Give your incentives a reality check

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 31 Aug 2009

Everyone wants a reason to purchase or interact with your brand online, so give them a little incentive…

Whether you choose to send specific and triggered messages within your email activity, or use them in your regular communications, incentives are a powerful tool to convince people to open your emails, click through from them, and ultimately make a purchase.

What can incentives do for you?

Done right, incentives offer true value and so are likely to increase response. And you can develop and measure specific incentive programmes designed to achieve specific goals:

increase open rates by working the incentive into the subject line
boost clickthrough rates by working the incentive into the subject line AND hosting all the details of the entry / redemption on a landing page
develop incentives that drive sales- typically through offers with a shelflife (“buy before August 31 and get £50 off”) or discounts on volume (eg “3 nights for 2″)
grow your list - incentivise your subscribers to forward your emails, and encourage new recipients to register
keep subscribers engagedwith an incentive as part of your welcome and/or regular incentives in your communications (all promoted as part of your subscription process, of course)
cut down on unsubscribes with regular incentives in your email programme

How NOT to incentivise

When developing your incentives programme, remember not to fall foul of these common pitfalls, any of which can quickly devalue what you’re offering:

DON’T offer too many incentives: This can adversely influence your subscriber’s purchase patterns. Once you stop incentivising them to purchase, they may not purchase at all. And you run the risk of incentivising purchases they would have made anyway.

DON’T attract too many price shoppers: If your whole subscription process is too heavily focused on incentives, you may end up with a subscriber base that’s very price focused. Subscribers attracted via incentives tend to be less profitable as they may be less likely to engage with your emails when there is no incentive, so lowering your open, click and purchase metrics in the longer term.

DON’T only reward bad behavior: Many consumers know that they can sometimes get offered a discount just by only partially completing an order or abandoning a shopping cart. But active, loyal subscribers can get annoyed when they see incentives aimed only at new or lazy subscribers, so make sure that you have incentives to reward your best customers too.

Top tips for developing an incentive programme

Check if you really need to offer incentives
There are other ways to add value to your subscribers that may do the job just as well, such as a poll or survey, which are cheaper but also protect your brand. Before rolling an incentivised campaign out, test the impact of the incentive against alternatives. In your analysis make sure you include your profit, and leave enough time for all subscribers to respond – the results after a few hours can be very different from those after a few days.

Make sure your incentives are appropriate
If you’re incentivizing to grow your email list, make sure you offer relevant products or discounts. If you sell sportswear, a competition to win football tickets will generate more relevant subscribers than one providing tickets to a cookery class…

Make sure your incentives are unique to your email
Customers will appreciate the value of an incentive – and the value of subscribing – more if they understand that the incentive is available via you, and your email programme, alone.

Be prepared if your incentive goes viral
Make sure to develop terms and conditions protect you, and that you have the capability to honor your incentive. If your incentive is tailored or specific, you don’t want to take the risk of having special codes or offers posted on voucher websites. Build a mechanism that collects user data and permissions before the discount can be used, or alternatively create a special personalised codes or vouchers to avoid duplication purchases.

Why you should always make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your list

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 21 May 2009

Great customer service is about giving people what they want, when they want it, in the most efficient and helpful way possible. That logic should even extend to your unsubscribe process.

As well as being a legal requirement, making it easy for people to unsubscribe gives them a positive experience of your brand and is sound marketing sense.

After all, there’s little point keeping on sending email to people on your list who obviously have no interest in receiving them. And making it hard or impossible for people to unsubscribe is bad for response rates and deliverability, as subscribers are likely to complain.

Why make it easy to unsubscribe?

You might think that displaying an unsubscribe link prominently on your email will encourage people to unsubscribe, but the opposite is generally true. People are reassured to see that it’s easy to leave the list if they want to, which paradoxically tends to mean they don’t feel they have to.

On Email Worx, for instance, the unsubscribe function is very visible as a big tab in the top right of the email. Yet very few people have actually unsubscribed – in fact, more people click on the link than go on to unsubscribe because they just like to know they can.

How can unsubscribing keep the relationship going?

The unsubscribe process might sound like the final stage in the subscription process, but it doesn’t actually have to mean that your relationship with that subscriber is over. Using the most appropriate method, and giving the subscribers the options they are looking for along the way, can often reduce the level of unsubscribes and maintain an active database.

People who want to unsubscribe have either lost interest in the company, or their expectations of the subscription haven’t been met. Ensuring that you give potential subscribers all the information they need to assess your newsletter during the subscription process will assist in reducing the number of unsubscribes in the second group.

