(Version A)

And this?

(Version B)

Well, when it comes to getting people to click on a link,  the first email increases the likelihood that they will click by over 100%. But why?

Every year, the Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC) conducts a survey about the marketing practices of its membership. This year’s survey was receiving a much lower response rate than 2009, and EDAC wanted to send out a final reminder to try to boost response rates. To ensure that the email garnered the maximum response, we conducted a simple A/B test with the emails you see above. The emails were identical in subject line and message content, but we swapped the image of a smiling, pointing human face with a pie chart in versions A and B.

We started by picking the pie chart image that fit with the idea of the survey. But then we got to thinking that there is a lot of research out there that shows a big jump in clicks and opens when you have human subjects looking at or pointing to the call to action in your message. We decided to test it out for ourselves and sent Version A and Version B to a subset of the overall email list (10% each) and ran the test for six hours. The results are shown below:

Open Rates

• Version A (smiling pointer) – 25%
• Version B (pie chart) – 13%

Click Rates

• Version A (smiling pointer) – 8%
• Version B (pie chart) – 4%

Based on the size of EDAC’s mailing list, we can extrapolate that they received an estimated 46 extra clicks (100%) and 93 extra opens (90%) by sending the winning Version A to the remaining 80% of their mailing list, rather than Version B.

Results:

Sure enough, the response rate to the survey doubled within a week of sending out the reminder email, bringing them back up to 2009 levels. Had we sent out original pie chart version without testing, we’d likely be extending the survey deadline and sending another email plea.

We’ve blogged before about the importance of doing A/B testing with your email campaigns. This recent A/B test for EDAC using our 3mail Email Campaign Tool (shameless plug) demonstrates the incredible difference in results that can be achieved by something as simple as changing a single image.

• 59.3% of EDAC members are using email campaigns.
• 28.1% of EDAC members are already using social media. It is the top new marketing activity planned for 2010 for those that aren’t.
• 92.8% have a website specific to their organization, yet only 7.3% have a blog.

As more economic developers embrace new social tools, it is important to realize that when it comes to these new marketing channels, the old rules simply don’t apply. Here are 8 tips that cover ideas, etiquette and advice for getting started with social, blogs and email:

1.    Have a strategy and integrate it

If you hear your colleagues exclaim: “We need to get a Twitter!” or “Let’s get at least 100 Facebook friends!” or “Let’s buy a third party email list so we can show big distribution numbers!”, then you don’t have a strategy, you have a big, big problem.

True, these tools are growing in popularity and importance, but aiming wildly at the flavour of the month is not the way to take advantage of them. Like any marketing channel, you must answer basic questions like “Who do we want to reach?”, “What message do we want to send?”, “What is the goal of this activity?” Once you’ve got that figured out you can decide on the tool that will get you there.

Your strategy in these new areas must also work with your overall marketing strategy. Too often, marketers neglect the important potential of cross-pollination that comes from social media, blogs and email. How can you use them to leverage each other and your other marketing efforts?

2.    Do your homework
We can’t offer you a magic bullet when it comes to selecting from the suite of tools available to you. While Twitter may work for some, the openness and frequency demanded by that platform may not be right for others. An in-house email solution may be the route for you, while your neighbour may choose to leave the technology up to an outside agency. It is incumbent on you to research what is out there and decide what, if any, tools you want to integrate with your current strategy.

Using these tools may seem like a cheap way to go, but what you save in hard costs you will incur in the time required to keep your content fresh and interactive. Think carefully about what you will have the time to sustain.

3.    Don’t jump right in

Once you have decided on the channels you’d like to integrate, it’s time to… sit back and take notes? Yes. Many social media platforms have their own vernacular and etiquette. Watch how your peers are using these tools, and note how audiences are responding.

Email, blogs and social networks are fickle mediums, as it takes very little effort to “un-follow”, “un-friend” or hit delete. Be sure to get a good grasp of how to make the best impression and build trust and credibility. You will only get one shot.

4.    Measure

One of the greatest advantages of these new tools is how well they lend themselves to measurement. Set goals and constantly measure your progress in order to tweak content and determine which channels are working for you so that you can allocate your resources accordingly. Some ideas for measurement include:

• Traffic: Use a free tool like Google Analytics to see what efforts are increasing traffic to your website or blog. You will be able to see what content is most popular, where users are being referred from and how often they return to your site.
• Comments and other interactions: Which blog posts get the most comments? What Facebook updates spark the most user interaction? What LinkedIn discussions get the most responses? Use interactions as a measure of engagement and make note of what is generating conversation.
• Email Metrics: If you consider pasting 300 email addresses into your “bcc” field an “email campaign”, then it is time to check out some of the new tools that allow you to track specific user behaviours, compare campaigns to one and other and see what content is most popular. Email metrics are powerful, and can be used for specific events as well as ongoing communications.

