At Extra Space Storage, marketing director Dayna Hathaway said shopping cart abandonment emails were going out 24 hours past abandonment. "That's obviously too late," she said. So, the company made an investment to shorten the lag time and reviewed data. The lag time was cut to one hour after abandonment and the conversion rate increased eight or nine times, Hathaway said. Hathaway was on an MediaPost Email Insider Summit panel, which included Ancestry.com's Daniel Bruns, a senior director working in CRM. The question of the value of an email address arose. No specific answer was given by any of the three panelists (EBay's Rishi Mahalaha, manager in daily deals marketing, was the third. But Ancestry.com has a large bounce file. Sometimes Bruns suggested it's not worth it to pursue an updated email address, so the company removes bounces from the opt-in list and monitors deliverability. (Side commentary was offered by the Direct Marketing Association's Stephanie Miller, who pointed out on Twitter that the value of an email address is the "hardest question" in email marketing.) A question was asked about what goes into consideration about which ESP to use. Cost obviously plays a key role. EBay uses Yesmail, but that could change since the company has acquired GSI Commerce, which owns e-Dialog.
TurboTax is moving to take an effective email program and expand it into SMS. The tax preparation company has used email to persuade customers to return after abandoning an e-filing midstream. With smartphones proliferating, it’s been adding text messaging as a way to try and bring people back. “This has been a really effective communication stream through email,” said Elizabeth Berger, a group manager in direct response marketing at TurboTax. “It’s driven a tremendous amount of lift, so we’re hoping that with text messaging we can see similar results, just through a different format and through a different platform.” The effort is just one in the mobile space Berger cited that her company is pursuing. With data having shown close to 20% of search queries for TurboTax taking place via a mobile device, the company is investing in driving customers to an optimized mobile landing spot. “If we can get someone from a mobile search to get to a landing page and log in that’s successful because then we can talk to them by email -- then we can talk to them through other channels, even online advertising,” Berger said as she delivered a keynote address at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit on Wednesday. Berger said with traffic on mobile devices growing, there’s an effort to ensure emails opened on them have a compelling appearance. So, the company has put in place templates and is emphasizing responsive design. “If we detect what device they’re coming in on, then because of the responsive design, our emails will reformat so that they deliver well and they’re a great experience for people coming in on mobile,” she said. Last March, an SMS system was launched that also looked to build off an email program. When people finish a tax return, they can opt-in to receive a notice that the e-filing was accepted or rejected by the IRS. SMS was offered as a notification option and 27% of a customer segment signed up. TurboTax continues to operate a SnapTax app, where people can take a photo of a W-2 and their information can be imported. The app has roots in a program at TurboTax parent Intuit, where employees are given “unstructured time” and can spend 10% of their time how they want. TurboTax began running TV ads last year plugging options on smartphones and tablets and will again this year. “We’re going to show more mobile, more tablet in our national advertising because it is accretive to the brand,” Berger said. But Berger had to fight to persuade the company that it was worthwhile using valuable ad time to promote mobile options. Research showing 55% of customers at the likes of H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt who had a smartphone indicating they would be more likely to use TurboTax helped her lobbying efforts.
In a conversation about how to allocate precious resources, Brian Jaffe of Nationwide asks, "Why do we not regularly survey our email subscribers?" Given that we do customer surveys all the time, particularly on websites, why do we not do original research with subscribers? "You can never have enough data," says Rishi Mahalaha of eBay. However, assigning budget to research is hard. The panel agrees that testing has a budget, but research does not. Maybe the reason email marketers don't do this often is because we have so much response data. Perhaps we all feel that response and behavioral data is a sufficient proxy for perception of the email program by subscribers? Our volumes of great data is both a blessing and a burden.
The Direct Marketing Association's Stephanie Milller cited a recent Harvard Business Review article titled "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century." Miller asked attendees at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit if they have a data scientist in-house and a handful of hands went up. Who are these people? According to the HBR: "It’s a high-ranking professional with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data. The title has been around for only a few years. (It was coined in 2008 by one of us, D.J. Patil, and Jeff Hammerbacher, then the respective leads of data and analytics efforts at LinkedIn and Facebook.) But thousands of data scientists are already working at both start-ups and well-established companies. Their sudden appearance on the business scene reflects the fact that companies are now wrestling with information that comes in varieties and volumes never encountered before. If your organization stores multiple petabytes of data, if the information most critical to your business resides in forms other than rows and columns of numbers, or if answering your biggest question would involve a 'mashup' of several analytical efforts, you’ve got a big data opportunity."
LeadSpend CEO Craig Swerdloff wrote a blog post on his appearance on an Engagement Vs. Deliverability panel Tuesday at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit. Here is an excerpt: "There is near universal agreement that the following factors play a role in the ISPs' determination of your sender reputation, deliverability, and Inbox Placement Rate:
Marketing people – particularly email marketing people – have an opportunity to change the entire way that business operates. In fact, I would say that you CANNOT succeed, make money for your company, keep your job…. Uuless you EMBRACE THE ROLE OF CHANGE AGENT FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION. Think about it.