How to do Email Right and Wrong for Business Marketing Based on 2013 Customer Data Analysis
Why have I written a post about when email marketing goes right and wrong?
To show you that building personal relationships via email is a great bet on success while using newsletters and auto responders can be an easy way to ruin potential opportunities. This suggestion is supported by the data I have gathered in 2013 both in my business and my personal life. I suggest this knowing that many people and companies have experienced great success with their email marketing and list building techniques in the last ten years. I am confident in the next ten years, building an email list and using an impersonal approach will become an unsustainable technique for growth the way telemarketing is now. By impersonal I mean any email not written for and specifically sent to one person. The action to take based on this theory is to focus time and effort on personal customer relationships and creating content customers can access on demand rather than impersonal customer approaches or placing content in front of customers forcefully.
In my own business, I learned this the hard way and I always now use a personal approach for my customers. I give them what they ask for and a value added bonus sometimes directly when I deliver their order. My biggest customer is in South Korea and somehow keeps me in mind even when we do not speak for months. His business is worth nearly a third of my revenue and we have never spoke on the phone or communicated any way besides email. I answer the emails he sends and I only give him what he needs. The relationship is as simple as possible. Where it started with a small order, he continually gave me opportunities without me asking for them or bothering him with irrelevant emails. I am confident if I had tried to push him to being a bigger customer with repeated attempts to get him to place bigger orders, he would have grown annoyed and stopped responding to my emails. Since I made this mistake with customers before him, I am happy to have learned how to do it right.
To provide an example of how other companies are matching this approach, many startups I sign up with such as BuzzSprout (podcasting hosting) will not send an email about almost anything if you uncheck the box allowing them to send promotional emails. If I email their support, they send a personal response instead of an auto responder so that I do not get a reply until an actual person read the email and provided a thoughtful response. Some of the services these companies offer are so innovative, simple, and cost effective that I love them to begin. Since I love them so much, it is hard for them to get much more out of me and easy to lower my impression of them by wasting my time with impersonal information.
To support my theory, I will share my own experience both as a customer and as a business serving customers in 2013 of what has worked along with what has not. In summary, I have made huge gains out of building personal relationships and totally foregoing any list making strategy. My attempts to add email marketing to my business have not only been a failure but they have cost me relationships and leads I worked hard for. Here is the data I have gathered this year. Please note percentages are rounded for simplicity and that I offer online advertising services averaging over $200 for a first order which makes my "product or service" significantly different from many consumer products. This difference easily can account for why the data came out this way.
My company's customer contact data for 2013:
35% of all email leads were converted.
0% of leads converted with an auto responder.
0% of leads converted with an auto responder followed by a personal message.
5% of leads converted included an affiliate, virtual assistant, or third party responding first.
95% of leads converted included a personal response from me first.
90% of customers received a personal email response from me prior to ordering.
10% of customers never communicated directly via email with me prior to ordering (i.e. online orders with no communication prior to ordering or handled by third party without any lead on my end).
0% of repeat customers originally received an auto responder.
2% of repeat customers originally received a response from a virtual assistant, affiliate, or team member instead of from me.
98% of repeat customers originally received an email response from me either before or after placing an order.
100% of top 5% revenue repeat customers relationships were built exclusively via email with only me.
90% of all repeat customer relationships were built exclusively via email with me.
10% of all repeat customer relationships were built with the help of a third party or independent of any response to my emails (i.e. virtual assistants, Skype calls, or no contact at all).
85% of customers responded to any email from me.
90% of customers responded to a personal email from me addressing their order, their goals, or other information they shared exclusively with me.
25% of customers responded to an email from me including information which was not directly related to a previous conversation or an order. For example, I have a new book out or I am offering a new service you might like.
Why did I collect this information?
At the beginning of 2013, my business was starting to explode with growth. The consensus to me seemed to be that email marketing, outsourcing, affiliate marketing, and auto responders were what most of the "experts" suggested as tools I could use to handle more customers and convert more leads with less effort. I however was skeptical and wanted to see for myself. Since I often am wrong and the experts are often wrong, I tend to trust the data I have in order to know what works and what does not. After building most of my relationships personally via email in 2012, I decided I would consistently test efforts to build relationships other ways including through affiliates, virtual assistants, auto responders, and newsletters. I would often test this approach for a fixed period of time or on a lead generation method already proven effective combined with a new email address. This way I could strictly test the assumptions about how I could build a relationship via online communications without having the data clouded by other factors such as the lead generation method or the actual content itself. Naturally, no data is perfect and no analysis is perfect. That said, I have collected plenty of data before and performed hundreds of data analyses before. If I am willing to bet my livelihood on it, I am either right, foolish, not as smart as I think I am, lucky, or some combination of all of the above.