5.    Be human

There is an expectation with blogs, social networks and emails that content is more conversational and personal. Remember that you are being invited into someone’s inbox or personal network, so don’t regurgitate your media releases and mission statement. Share advice, offer resources and don’t be afraid to add some personality to your writing. Being interesting is more important that strict adherence to corporate taglines and rigid grammar.

6.    Listen

When you open yourself up to interactions with your audience, be prepared to listen. You may need a thick skin sometimes, but it’s critical not to censor or try to control the conversations that happen as a result of a social presence. You may get a harsh “What a crock!” to one of your blog posts, or a snarky comment on Facebook, but you’ll earn a lot of credibility for letting the conversation happen without trying to steer it. You may also find that other users jump in to defend you, which is far more powerful than a rebuttal from you. More importantly, the things you may not want to hear are the exact things you may need to be hearing:

“At a talk about a year ago, one audience member stood up and asked a question. Her company wanted to use social media, but they were scared about what would happen if people said bad things about their products. As a result, she asked how they could minimize negative comments on the web about their products. In her search for a way to control the message, she missed the most basic solution: Fix your stuff.” – Eric Karjaluoto, SmashLab

We used to pay big bucks for focus groups. Social networks provide a focus group of sorts for free, and the responses are often more spontaneous and honest than those you get around a board room table or in a town hall forum. Be sure to listen to how your community can “fix its stuff”.

7.    Quality over quantity

It takes a long time to build a good network, and trying to find shortcuts will not serve your goals. It may be tempting to purchase an email list, but before you do, think about the last time you received an unsolicited email. Likely, your reaction was one of confusion and annoyance, not one of relief that someone sought you out to tell you this great piece of information. Further, privacy practices dictate that you cannot send emails to people that don’t explicitly give permission or implicitly give it by having done business with you within the last two years.

Social networks and blogs are similar. Many treat them as a popularity contest, but the most valuable friends, followers and subscribers are those that look forward to your posts and engage in conversations with you. In short, it may be tempting to try to push up your numbers, but do you really want to be talking to people that don’t want to listen to you?

8.    Put the shoe on the other foot

There are no hard and fast rules for how often to post to a blog or send an email newsletter. The one rule you should heed however is to never waste your reader’s time. Before you put a message out there, put yourself in your audience’s place and ask if this is going to add some value to their day. If it’s not, it’s better to wait until you’ve got something to say that will build your credibility and leave them wanting more.

In closing

Like any other industry, economic development marketing is moving towards new tools for communication that rely heavily on technology, transparency and measurement. Used correctly, they can greatly enhance your community’s brand in the market, and can facilitate business development, job growth and civic pride. Take the time to figure out the best strategy for you, respect the practices of these new platforms, and you will reap the rewards as you grow this area of your marketing strategy.

“Remember: When you’re developing an e-mail newsletter, make it relevant and interesting to your audience. This sounds so simple, but I still see clients whose e-mail newsletters are “all about us” — we’ve hired a new VP of sales, we landed a new client, etc. That’s nice, but what’s in it for the reader?

Many times this type of information, if included at all, should be relegated to a brief sidebar — it’s not the meat of your e-mail newsletter. If there’s more to the story — for instance, you’ve added new functionality that may benefit other clients to land the new customer — then that might warrant a full-blown article.”

- Found at ClickZ.

Next time you are creating content for your newsletter, put yourself in the shoes of the reader. They don’t care about the same things that you do internally. Think about the newsletters you get from your favourite store – they show you new products, offer fashion advice and discounts, and perhaps suggest items based on your past behaviour. They do not announce new hirings and corporate objectives. More often than not, the retail sector gets it right when it comes to writing for the reader in the email newsletter space. Why should economic development be any different?

Look at each potential news item and ask “Does this impact my reader? Does it offer them something that is relevant to them? How does it change things for them? What can they do with this information?” If you don’t have a meaningful answer to these questions then it’s time to shelve that story and find something that will give readers a reason to keep reading your newsletter.

A final thought: Don’t be afraid to include stories and links that aren’t directly about you. Show thought leadership with an advice-based story for your readers, or link to recent news or announcements that are relevant to them. As an economic development professional, you facilitate and act as a link to a variety of resources in your day-to-day work. Find ways to extend those services to your clients online as well, and you’ll ensure that your e-newsletters are read and kept as a resource by the people that read it.

