Top marketers presenting their case studies at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami last week included Matt Griffin of the Boston Celtics.

Though the Eastern Conference-leading Celtics probably don’t have this problem right now, the team found itself looking at quite a few empty seats at least once in the not too distant past. Matt’s straight-forward mission: Get ‘em filled.

First, Matt understands his audience. He knows he has a die-hard fan base. He’s analyzed their emotional purchasing behavior, and he knows they have a tendency to impulse buy. He also knows his team has a broad demographic appeal.

Phase one of his strategy? A targeted email campaign to customers who had previously bought blocks of tickets, especially colleges (target those of the players) and families (throw in hot dogs and T-shirts and make it a package deal), and offer customers who had opted-in to get emails from the team site a ½ off ticket.

Phase Two: An email campaign to previous ticket buyers, carefully tracking click-throughs on the offer. If they didn’t convert right away, they got a phone call. “Phone calls after the fact are gold for us,” said Griffin.

Fast-forward to the tip-off: Seats were full, the Celtics won (and thanked the fans), and that brought on Phase Three of Matt’s plan: Follow up with everyone who bought a ticket, or a block of tickets, and offer them a six-game package.

Results? Their approach is an NBA best practice, getting twice the returns of standard email campaigns with their “three-point conversion," and the Celtics are one of the top ticket selling teams, even in years they aren’t leading the league.

According to Matt, the Celtics aren’t about just putting on a professional basketball game: “What we really do is create an experience.”

Their approach to email marketing isn’t bad, either.

Here’s what the top marketing and research directors at MECLabs came up with on Tuesday afternoon, after three intense days of slicing, dissecting, analyzing, and optimizing email and landing pages at the MarketingSherpa eMail Summit in Miami. (Oh yeah, and after a power outage that made national and international headlines!)

#1: Marketers have to be more than marketers. According to Jeanne Hopkins, Chief Marketing Officer for MECLabs Group, CMOs need to understand more than just marketing. They need to understand the business as a whole, including the company’s finances and its technical capabilities and limitations. This means making allies of the CFO and the CIO, understanding their problems and concerns, and making sure they understand marketings'. Most importantly, marketers need to get across to the CEO in easily understood and quickly digestible terms, graphs, and pictures just how and how much marketing is contributing to the bottom line and the success of the business overall.

#2: Is 2008 the year that email marketers get religion on landing pages? Email experts and marketers are starting to “get” that email is not created, sent, and responded to in a vacuum. As MarketingExperiments subscribers know, Continuity and Congruence play a huge role. Emailers better understand how important it is to avoid site flow disruption: ensuring Value Proposition and its communication—from the product, to the offer, to the Landing Page, to the conversion—each step the visitor takes to get from one to the next—is not interrupted, doesn’t cause unnecessary Friction, and doesn’t make the customer so anxious they fly instead of click to buy (or sign-up, or donate).

#3: It's all about the message. Stefan Tornquist, Director of Research at MarketingSherpa, reminded the final session’s audience that the click-to-open ratio in email testing is a key metric when it comes to the quality of your content and the subjects your readers like best.

#4: Marketing + IT = Happy faces. See number 1. Marketing and IT must be able to communicate. IT must enable marketing. If IT doesn’t (or won’t) support and facilitate what marketers need, and more importantly, what prospects and customers need when they open an email, click, and get to a Landing Page, then marketing will fail to deliver all it can and remain adequate instead of excellent (right Flint?) and so will the business. Having been a CIO intent on changing the culture from within, here’s a nice synopsis of my perspective:

" IT is not an end in itself. It has no purpose and no value beyond supporting and enabling the business, thus there is a strong argument that ultimate responsibility for IT strategy setting and implementation should rest with the business leadership.”

IT Alignment: Who Is in Charge? The Information Technology Governance Institute, 2005

#5: Email isn’t dead. Email still delivers stunning ROI when done properly. Hence the need for professional training, sharing of what works and what doesn’t, and a community of marketers that wants their communication with customers to be timely, welcome, relevant, and above all, useful. After all, that's what customers want.

Pam McHugh, General Manager, U.S. Operations and Research, Mintel International said this morning at the MarketingSherpa eMail Summit in Miami that 1000 consumers recently surveyed by Mintel found only 26% of personal business email "relevant or useful."

McHugh presented the importance of each of the following in determining whether or not someone will open your email, thinking it's useful:

Opportunity to opt-in.

Give respondents every opportunity to opt-in to emails from your company, because 90% of "opt-inners" (opters-in?) said they were somewhat or very likely to open the email.

Make it clear who you are.

83% of Mintel's respondents said that knowing the sender is very or extremely important and 79% said when they know the sender, subject line is extremely important.

Clearly state the offer in the subject line.

McHugh used an example of a subject line from a credit card email. The original subject line said "enews update", but according to Hughes, "'earn up to $500 in statement credits' would be much better... My son is going to open that email." The email also contained no less than five Calls-To-Action to refer a friend to the program.

Mind your frequency.

