IMV20 : Email Marketing

The following is a transcript for IMV20 : Email Marketing. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo, Episode 20. I’m your host, Ted Murphy, and with me today is Nancy Carl, email marketing specialist for Armstrong World Industries. Welcome to the show today, Nancy.

Nancy Carl:

Thank you.

Ted Murphy:

Nancy, can you start off by telling our listeners a little bit about Armstrong? What exactly is it that you guys do?

Nancy Carl:

Armstrong is a global leader in designing and manufacturing floors, ceilings and cabinets for residential and commercial customers. We’re based in Lancaster and we have 41 plants in 12 countries and almost 15,000 employees.

Ted Murphy:

So you guys are actually a Fortune 500 company? Is that correct?

Nancy Carl:

Yes, we are.

Ted Murphy:

All right. Well, we’re here to talk today a little bit about email marketing and obviously being an email specialist, you’re the right one to talk to about that. So, can you tell us a little bit about email marketing and the impact that it’s had on Armstrong’s brand?

Nancy Carl:

Well, in general we use email marketing to generate some awareness for Armstrong as a brand, but I think what we’re really focusing on is creating a brand loyalty that enables our customers to carry through to the store visit.

We don't sell our flooring products online so it’s especially important for us to – we call it inoculating against the switch. Making sure that in retail people might not be persuaded to purchase other brands.

One way that our email marketing does that is to feel like real help for the customers. We’re working on a large email campaign that’s going to help facilitate customers through that purchase cycle by driving them to our Web site where we have a lot of education materials about our flooring. We have comparison charts, design tips and tools and the ability to purchase samples.

So, we feel that with these tools easily at hand in every email, we’re gonna make the process so easy it’s a no-brainer when they get to the store.

Ted Murphy:

So, for you it sounds like it’s a lot about education and providing the customer with tools.

Nancy Carl:

Definitely and we want to make sure that when they walk into the store they’re prepared enough to answer any questions that might come up with the retailer about why they should or shouldn’t purchase Armstrong.

Ted Murphy:

What type of opportunities do those tools create for people purchasing your products?

Nancy Carl:

Well, we try to use email marketing to connect with the customers on a very personal and engaging level almost as if they were talking to employees here. Our emails here include personalized salutations and content that we feel are very informal to invite one-on-one interactions with our customer service department as the customers will ask us for more help on narrowing down their flooring choices.

So, email’s a great way to drive customers to the most important information on the Web site for their task at hand. Whether that’s selecting the right floor, designing as part of a remodeling project or even just helping them understand how to purchase a floor at the store.

Ted Murphy:

And what type of response have you been getting from your customers regarding these emails? The decision to go the informational and educational route. How was that decision determined?

Nancy Carl:

Well, I think our customers do find our current campaigns to be very engaging. They talk back and reply to our emails as if they were talking to a real person and we have above industry average open and click through rates so we feel that we’re definitely engaging them in a positive way.

In the future we’re looking to marry that anecdotal evidence we have to actual purchase data to make sure the program’s really working.

Ted Murphy:

So, what information do you think is most relevant to understand about the customer when it comes to email?

Nancy Carl:

Well, we're definitely moving towards a very highly targeted personalized email marketing program. I’ve heard it said that irrelevance is the new spam and as everyone’s inbox is filling up with blast and post card emails, the value proposition we have, what we’re offering via email, has to increase. So, we’re moving from knowing very little about our customers to collecting the only information we’re going to use to communicate with them via email on our Web site.

So, this means that we’re being responsible communicators. We don’t just collect information we won’t message to. And we don’t just send emails just to send them. We want to understand what products our customers are interested in, what type of project they’re working on and enough about them personally to make sure the emails are relevant.

So, for example, do they have pets or children or other concerns that are gonna drive their flooring choice? Are they gung-ho do-it-yourselfers that we would recommend different products to?

We feel these pieces of data add up to form a persona that we can communicate with as if we were the retailer or even better.

And we also let consumers be in control of their preferences. So, they’re engaging with us as much as we’re engaging with them.

Ted Murphy:

How do you go about collecting that data? How do you determine that someone actually has a pet or maybe starting a new home improvement project?

Nancy Carl:

Well, I think the most direct route is the one we’re going for and we just ask our customers on our Web site. And we do that so that they feel like they’re giving us information for a reason. And that reason is that we’re gonna tell them something that’s gonna help them make a better flooring purchase.

Ted Murphy:

Great. We are going to go to voicemail and just for our listeners, you can always call and leave a voicemail for us if you have any questions about Internet marketing. And that number is 1-866-206-4461.

Blaine:

Hi. This is Blaine from Levittown. Love the show. Have a quick question. Noticing that there’s been a lot of discussion among email marketers lately about the accuracy of open rates and how important they really are. What kind of measurements do you think really carry the most weight for that kind of thing? Great. I hope to hear an answer soon. Thank you.

Nancy Carl:

Well, I would say that measurements obviously are very important to us as a marketing department. You know we’re always trying to justify our existence. So, we think it’s very important to continue to measure open rates. Although there’s been a lot of debate, we kind of feel like if you’re open rates aren’t strong, then your click throughs and any interactions won’t be strong either. And plus it lets you see if your campaigns are working over time.