• 85 percent of the people on your e-mail list will stop reading your e-mails (without unsubscribing) after the third message your company sends to them.
• Over 10 percent of people who initially read your e-mail on their handheld device will file it away, intending to take action, but never doing so.
• Every year an average of 30 percent of the people who signed up for your e-mail marketing list will not get your e-mails because their ISP will incorrectly block them.

Just a few stats from the Email Experience Council that reinforce why it is so critical to keep your email recipient list up-to-date and continue to find ways to grow it and engage new subscribers. You can read more over at ClickZ.

The dangers of bad email practices are very real: As we become more annoyed with the number of unsolicited emails we receive, we are more likely to react by ignoring them or complaining about them – both of which can cause irreparable damage to a community’s brand.

Email Legislation in Canada
Unlike the CAN-SPAM laws in the U.S., Canada currently does not have specific email privacy legislation, but PIPEDA does cover many aspects of email marketing indirectly. Earlier this year, the Canadian government tabled Bill C-27: The Electronic Commerce Protection Act to specifically address email marketing, counterfeit websites and spyware. Alternate spam legislation is also going through Canada’s senate. So in the absence of clear laws, what’s an email marketer to do?

Best Practice: Permission-Based Email

Regardless of legislation, it just makes good sense to send your emails to people that actually wish to receive them. Sending unsolicited email frequently results in confusion and annoyance, and does nothing to strengthen your community’s image with your intended audience.

Email lists should be judged on quality, not quantity. Do your recipients recognize and welcome your communications? Do they open them? Click on your links? Do your open rates stay consistently high or are they dropping off? How many people are unsubscribing?

Think of it as the difference between a cold call and a warm lead or referral. Time is best spent on the latter because it is more likely to garner results and create a relationship. Just because it takes less effort to hit “send”, doesn’t mean you should abandon this principle.

Checklist for Email Marketers:

Who can I send email to?

• People who have specifically signed up through your website
• People who completed offline forms & indicated they wanted to be emailed
• People who gave you their business card and asked to receive email – If someone gives you their business card and you have also explained to them that you will be in touch by email, you can contact them.
• You have had business communications with them in the last two years. This is implied permission, although asking them directly is much better.

Who can’t I send email to?

Anybody that is not covered by the list above! Here are some examples:

• Lists or email addresses received from a third party – Includes any list you bought or rented, got from a partner or membership  organization. No matter the claims of the source of this list, you cannot send email to them.
• Addresses you collected or “copy & pasted” from the Internet – Even if they look like ideal customers for you, you can’t email someone just  because you found their address.
• Addresses you haven’t emailed in the last 2 years Permission doesn’t age well. Even if you got their permission legitimately, they won’t remember giving it to you. If you haven’t sent something to that address in the last 2 years, you can’t start now.

Resist the temptation to create giant lists of people that don’t want to hear from you. Instead, work hard on the most important thing that will help your list grow organically: your content. Send people something they want to read and can benefit from. You’ll retain your existing subscribers and be more likely to bring new ones on board.

The team responsible for the brick campaign – investPEI, Summerside Regional Development Corporation and the City of Summerside – were eager to come up with something that would set them apart with prospective tenants for their new Health IT facility. What they came up with yielded results that were unprecedented compared to previous tradeshow outreach.

“For the first time, we weren’t blindly sending out brochures or emails and wondering who read them,” explains Mike Thususka, Director of Economic Development for the City of Summerside, PEI. “We had a coordinated campaign that gave us feedback about who was receiving the packages and clicking through to a focused website designed just for this campaign. When we got to the trade show we knew exactly who to meet with.”

And it all started with a single brick.

“Some were skeptical at first when we suggested the idea of mailing prospective companies an actual brick,” recalls Heather Ciere of On Three Communication Design. “We had been touring the new Health IT facility and passed a pile of bricks that had been collected from the redevelopment of the property. We got to thinking about what the bricks represented beyond the multi-million dollar investment in the building. They represented the ‘building’ of a vision for Health IT too. Why not use something tangible like a brick to represent PEI’s vision and ambitions?”

Prospective companies received a brick in the mail explaining what it represented and introducing the opportunity. They were directed to a special website: investpei.ca/healthIT to learn more. This allowed the team to track the effectiveness of the packages. This was followed by a peer-to-peer email campaign from ambassadors like Dave Perry of Carestream Health – a Health IT firm already operating in the facility. Using email links and tracking software, the team was able to pinpoint exactly who clicked through to the site and how many links they clicked – a great measure of interest.