When it came to frequency, Mintel received some "really astounding numbers" according to McHugh. If they know the sender, recipients will "tolerate" 9 emails per month from companies with which they do personal business. "They are not saying they are going to open it all, but they will tolerate it from marketers they are familiar with," said McHugh.
If consumers do not perceive they have a relationship with you, their tolerance is significantly lower, tolerating only three emails per month.

Target age-segment opportunities.

Those 65+ open less of their personal business email "even if they opted into it" according to McHugh. But once opened, they are fairly likely to respond, responding to 2.5 PB emails in the past week. Knowing the sender is extremely important for 79% of these respondents.
It was extremely important for only 38% of 18-44 year-olds.

Target affluents.

Those with household income above $100k were most likely to follow through with the purchase of a product or service if they opened the email. They also check their email about five times a day.

Best practices according to Mintel:

1. The more targeted the better. Build demographic information on your contacts over time to improve targeting.
2. Opt-in options. Allow your customers and prospects to opt-in to select types of communications.
3. Clear, concise, subject lines including your company name and offer. "Make that subject line speak to me, if you do, I just might open it," concluded McHugh.

Day 2 of the MarketingSherpa Email Summit here in beautiful Miami brought real-live experiences from an impressive range of companies. Bottom line? Better know your customers and what they like and need instead of blasting them with generic info and offers. The secret word is relevance.

First up was Annette Promes, director of email marketing for Expedia. She wanted to know which offer--points towards free travel, a cash discount code, or a general message promising savings--did a better job of increasing response to hotel offers from customers who had signed up for a ThankYou® Rewards Network membership.

The points treatment lifted click-through by 82% and transactions a whopping 347% while the code/coupon, while also doing well, increased clicks by 24% and transactions by "only" 106%.

Customers had signed up for the points program, and it was points they desired. Promes warned against training customers not to do business with you unless they get a coupon.

Kimberley Talbot, senior group manager of worldwide relationship marketing for Adobe also proved relevance is the key with her case study of the launch of the Creative Suite 3 product.

Talbot segmented the campaign to meet the needs of three customer segments in general: designers, photographers, and educators. The creatives got an email with one stunning, original graphic on a white background and a minimum of copy. Photographers got more tech specs to check out. Educators were told how the software could prepare students for future success.

Then Talbot used a propensity model to ID which customers were early, mid, and late adopters and crafted her email Call-To-Action accordingly. She focused additional direct marketing spend on the early adopters. Her results?

A mind-blowing email campaign ROI of 29,000% in North America and 5,000% worldwide. A 41% increase in overall order rate and a 72% increase in direct orders vs. a "no contact" control.

"Customers proved they know what they need," said Talbot. "They purchased what we predicted they would...but they were exposed to more products."

The take-away?

- Tailor use of media to the audience's preference.
- Version for segments whose needs have a material impact on response.
- Prioritize investment against those segments for whom the messaging is most relevant.

Want to know more about the future of customer engagement according to Adobe? Go to www.adobe.com/engagement/

More later...

It was interesting, intense, tough, and at the end of the day, very rewarding. The MarketingExperiments optimization team condensed 7 weeks of email optimization coursework into one day with a one-hour test.

Those who started the nine-hour day frisky and positive left a little less frisky, but the consensus was the jam-packed class (450 attendees) today at the Intercontinental Hotel Miami got exactly what they signed-up for: Expert understanding of how to optimize email capture, envelope fields, body copy, and landing pages (but in reverse--those who are "in the know" will understand) for their companies.

Malli Gero, principle, Gero Communications, who has worked in marketing and PR for 25 years, summed it up for me: "As a solo practitioner, I have to choose carefully what I sign up for, so I was excited about this summit. When I told my clients where I was going, they were really excited. My mode of speaking to the media is only through email, so writing that subject line is critical."

Eric Choi, manager of database marketing for Citrix Online, said he likes "the scientific approach" MarketingExperiments takes to professional certification courses. "The typical marketing approach is to go with your gut." Anyone who attended the Marketers' Intuition Revisited Web clinic in December knows how wrong that is. The majority of marketers who attended were wrong every time Dr. Flint McGlaughlin asked them to pick which landing page, which PPC, which email, etc. did the best in our tests.

Karen Imbrogno, customer communications manager for Insurance.com, was keen to add yet another ME stripe to her qualifications. Imbrogno has an Online Testing Professional certification already, and other members of her team have Landing Page Optimization certifications.

Karen told Dr. McGlaughlin and the class that her team "follows your advice religiously."

While we wait for the results of our tests, I think another of Gero's comments best sums up the day: "It's been great - it really adds a lot of value. I hope I remember it all!"

Me too, Malli. See you tomorrow...

Email is one of the biggest challenges marketers face in 2008: Still capable of generating a stunning ROI, but requiring the analysis and guidance of experts to overcome the problems “success” has created for it in the past 20 years.

Just consider this list of biggest marketing concerns about email from a survey taken of B2B and B2C marketers last November by MarketingSherpa:

#1: Recipient mailboxes are swamped. All email suffers.
#2: Spam is eroding trust.
#3: Email doesn’t get the budget and attention it deserves.
#4: Willingness of people to opt-in to new lists.
#5: Lack of accountability and measurement.
#6: Image blocking negatively affects creative email.
#7: Deliverability.