To further support my data, I looked at how I do business with other companies.
Me as a Customer Data:
0% of businesses used an email funnel to get my business.
90% rate at which I unsubscribe on the first email I get not sent directly to me either from an auto responder or from a newsletter.
0% got my business after I was interested and they sent me an impersonal introductory email (i.e. the lead phase prior to purchase).
40% got my business after sending me a personal email with my name and a specific response to the lead information I submitted.
60% got my business online without any service or contact.
50% of the time I gave a negative review online or to another person of a business for adding me to an email list without my permission regardless of the service I received.
30% of the time I gave a negative review online or to another person of a business for adding me to an email list without my permission even after I received great service.
95% of the time I gave a positive review online or to another person of a business when I was not added to an email list and received great service.
90% of the time I will intentionally avoid doing business again with a company even when I got exactly what I wanted but was repeatedly emailed without my permission with irrelevant information and sales.
Case Study of Doing It Wrong!
Vocus totally ruined their relationship with me via email marketing despite doing a great job with the actual service. How did this happen? I wanted to make a press release for my business using PRWeb. I was able to fairly quickly and easily do this using whatever mid-level package they offered for a few hundred dollars. I was very happy with the results and the follow ups from news websites and the traffic I received. I still occasionally get traffic from my press release and I am sure that in the future when I do a better job making a story out of it, I will even get some news coverage.
What went wrong?
I always aim to avoid any check boxes for "promotional newsletters" or any permission to send me impersonal email. Why? I get thousands of emails every week as I am sure many of you do. I get hundreds of personal emails addressed to me asking specific questions. I have to go through leads and manage active clients and continue to improve my relationship with my virtual assistant so that she can handle more of this for me. The point is I do most of my business through email exclusively. I spend about half of my time working answering emails and I rarely have the chance to send the first message. In my life more generally, I live a life of focus. I have a wife, three dogs, a house, a family, friends, and a love for playing Call of Duty. I try to waste as little of my time as possible and I try to always do one thing at a time and finish it rather than multitasking. This type of focus allows me to write a post of this length which is around 2,500 words in an hour. The people I do business with all also seem to have a similar approach to life. The easiest way to piss me off is to waste my time and this applies to my customers as well. When I get not one but more than ten emails with generic and useless information about promoting myself online, this constitutes wasting my time. I unsubscribed from every single email I got from Vocus or PRWeb and I still get one every few days. Maybe I should just stop checking the promotions tab? Thankfully the people at Google understand this problem and are on top of this problem already with using tabs.
What would have happened if they had not sent me so many emails?
When I see a strategy that works, I quickly expand it. I would have given Vocus repeat business nearly every month with a new story or press release. Their email marketing ruined the long term relationship they could have had and even caused me to rethink press releases generally.
To elaborate without being verbose, Best Buy did the same thing. I now go out of my way to order with Amazon or at Walmart instead of going to Best Buy despite the fact I love being in the store at Best Buy and have shopped there for more than ten years. They have always had great customer service and always been a great company to do business with as a customer outside of their email marketing. It is not that Walmart and Amazon don't do some promotional emails despite my best efforts to unsubscribe. It is the sheer volume of emails I get based on the amount of orders I place, the irrelevance of the emails, and the intentional disregard for my desire to not receive emails that ruins the relationship. On top of that, Best Buy even sold my phone number and now guaranteed I choose Amazon and Walmart over them as often as possible. What did they get out of selling my information? Likely only a few cents to maybe $50 at most. How much business did they lose? Thousands.
Is there an exception?
Live nation concerts for a few years was one of the few emails I actually checked about upcoming concerts in my area. I booked a few concerts based on the list they provided over the course of three years and eventually unsubscribed after continually being disappointed no good concerts were in my area. My thinking is that I can easily search for the artists I like and see when and where they are playing when I feel like it instead of reading emails which have a low likelihood of giving me good information.
Conclusion!
Communicating via email can be both a powerful tool for growing your business when used in a personal way and one of the easiest ways you can ruin a good opportunity when used poorly. Building personal and long term relationships via email in the business and luxury service industry is likely to provide hundreds of times more value than simply churning and burning a list or pushing for a large list of emails. This might or might not apply to the world of affiliate marketing and consumer marketing and I would guess the answer depends on who you ask.
I hope this post has been useful for you in gaining some perspective into what might be a good idea to do or not to do or to try. I always recommend finding out for yourself but beginning from an educated position. This means putting yourself in the position to test competing opinions rather than assuming one or the other is right to begin with. I am sure as I write this someone out there has an exact counter study suggesting that their auto responders converted beautifully and they do not have enough time to send a personal response. That's okay with me! I trust your data and your opinion for your situation. If you have a product or service that your system works with, then I would not change it! If you are not having great success using the methods that are supposed to work, give the personal approach a try!