“Generally, direct mail campaigns have a terrible ROI,” says Jim McGimpsey of On Three, “They usually end up in the recycling bin before they are ever opened. But when you mail a package with a brick inside, it makes people stop and take notice. Even if the reaction is one of confusion, it still ensures that the receiver looks further at the materials to make sense of this strange delivery.”

By pairing this unique mailing with the best of email and web metrics, the campaign allowed the PEI team to start conversations with people they knew were interested. “People remembered us as the city that sent them a brick – the city that took a chance and worked hard to get their attention,” says Thususka.

Prince Edward Island was ranked 4th worldwide for Advanced Software Development by KPMG. It is aggressively pursuing this sector as an area of growth. The brick campaign will play a significant role in this attraction strategy. For more information, visit investpei.ca/healthIT.

 People skip over boring magazine ads, ignore shoddy TV spots, tune out poor radio spots, overlook irrelevant banners.

And that’s largely it.

But people don’t just ignore or delete “bad” emails. They resent them. A brand pays a price for not delivering value-by-email and annoying the subscriber.

It is true. Our email inbox is our personal space, and the ability to use it productively is a daily struggle. For most, email has become a distraction and a chore at times, and the appearance of an email that is unwanted and does not add any value exacerbates this situation. The consequences of a frustrated user hitting the “Report Spam” button are significant – your future email campaigns will be blocked by the ISP and your deliverability will plummet overall.

Think seriously about the time you are asking someone to invest in dealing with your email, and whether they will see value in receiving it. If not, don’t send it. Period. You may not get another chance.

Read the whole article at Email Marketing Reports.

Here are just a few of the questions that (initially) deserve an “it depends”:

• When is the best day to send my emails?
• When is the best time of day to send my emails?
• How often should I send my emails?
• How long should my copy be?
• Should I brand the subject line?
• Should I personalize the subject line?
• What open and click rates should I be happy with?
• The problem is we all like clarity.

So here goes:

Sunday, 8.45am, Once a week, About 300 words, Yes, No, 25% and 10%

You can take false comfort in clear answers. But these answers are based on data and experience that has no relevance to the actual situation you find yourself in. So they are unlikely to get the most out of your efforts. They may even be counterproductive.

Or you can accept the correct answer to all those questions: it depends.

He is absolutely correct. We get these same questions too from our own clients and from now on I think I’ll just forward Mark’s article because he puts it far more eloquently than I could. Overall open rates based on data from many many markets mean very little to economic development marketers. For example: Would you really be happy if your network of partners and clients (likely to be the bulk of an economic development email list) opened your email on average as frequently as a product offer sent to thousands and thousands of faceless customers from a major retailer? Obviously, you’d expect your opens to be much much higher.

The only real measure of success is against yourself, and the only way to arrive at where to set the bar is to vary your content, study how your readership responds to it, rinse and repeat. Sure, you can use universal numbers as a loose starting point, but the real art of email marketing comes in the tweaking of your own content. That in turn comes from really studying how people respond to your campaigns – what links they click, what subject lines work, what amount of content seems most palatable… you get the idea.

The bottom line: Don’t be happy measuring up to grossly generalized targets. Instead, use your last campaign as the standard to beat. That’s the true measure of success.

It’s a critical question that can make or break the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Click Z Experts have an interesting article about ensuring that the real estate at the top of your newsletter or other communication (i.e. the info that people will see in their email preview pane) is enticing and motivates them to scroll down or open the email to see the rest of your content.

Large banners, graphics and advertisements can eat up valuable space and earn you a “Delete” before they ever get to the content that is most important. You can read the full article here, but here are some interesting highlights:

•  In 2005, EmailLabs released a study reporting that 69 percent of business people use a preview pane when viewing e-mail. Another 33 percent of the group said they often read entire messages this way.
• The vast majority of people use a horizontal rather than a vertical preview pane. Of these users, roughly half configure their preview pane to be about 2 inches tall, while the other half prefer a taller view of about 4 inches.
• Snippets are becoming another important tool for engaging readers. In the case study I mentioned earlier, we also saw a 41 percent lift in open rates, thanks to the copy that appeared in the snippet.
• Paying just a little attention to the preview pane can return a significant lift in performance. Earlier this year, I generated a 76 percent increase in clicks and a 220 percent increase in leads generated for one client by adding a strong headline to the preview pane of the control e-mail.