Creepy Creative

Halloween is coming, hooray! But, while I like all the creepy imagery that is available for us to use, we always need to step back and take in the "big picture". This email that I just got from LaQuinta is just one example.

Never forget that information is coming at your consumers so fast these days that imagery is more important than ever. Pictures have never been so important in telling your story and the story La Quinta tells at first glance is that your well-made bed comes with a huge spider underneath. This may sound silly to you but people like me that are creeped-out by spiders and (gasp!) bedbugs. Will have just been given a terrible first impression.

Email growth through appending - a cautionary tale

I try to encourage the best list practices for the sake of maintaing a good reputation. Our company never rents/purchases email lists, we subscribe to feedback loops, handle opt-outs immediately ... But one thing that is a bit of a gray area is the process of appending or e-append. I've heard experts speak pro and con about it, so we allow it within a controlled environment. The following is an example of a recent append that we participated in.

From a list of around 300M we found about 90M email addresses. The addresses were returned after an initial "invitation" to opt-out by the list compiler. BTW, have the compiler do this first communication or you'll kill your reputation faster than a politician's mistress. Anyway, the compiler should give you the appended email addresses along with codes like: soft-bounce, opened, no response, individual match and household match.

Here's where the caution really begins.
We add a relatively tiny mix of the appends into our normal newsletter list and monitor the reporting. When you start small, even a terrible complaint rate will not tip the scales with the ISPs but you do have to be able to report on the list codes, so don't lose track of them. In our project, we added 3M appends to our regular 110M newsletter send, gauged the results and added an additional 6M the second week and so on ... And here are the numbers that tell the rest of the story.

After 2 weeks/sends we found:
- The appends that were "unknown" had the worst complaint rate at about 40 times the base. Unknown Household match being a whopping 1.8%. That's reputation suicide if it had mailed by itself!
- The appends that had been "opened" had a great open rate, about 2x more than the base (makes sense) but the complaint rate was also high: 14x the base for the individual matches and 28x for the household match. That also makes sense since i don't want my brother's junk in my inbox.
- We went ahead and tested the "soft-bounce" although it's a lot of trouble for not much payoff: 10-15% bounce rate and half the open rate as the base. Also a complaint rate as high as the unknowns, about 1.6%
- As a whole, the unsub. rate for the appends was 8x the base for the first week and 6x the second.
- The bounce rate is also important to monitor and was 8x the base for the fresh appends.
- Finally, the "opened" appends had a positive click rate (not counting click to unsub.) that was 25% better than the base names, so there are obviously some good names to be had in that category.

The takeaway here is to BE CAREFUL! Deal with a reputable append company. Have a strategy for deployment and watch the responses like a hawk. Remember that the complaints accumulate as the new names begin to realize that you are sending with some frequency, so don't just use your first week as a throttle for the rest of your sends. And, I didn't even touch on the ROI of running the append. You can work that out based on your own situation.

Feel free to comment on this or email me with questions.

Direct Marketing is Your Friend.

Direct marketers have a bad reputation as "junk mailers" and more recently "spammers". And to be fair, as an industry we bring it upon ourselves. When we succumb to the VP who constantly wants to send out more and more communications, we stuff inboxes full of unexpected, unwanted "junk" causing disdain and associating the brand with the money-grubbing nuisances that we are. Hey, just callin' it as I see it.

On the other hand ...

There are, on the other hand, direct marketers who have it right. Those wise marketers that make an effort to connect on a one-to-one basis. Those companies and agencies that spend as much time getting to know their current customers as they do finding new ones. Those advertisers are the friends of the people, the champions of real customer relationships, no matter whether their list is in the hundreds or the hundreds of thousands.

That's what this weekly blog is intended to be about. Observations about how some marketers are getting it right and how others are missing the mark. Tips on stepping back and taking in the broader picture of how the lifecycle of good direct strategies never ends, it just builds upon itself. If you have any questions about how to make your direct marketing better, or if you have an example that you'd like to share, please drop me an email.