Remember that while unsubscribers may be opting out of your newsletter, this does not mean they could not still be a client. Providing people with a pleasant unsubscription experience can work in your favour over time. Giving alternative options to an unsubscription (such as content or frequency) can be a way to maintain your database size.

Q: How easy should you make it to unsubscribe?

In research we carried out in this area, we identified 5 common methods to facilitate unsubscription, all starting with a link in the newsletter which leads to one of these options:

a page confirming you have been unsubscribed
a page with a confirmation message requiring one or two clicks to validate
a page requiring a password and a click
a log-in page to access your preferences
a new email message

We found that these different methods vary most in the amount of effort required to unsubscribe. Some companies appear to be focusing on keeping their database as large as possible by making it difficult for subscribers to unsubscribe, whilst others make it too easy, which could lose you perfectly happy subscribers who just clicked on the link by mistake.

A: Not too easy…

Because some subscribers click on unsubscribe to make them feel in control and aware that they can easily unsubscribe at any time, there’s a danger that the instant unsubscription, where you click on the newsletter link and go straight to a page confirming that you have been unsubscribed, is perhaps a little too efficient. This method also eliminates your opportunity to find out why the subscribers want to unsubscribe and remind them why they signed up, which would give you a last chance to convince them to stay.

…but not too hard either

On the other end of the scale, some processes are very complicated and require would-be unsubscribers to log in or enter a password. But people about to opt off an email newsletter are unlikely to remember their login details, and making disengaged subscribers struggle to leave could alienate them even further and create angry critics of your brand. Logging in can work for offering other subscriber options, like changing newsletter frequency or setting preferences. But here it runs the risk of damaging the ESP’s reputation: if the unsubscribe process is too complicated, people may decide instead to click on the ‘this is spam’ button to unsubscribe, so creating future deliverability problems. The unsubscribe link should be capable of logging in the subscriber automatically; indeed, in the US this is now legally required by CAN-SPAM.

A Fresh Look at Winning Trust

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 9 Jan 2009

When new visitors or existing customers come to your website, you have a very limited time to convince them to part with their email address – and to give you permission to email them.

To win a potential subscriber’s permission, you need to do 3 things:

1) convince them that they’ll benefit from receiving your messages
2) prove that they can trust you with their email address
3) tell them what to expect, so that you can enjoy a long, mutually beneficial relationship

A “more information” link to a separate registration page can provide space to give the unconvinced more detailed information and an opportunity to personalise their content or its frequency.

In this example, Time Out’s subscription box conveys all the necessary information very concisely. Benefits, frequency, a sample newsletter and a single-field subscription process are all included effectively in a small area on the site’s homepage.

Benefits

As email marketers, we’re likely to sign up to more newsletters and communications than most consumers – we know and trust the process, and we’re interested in seeing what other companies are doing. But it is important to remember that consumers are much more picky about what they sign up to.

In order to maximise the number of subscribers you need to give people a reason to subscribe, and you need to mention this at the sign-up stage.

The best benefit to offer is something unique – something only your email subscribers will receive. This benefit can be exclusive to subscribers, available to them first, or both: member-only discounts, first notification of new releases and free delivery for subscribers are good examples.

Expedia’s registration page conveys the benefits of subscribing clearly and well.

Frequency

It’s important to give prospective subscribers information about the frequency of contact they should expect. If you are sending regular communications (which we recommend), you should mention this at the registration stage. This could be as simple as mentioning it in the name of your communication – “Weekly offers” or “Monthly newsletter”.

If your messages are more ad hoc, you should tell customers the maximum frequency with which you expect to mail them – eg “no more than once a week”.
Preferences

Giving subscribers control over what they receive is a good way of protecting your reputation and ensuring they are happy to keep receiving your communications in the long term. One of the best ways to do this is to let them set their own preferences for frequency and content choice.

Whether this is possible for your programme will depend on your resources, the content you have available and the number of subscribers on your list.

The BBC offers a range of preferences to its subscribers, allowing them to choose frequency, delivery time and type of content.

Examples

Previous newsletters are a great way to show potential subscribers the content and format of what they can expect to receive. This visual trigger can also help your newsletter to look familiar when it arrives (which may be up to a month later), reminding the subscriber that they did sign up.

Privacy policy

A link to your privacy policy – or even better, a plain English summary of it – will reinforce the fact that you are a reputable organisation, making it easier for people to trust you with their email addresses.