To show you that building personal relationships via email is a great bet on success while using newsletters and auto responders can be an easy way to ruin potential opportunities. This suggestion is supported by the data I have gathered in 2013 both in my business and my personal life. I suggest this knowing that many people and companies have experienced great success with their email marketing and list building techniques in the last ten years. I am confident in the next ten years, building an email list and using an impersonal approach will become an unsustainable technique for growth the way telemarketing is now. By impersonal I mean any email not written for and specifically sent to one person. The action to take based on this theory is to focus time and effort on personal customer relationships and creating content customers can access on demand rather than impersonal customer approaches or placing content in front of customers forcefully.
In my own business, I learned this the hard way and I always now use a personal approach for my customers. I give them what they ask for and a value added bonus sometimes directly when I deliver their order. My biggest customer is in South Korea and somehow keeps me in mind even when we do not speak for months. His business is worth nearly a third of my revenue and we have never spoke on the phone or communicated any way besides email. I answer the emails he sends and I only give him what he needs. The relationship is as simple as possible. Where it started with a small order, he continually gave me opportunities without me asking for them or bothering him with irrelevant emails. I am confident if I had tried to push him to being a bigger customer with repeated attempts to get him to place bigger orders, he would have grown annoyed and stopped responding to my emails. Since I made this mistake with customers before him, I am happy to have learned how to do it right.
To provide an example of how other companies are matching this approach, many startups I sign up with such as BuzzSprout (podcasting hosting) will not send an email about almost anything if you uncheck the box allowing them to send promotional emails. If I email their support, they send a personal response instead of an auto responder so that I do not get a reply until an actual person read the email and provided a thoughtful response. Some of the services these companies offer are so innovative, simple, and cost effective that I love them to begin. Since I love them so much, it is hard for them to get much more out of me and easy to lower my impression of them by wasting my time with impersonal information.
To support my theory, I will share my own experience both as a customer and as a business serving customers in 2013 of what has worked along with what has not. In summary, I have made huge gains out of building personal relationships and totally foregoing any list making strategy. My attempts to add email marketing to my business have not only been a failure but they have cost me relationships and leads I worked hard for. Here is the data I have gathered this year. Please note percentages are rounded for simplicity and that I offer online advertising services averaging over $200 for a first order which makes my "product or service" significantly different from many consumer products. This difference easily can account for why the data came out this way.
My company's customer contact data for 2013:
35% of all email leads were converted.
0% of leads converted with an auto responder.
0% of leads converted with an auto responder followed by a personal message.
5% of leads converted included an affiliate, virtual assistant, or third party responding first.
95% of leads converted included a personal response from me first.
90% of customers received a personal email response from me prior to ordering.
10% of customers never communicated directly via email with me prior to ordering (i.e. online orders with no communication prior to ordering or handled by third party without any lead on my end).
0% of repeat customers originally received an auto responder.
2% of repeat customers originally received a response from a virtual assistant, affiliate, or team member instead of from me.
98% of repeat customers originally received an email response from me either before or after placing an order.
100% of top 5% revenue repeat customers relationships were built exclusively via email with only me.
90% of all repeat customer relationships were built exclusively via email with me.
10% of all repeat customer relationships were built with the help of a third party or independent of any response to my emails (i.e. virtual assistants, Skype calls, or no contact at all).
85% of customers responded to any email from me.
90% of customers responded to a personal email from me addressing their order, their goals, or other information they shared exclusively with me.
25% of customers responded to an email from me including information which was not directly related to a previous conversation or an order. For example, I have a new book out or I am offering a new service you might like.
Why did I collect this information?
At the beginning of 2013, my business was starting to explode with growth. The consensus to me seemed to be that email marketing, outsourcing, affiliate marketing, and auto responders were what most of the "experts" suggested as tools I could use to handle more customers and convert more leads with less effort. I however was skeptical and wanted to see for myself. Since I often am wrong and the experts are often wrong, I tend to trust the data I have in order to know what works and what does not. After building most of my relationships personally via email in 2012, I decided I would consistently test efforts to build relationships other ways including through affiliates, virtual assistants, auto responders, and newsletters. I would often test this approach for a fixed period of time or on a lead generation method already proven effective combined with a new email address. This way I could strictly test the assumptions about how I could build a relationship via online communications without having the data clouded by other factors such as the lead generation method or the actual content itself. Naturally, no data is perfect and no analysis is perfect. That said, I have collected plenty of data before and performed hundreds of data analyses before. If I am willing to bet my livelihood on it, I am either right, foolish, not as smart as I think I am, lucky, or some combination of all of the above.
To further support my data, I looked at how I do business with other companies.
