We had a lot of great comments on Wednesday’s post about 1-800-Headsets’ year end thank you email. I received an email from Get Elastic reader Martin Preikschas of Gold Guys Canada shared his own experience with the email tactic (coincidentally, also on December 29, the date of the Headsets email). His results were not positive:
On December 29, (the same date of the Headsets mail) I also sent out a non-marketing, “hey thanks” letter to our Gold Guys Canada base. I was motivated to do so because a) I wanted to remind our clients that we are individuals behind the face of our business, b) I wanted to reconnect on a personal level with our clients and c) I was tired of always crafting a “pitch” and relished the idea of a gentle, human letter.
I don’t know if the Headsets results were the same as ours, but we saw:
- A 7% drop in both immediate and week-following opens
- An equal percentage of opt-outs to previous mails
- A 0% reply rate (shocking for us)
- A 14% decrease in click-through (not surprising since there are only two links in this letter)
The text of our mail is included below:
Subject line:
Big Thanks and Best Wishes from Gold Guys Canada!
Text:
Thanks for all the fun
We at Gold Guys just wanted to say thank you for a year marked by some great gold parties and many wonderful people. We thank you for welcoming us into your homes, and for introducing us to your families and friends.
We hope that in the coming year we’ll get to see some of you again.
Best wishes for the New Year
We extend to you all sincere wishes for a 2011 filled with all the things that make life great – laughter, friends, family and growth.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Ruttner, Michel Korman, Barry Korman and Martin Preikschas,
www.GoldGuysCanada.com
www.My-Gold-Party.ca
My take away, due to the significant decrease in opens and replies, is that folks suffer from email fatigue during this time of year AND that they expect bold, call-to-action, value-proposition emails from businesses even if all you want to do is say thanks. In future, if I feel the need to get snuggly with our clients, I’ll save it until I also have something tangible to offer to show our appreciation.
This doesn’t mean 1-800-Headsets wasn’t successful, as customer base, email content and a variety of uncontrollable factors are involved. But Martin’s assessment of the reasons WHY the email campaign wasn’t successful is valid. It’s always important to test, measure important metrics and explore reasons why a result was positive or negative.
Subscribe by RSS
Mr. Preikschas may be correct when he states that people are simply tired of opening emails at this time of year.
However, it seems to me that that people sell their gold because they have to (financial difficulties, etc.), whereas people buy new headsets because they want to. There is a huge difference between having to sell and wanting to buy.
If I ran into financial trouble and had to sell my wife’s gold jewelry, I’m not going to be too happy to receive a personal email from the guys that took it from me.
Accordingly, I’d say that a strong, business-wise message along with a clear call to action would be more appropriate.
By the way, a while ago I wrote an article entitled “The Small Merchant Peacock Syndrome and Its Cure”. I recommended that smaller merchants try to become more personable, especially when communicating with customers. You can read the post at eCommerceAngles.com.
I’m not sure what Martin would have defined as a successful campaign when you aren’t asking for anything, but I think the “we” approach instead of “I” approach seems more generic. The letter obviously wasn’t crafted by any one of the people who signed the bottom. And who are those people? Are they the founders?
I’m not trying to be critical, I just think you can’t draw apples to apples comparisons here.
How one defines success is also worth considering. Really, what Martin’s email asks his customers to do is to “feel appreciated by Gold Guys Canada”. There is no other call to action. As such, the email may have “worked” just fine, and who knows, maybe that warm fuzzy will pay off in higher repeat purchase rates from that cohort over the next few months. The point is, this was a brand-building message; it shouldn’t be evaluated by direct marketing metrics.
Sounds like I do NOT need to send out any friendly emails.
What I have started sending out are product review request emails for customers who have not submitted a product review yet for their past purchase.
With this, I randomly give away 7 free Audio Bibles to the pool of review replies. I think it helps get a few more product reviews and everyone likes to win something now and then.
I think you need to take into consideration the lack of ‘sale’ from being friendly. I wouldn’t write it off altogether as you seem to be but to send the email out and not expect many numbers back from it. A watch company I recently purchased from had a business card size document in the package, giving me 10 dollars off on my next purchase and the back side thanked me for my purchase with the signature of the person who packed the box for me.
The ROI is essentially nothing on this as there are no analytic aside from checking the coupon use, but I have this burned into my brain now, company name and their level of service, and next time I buy a watch it will be from them solely based off of this business card sized paper. So no ROI, probably not 100% view to the people they send them to, but for those few customers that DO read through, it’s worth it without any initial financial return.
What’s positive? What’s successful?
After re-reading the brief “case study” that Linda graciously posted, I found myself asking, “But was it really negative or a failure?”
We had 0 replies, but is that a bad thing? What could we really expect since there was no call to action?
We had a decrease in opens, but is that negative? It’s not like people were ignoring a subject-line offer.
Unfortunately, with a campaign like this, there really is no way to measure “success” because the goal itself was immeasurable – to give clients a warm fuzzy feeling. This is the kind of campaign you do “just because”, and not to see some immediately measurable response. In that sense, I could not agree that this campaign failed. Or succeeded.
The emails can’t be compared, neither do their results. The 1-800 headset’s email was much more elaborated and have calls to actions, this email is like a standard text like other thousands that had filled our inboxes in this period.
Thanks Linda for this post and to the users that have commented. It’s coming to grips with some of the most essential e-mail marketing questions that merchants deal with.
Can we center this discussion around value? As in, what value does the customer take away from an e-mail, and in this case can we determine whether or not it was really a failure in terms of the value a customer received or didn’t receive?
Sure, in terms of pure consumption value may have not been high, but like Mary says there’s nothing that’s measurable about the campaign as no call to action was clear – it was simply Gold Guys Canada reaching out to their customers to say thanks.
All in all this entire process is valuable to view, analyze, and adjust accordingly. Maybe the e-mail needed to come from an individual, have more of a personal touch to it, (whatever that means) or include a call to action. It could have been a bad time. It could have been the wrong message from the wrong company.
Whatever the case, what we do know is that people like being treated as individuals, and being talked to like human beings. Maybe that is what we should focus on. And before you scream “THAT’S NOT SCALABLE!” – let’s think outside of the box, there are ways to create a personal e-mail message from an automated system.
Something to chew on…