MarketingSherpa is offering three days of seminars, training, and case studies at their Email Summit in Miami Feb. 24-26 to address these issues and more. I’m betting most readers of this blog have already signed up. If you haven’t, you probably need more help than you realize or you’re willing to admit yet (there are a few tickets left). Though the one-day MarketingExperiments email certification course at the Summit is now sold out, you’ll shortly be able to take the full-length course online.

Here are some tasty email tips from MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments experts to hold you in the meantime:

• Segment, then target. Generic blasts are out. Finely honed messages are in.

• Build trust. It’s key to open and conversion rates. According to the MS survey, 50% of respondents said emails that arrive too frequently are spam, even when they’re from companies they know.

• Make a strong, value-added offer every time. Don’t waste your customer’s valuable time. See above.

• Eliminate incongruence and discontinuity. See MarketingExperiments research for more on this topic, but here’s the gist: If someone reads your email then gets a confusing, disruptive message from your Landing Page, you’ve lost them. And they won't be back.

• Get enough budget. Email expertise and technology will take real money. You get what you pay for.

• Test. In 2008 you must have a solid ability to deeply analyze your lists and track metrics; e.g., click-to-open ratio, revenue per email, leads per email, engagement per campaign.

If your company or organization has a large list of email subscribers, you may find yourself struggling to create email and newsletter content that is compelling for each and every reader.

Big lists tend to include groups who have varying interests. People may have signed up at different times, for different reasons and in response to coverage of different topics.

This is why more and more companies are now segmenting their house lists into smaller groups of names.

Segmenting your list into sub-lists enables you to create content that targets smaller interest groups. The outcome is that you end up being interesting and relevant to each group...rather than writing content that is generic enough to suit everyone, but engages nobody.

If you doubt the wisdom of list segmentation, take a look at the chart in this blog entry at Aweber.com.

In a nutshell, smaller lists achieve higher open rates, and largely for the reasons stated above.

More and more sites now try to capture visitors’ email addresses on the first page...whether it’s the home page or a landing page.

Why? So that if that visitor doesn’t complete a purchase or registration of some kind during that visit, you can then follow up with an email or send them a newsletter.

It’s an effective tactic and one we tested ourselves as part of our Shopping Cart Recovery brief.

However, there are times when asking for an email address is perceived as an unwelcome barrier by site users.

For instance, more and more online publishers are insisting on some kind of registration before allowing visitors to access the full content on their sites.

What is the downside?

Here is one point of view, published today by Marcia Yudkin in her Marketing Minute newsletter.

With her permission, here is the full text of what she wrote:

In stores, many of us cringe when asked, "May I help you?"

In many mail order ads, you can still see the wording traditionally used to reassure people requesting information: "No salesperson will call."

Online, more than 89 percent in a July 2005 ThomasNet.com survey want anonymity when searching for information on the Internet. In a 2006 Marketing Sherpa survey, 53 percent don't want to share personal information when shopping.

Clearly, most people strongly prefer privacy. When handing over personal data, they expect something valuable in return.

The increasingly popular technique of requesting a name and email address before providing a description of a product violates this expectation.

Proponents of the technique claim that by the numbers, it's profitable. However, missed publicity opportunities don't show up in numbers. I recently found myself intrigued by a product I'd normally want to tell people about, but all the product details were guarded by the need to sign up first.

I left instead.

By hiding products beyond a moat, you may forfeit the enthusiasm of journalists and opinion leaders who could spread your message at no cost.

She is right in saying that a requirement to register or hand over your email address can present a barrier to the people you most want to read your content.

I have experienced this myself when researching topics for this blog. I might come across a link to an interesting article, click through to the site and then find myself having to register before I can read the article.

In most cases, unless the article is on a must-read topic, I don’t bother to register, hit the back button and look for something else. As a result, that publisher loses a link in this blog and some additional, free publicity.

There is another issue here as well. I’m not presenting it as a reason not to capture email addresses, but rather to ensure that we are all aware of the consequences of everything we do online.

When I come across a request for my name and email address on the first page of a site, whether it be the home page or a landing page, a small piece of information about the site’s brand is tucked away in a corner of my mind.

I see the email address requirement and may think any one of more of these things...

“Can I trust these people? I only just arrived at their site for the first time and they are instantly asking me for personal information.”

“Hey, these guys are pushy.”

“No, I won’t give you my email address until I find out whether your site can give me what I’m looking for.”

“Hang on, I can’t find out whether this site can give me what I’m looking for without handing over my email address. I don’t feel comfortable. I’m going to try elsewhere.”

If people experience any of the feelings expressed in these questions, you will receive a small black mark against your brand. Visitors may not remember you for your great site, but instead remember you as the place that made them feel uncomfortable on the first page they saw.

As I mentioned above, this is not a rant against email capture. Our own testing has shown how effective this tactic can be in increasing revenues.

Just keep in mind that even though your revenues are increasing, that’s not the only thing that is happening.

You may also, at the same time, be losing free publicity through journalists and bloggers, and be making a bad impression on some of your visitors.