Me as a Customer Data:
0% of businesses used an email funnel to get my business.
90% rate at which I unsubscribe on the first email I get not sent directly to me either from an auto responder or from a newsletter.
0% got my business after I was interested and they sent me an impersonal introductory email (i.e. the lead phase prior to purchase).
40% got my business after sending me a personal email with my name and a specific response to the lead information I submitted.
60% got my business online without any service or contact.
50% of the time I gave a negative review online or to another person of a business for adding me to an email list without my permission regardless of the service I received.
30% of the time I gave a negative review online or to another person of a business for adding me to an email list without my permission even after I received great service.
95% of the time I gave a positive review online or to another person of a business when I was not added to an email list and received great service.
90% of the time I will intentionally avoid doing business again with a company even when I got exactly what I wanted but was repeatedly emailed without my permission with irrelevant information and sales.
Case Study of Doing It Wrong!
Vocus totally ruined their relationship with me via email marketing despite doing a great job with the actual service. How did this happen? I wanted to make a press release for my business using PRWeb. I was able to fairly quickly and easily do this using whatever mid-level package they offered for a few hundred dollars. I was very happy with the results and the follow ups from news websites and the traffic I received. I still occasionally get traffic from my press release and I am sure that in the future when I do a better job making a story out of it, I will even get some news coverage.
What went wrong?
I always aim to avoid any check boxes for "promotional newsletters" or any permission to send me impersonal email. Why? I get thousands of emails every week as I am sure many of you do. I get hundreds of personal emails addressed to me asking specific questions. I have to go through leads and manage active clients and continue to improve my relationship with my virtual assistant so that she can handle more of this for me. The point is I do most of my business through email exclusively. I spend about half of my time working answering emails and I rarely have the chance to send the first message. In my life more generally, I live a life of focus. I have a wife, three dogs, a house, a family, friends, and a love for playing Call of Duty. I try to waste as little of my time as possible and I try to always do one thing at a time and finish it rather than multitasking. This type of focus allows me to write a post of this length which is around 2,500 words in an hour. The people I do business with all also seem to have a similar approach to life. The easiest way to piss me off is to waste my time and this applies to my customers as well. When I get not one but more than ten emails with generic and useless information about promoting myself online, this constitutes wasting my time. I unsubscribed from every single email I got from Vocus or PRWeb and I still get one every few days. Maybe I should just stop checking the promotions tab? Thankfully the people at Google understand this problem and are on top of this problem already with using tabs.
What would have happened if they had not sent me so many emails?
When I see a strategy that works, I quickly expand it. I would have given Vocus repeat business nearly every month with a new story or press release. Their email marketing ruined the long term relationship they could have had and even caused me to rethink press releases generally.
To elaborate without being verbose, Best Buy did the same thing. I now go out of my way to order with Amazon or at Walmart instead of going to Best Buy despite the fact I love being in the store at Best Buy and have shopped there for more than ten years. They have always had great customer service and always been a great company to do business with as a customer outside of their email marketing. It is not that Walmart and Amazon don't do some promotional emails despite my best efforts to unsubscribe. It is the sheer volume of emails I get based on the amount of orders I place, the irrelevance of the emails, and the intentional disregard for my desire to not receive emails that ruins the relationship. On top of that, Best Buy even sold my phone number and now guaranteed I choose Amazon and Walmart over them as often as possible. What did they get out of selling my information? Likely only a few cents to maybe $50 at most. How much business did they lose? Thousands.
Is there an exception?
Live nation concerts for a few years was one of the few emails I actually checked about upcoming concerts in my area. I booked a few concerts based on the list they provided over the course of three years and eventually unsubscribed after continually being disappointed no good concerts were in my area. My thinking is that I can easily search for the artists I like and see when and where they are playing when I feel like it instead of reading emails which have a low likelihood of giving me good information.
Conclusion!
Communicating via email can be both a powerful tool for growing your business when used in a personal way and one of the easiest ways you can ruin a good opportunity when used poorly. Building personal and long term relationships via email in the business and luxury service industry is likely to provide hundreds of times more value than simply churning and burning a list or pushing for a large list of emails. This might or might not apply to the world of affiliate marketing and consumer marketing and I would guess the answer depends on who you ask.
I hope this post has been useful for you in gaining some perspective into what might be a good idea to do or not to do or to try. I always recommend finding out for yourself but beginning from an educated position. This means putting yourself in the position to test competing opinions rather than assuming one or the other is right to begin with. I am sure as I write this someone out there has an exact counter study suggesting that their auto responders converted beautifully and they do not have enough time to send a personal response. That's okay with me! I trust your data and your opinion for your situation. If you have a product or service that your system works with, then I would not change it! If you are not having great success using the methods that are supposed to work, give the personal approach a try!
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