an impulse buy and will come back again.

But a blog is a timeline and has history over time. Each post you make builds over time, and with it comes content that remains and grows. This very point helps give your blog weight (if you’re posting regularly over time, you’re sending the message that you’re serious about this and you’re looking at it as a true communications tool, not a hobby that you try out for a week or two and then abandon. Your readers can search your blogs over time as you build your body of content, and the longer you’re around, the more content you generate, the more people will find your content, the more people will link to you, which increases your chances of attracting new customers.

5) Blogs have great search benefits. Consider that with an email campaign, I’ve got a number of hurdles to get through before my message gets to the actual recipient. Even if I can get my legitimate email address through AOL, Yahoo, MSN, or Google, I’ve still got individual spam filters to contend with. And despite the fact that my content is valid (I’m not selling Viagra or naked celebrity photos, unless of course that’s your business model and you’ve got legitimate opt-ins that you’re mailing to!), people’s spam filters may trap your message and you may never see it.

Not so with blogs. Since they live out on the web, your readers choose to read your content or not, and can be alerted for new posts with things like RSS alerts that can dynamically update web-based RSS aggregator sites like iGoogle or Netvibes. And since the content you’re generating lives on your site, you’re building a mountain of content over time.

It’s fair to say that the more content you’ve got, the better your chances for getting found on Google, but it’s a more accurate statement to say that the more content you create, the more legitimate you establish yourself to be, the higher the number of people that will link to you, and therefore the higher your overall search rankings (all without paying any additional money to search engine optimization firms to improve your rankings).