But, beyond that, I think that we can also measure success of our email marketing programs with key performance indicators that we’ve already determined like site registrations or sample orders. For us it’s contact emails or live chats or anything else that you’ve identified as a success metric on your Web site.

And if you can connect online communication with your offline sales, and I know that a lot of companies can’t necessarily do that easily, but you definitely should.

And here at Armstrong we also use six sigma methodologies to ensure we’re on the right track.

Ted Murphy:

So tell me a little bit about targeting towards customers during the sales cycle. How do you determine where they are, what type of messaging they should receive and how you time that whole exchange?

Nancy Carl:

One of the things we’re doing is we’re moving towards a more guided selling approach on our Web site. And we definitely know that when somebody raises their hand to be contacted and opts in from our Web site, they’re the hottest within the first two months from opting in.

So, to quickly understand and communicate with them immediately is very important to our program. The more we understand about how our customers are shopping online, the better our email communications are going to be. So we do a lot of research to understand that.

And we were finding that purchasing a floor is a more highly considered purchase and it more closely mirrors how a person might shop for a car. So we use a lot of benchmarking from the automotive industry to drive some of our strategy.

And then we’re trying to also connect that with a customer profile data that we’re collecting and this makes that kind of where you are in the purchase cycle targeting much more possible for us.

Ted Murphy:

I know that we deal with a lot of organizations that have multiple stakeholders that are all wanting to communicate to the customer base. How do you guys determine what type of information is ultimately going to be communicated out and how do you balance all the needs of the different departments inside your organization?

Nancy Carl:

That’s a very interesting question because I’ve been chiefly talking about our residential flooring department but we do have a global organization. So we do have a lot of overlap in who wants to communicate with who.

So, part of what we’re doing is setting up these profiles and centralizing the communication process so that when users are profiled, we can tell who we’re communicating with over the whole organization.

And we also have, you know, a lot of corporate standards around what types of messages can be sent and that all depends on the email marketing strategy that we set up to begin with.

So we’re really finding that the better strategy that we have and the better we’ve communicated with our business unit leaders then the easier it becomes to control what actually goes out the door as far as emails are concerned.

Ted Murphy:

And when it comes to emails and communicating, how much is too much? What type of parameters have you set in terms of how many messages a person should receive in a given timeframe?

Nancy Carl:

Well, right now I think the best example of that is our commercial audience where we’re trying to communicate at least twice monthly and we’re trying to watch our site traffics, our open rates, and our click through rates. And we have seen when we have over communicated to people more than say three or four times a month, we’re finding that sometimes our open rates tend to go down.

But I think one of the key things there is watching what your programs are doing, measuring, what are your success measures and then refining it. You know, perhaps this is an indicator that we need to work on our subject lines or perhaps this is an indicator that we need to clean our list better. Or we need to try to get more opt-ins than we’re currently getting because we’re not increasing that side of the coin.

So, I think there are a lot of different things that go into too much or not enough. But, as far as blasts go, we really think that probably once a week is the tops for us. Of course, that varies by industry. You know?

Ted Murphy:

Absolutely. So, what are the top three recommendations that you would give to our listeners regarding the use of email and email marketing?

Nancy Carl:

Well, I think we’re in kind of a unique position right now because we’re kind of leaving the timeframe when setting up your infrastructure is the only thing you were really worrying about. Or even trying to figure out how to put together an email program.

So, right now I think moving forward the most important thing you want to do is know your customer. And this means that you have to dive right into personalization segmentation. If you don’t have the ability to segment your list right now or a method for collecting and centralizing this kind of data, it should definitely be your first priority.

I think that emails that speak directly to your customers’ individual needs are gonna be the clear winners in box battle.

I also think that the standard test, measure, analyze, refine methodology for doing your email programs is something that you should continue. People still think that email is free and fast and there’s a lot to be said for that but it’s also something that you really have to watch as far as creative design, copywriting, usability, and spending the time that individual campaigns really need so that you can customize them for the audience or test your subject lines. I mean those things take time.

So, and the segmentation that you do isn’t gonna do any good if your emails are all the same. And you also need to keep your eye on the results to make sure that you’re keeping your content fresh.

And I think the last thing you need to think about is making sure your side of the street is clean. And by that I mean none of those nagging issues that people dealt with in the past like permission, what’s the subscription process, are you compliant with CAN-SPAM, how’s your deliverability? Those should all be things that you don’t have to think twice about. So, that way it leaves you more time to focus on your strategy.

Ted Murphy:

Excellent! Well, Nancy, I appreciate you coming on the show today and I wish you much luck with your email marketing campaigns in the future.

Nancy Carl:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Ted Murphy:

For those of you who are not familiar with Armstrong, shame on you. And you can go to www.armstrong.com and you should definitely check out their flooring products.

Nancy Carl:

And sign up for our email marketing program.

Ted Murphy:

Absolutely. You can see how it’s supposed to be done. All right. Have a great day!

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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