Luke Wroblewski talks about how he came across an unconventional registration form that asked people the same questions found in typical sign-up forms, but in a narrative format. It presented input fields as blanks within sentences (Mad Libs-style, if you will).
The question was would people be more inclined to complete it because of the narrative format? Or would the unfamiliar presentation format confuse people?
Ron Kurti and his team at Vast.com ran some A/B testing online that compared the two styles of forms.
Here’s the result: Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%.
Have you tried narrative style forms on your website?
Full story at LukeW »
Triggered emails are emails that are triggered by an event, such as a sign-up, a purchase, shopping cart abandonment, request for a review, or simply to send a ‘Happy Birthday’ note to a customer.
Although triggered emails was a buzz topic for years, not all marketers use them.
- Silverpop found that nearly 70% of the 42 retailers surveyed either distribute cart abandonment e-mails or plan to;
- 50% send service satisfaction e-mails after purchase; and
- S&S Worldwide discovered that abandoned shopping cart surveys alone represent 33% of its overall e-mail revenue.
Do you use triggered emails to follow up with your prospects and customers?
Full story at Direct Marketing News »
Events company LiveNation wanted to get more out of the hundreds of millions of e-mails it was sending out to customers.
An internal survey of unsubscribers revealed that the main reason customers opted out of LiveNation e-mails was that too many messages were about artists they didn’t enjoy.
So LiveNation integrated the music recommendation algorithms from the social networking music site Last.fm into its e-mail targeting. Drawing on data from customers’ previous ticket orders, LiveNation was able to segment its consumers.
It further customized e-mails to include a local calendar and venue search so that if a particular show did not interest the recipient, a few others resulted as options.
Results:
- Emails sent out decreased by 24%, from 863 million to 657 million;
- Open rates jumped to 18.04%, up 5.13%;
- Total click-throughs increased 18.17%;
- Unique click rate was up 29.88%; and
- Conversion rate of actual orders per click increased 35.86% to 4.13%.
Are you segmenting your email messages based on consumer interests?
Full story at DMNews »
Marketing databases can be neglected for years. Email subscribers might receive barely relevant emails at seemingly random intervals, and performance suffers. But you can turn it around.
The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra had an email database that reached into the tens of thousands of contacts. However, the list suffered from an unclear strategy. The team had relied on a “spray and pray” approach, reaching all contacts with the same emails and managing sends without a schedule. The result was a large list with poor performance.
They decided to launch a re-engagement effort coupled with a new email marketing strategy. They asked every subscriber in the database to declare they wanted to continue receiving emails from the Orchestra and specify the type of content they wanted. Those who did not reply were removed from the database.
Here are the steps the team followed to turn its large low-performing list into an efficient, high-powered marketing channel:
- Plan new content strategy.
- Send re-engagement email to most-active subscribers.
- Send re-engagement email to other subscribers.
- Respect and grow the list.
- Practice good list hygiene.
RESULTS
Online sales have more than doubled to 35% of all the company’s purchases since the re-engagement started. 40% of all subscribers have purchased tickets from the Symphony.
While the team initially cut 95.9% of its list size, it has grown the list by more than 500% from that low point. The list is now approximately 24.8% of its size from when the team started–but it is far more responsive.
Has your mailing list been neglected? Maybe it is time to purge the list of subscribers who aren’t interested in what you have to offer.
Full story at MarketingSherpa »
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