Auteur: Melissa Miller

Email marketing can be a tricky balancing act. You want to use copy that will get your recipients’ attention, but you don’t want to select words that will raise red flags with SPAM filters.

But there’s some good news! If you’ve been email marketing for a while (or even if you haven’t), you might have heard that “free” is no longer a dirty word with the email overlords. Still, some email marketers are hesitant to use the word, just in case there’s some truth to the former rumors.

Well, we decided to channel our inner Sherlock Holmes and do a little investigating. We tested it ourselves … with two questions in mind, actually:

1. Does using the word “free” hurt my deliverability?
2. Does my click-through rate improve if I use the word “free?”

And, if the answer to both of these questions is “yes,” then what’s the net effect of these two forces acting against each other? That is to say, even if my deliverability suffers, does the higher click-through rate make up for the hit? Okay, I guess that’s three questions. Let’s dig in …

The Test

We set up the test by creating two separate emails.

• Version A had the word “free” in the subject line, sprinkled into the body three times, and included as text on the supporting image.
• Version B was completely void of the word “free.” Instead of “Free Guide,” we used “SEO Guide” in the subject line.

 

The results were truly fascinating. Here’s what we found:

Deliverability Results

We measured deliverability with two software tools: 1) Return Path and 2) HubSpot.

When we looked at Return Path’s SPAM Filter Check results, we found that the two emails performed similarly. Of the nine filters checked, version A — the email including the word “free” — passed seven, while version B passed eight (78% versus 89%). This difference was attributed to one particular server filter that identifies itself as a “‘carrier grade’ filtering solution, used by some of the biggest ISPs in the business.”

Return Path, however, also indicated that both emails had identical SpamAssassin Scores of 1.3. (As a general guideline, Return Path recommends aiming for a score lower than 5 in order to avoid deliverability issues.)

HubSpot’s email software revealed similar results. Version A (with “free”) got delivered to 99.25% of selected recipients, and version B got delivered to 99.24%. This means that version A did 0.01% better.

Considering all three data points, it looks like “free” raised an additional (small) red flag, but it was not severe enough to make version A perform statistically worse than version B. In other words, using the word “free” made no significant difference.

Click-Through Rate Results

The results based on click-through rates were a different story. One email was the clear winner with a click-through rate that was 17% better at 99% statistical significance.

Can you guess which one?

It was variation B, the version that excluded the word “free”! Even when you look at the click-through rate out of only those who opened the email, variation B performed 5% better than A.

Now, this doesn’t mean that all emails without the word “free” will necessarily get a better click-through rate. It does, however, tell us that HubSpot’s email subscribers are more responsive to the word “SEO” than the word “free.” I can think of a couple reasons why this would be true. Either HubSpot subscribers are especially keen on SEO, or they already know that our content is free, and therefore, the word does not add value. Either way, it’s fascinating to see that “free” — a term that seems to be regarded as an all-powerful, silver bullet in the marketing world — did not win this competition.

Marketing Takeaways

This test revealed two key findings:

1. The word “free” on its own will not hurt your emails’ deliverability.
2. Even though it’s safe to use “free,” it might not be the most effective term for your audience.

The Lowdown on Keyword Filtering & Identifying SPAM

I spoke with HubSpot’s own deliverability specialists about point #1, or more specifically, keywords’ effect on email deliverability. They explained that keyword filtering is the old school method for identifying SPAM, but no longer is it the standard to outright reject emails based on keywords alone.

Instead, keyword filtering is simply used to help score your emails. And it is just one factor among several. Keyword filtering only hurts you when you have other problems, like a poor Sender Score (i.e. your IP reputation), email lists with low engagement, or a poor domain reputation. While keywords do impact the way you are perceived by a server, it’s not as heavy handed as the rumors have suggested, and you will not get rejected just because the word “free” is pervasive in your email.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, we can all go forth and safely test “free” against whichever keywords we fancy!

Have you tried using “free” in your emails? What kind of results have you seen?

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If you’re hip to the popular email marketing statistics, you probably know all too well that your email database slowly dies over time. In fact, 25% of your list will expire every year as readers switch jobs, email providers, or unsubscribe from your emails. As your list depreciates, it’s important to not only make sure you’re keeping your list clean, but also that you’re not throwing away active contacts. So what’s the solution? A re-engagement campaign!

What Is a Re-Engagement Campaign?

A re-engagement campaign is a systematic method for re-awakening inactive subscribers, while also identifying which email addresses in your database you should let go of. The campaign only involves your stale contacts — people who have been on your list for a long time who may or may not still be opening, reading, and clicking on your emails. The goal of a re-engagement campaign is to identify which portion of your list you should retain, and which portion you’re better off removing.

Why Is This So Important?

There are several reason why you would want to execute a re-engagement campaign:

1) You’re Emailing an Old List or Switching ESPs

A re-engagement campaign is critical if you’re going to start emailing an old list, or if you’re moving over to a new email service provider (ESP). Batch-and-blasting an old list can get you into some pretty hot water! Your email provider would likely suspend your account if you exceed a certain threshold of bounces. And once you’re suspended, most email providers will reach out and ask you about your list source in order to determine how much of a risk you are to their network. Senders with continued high bounce rates can hurt that ESP’s sending reputation, or even result in them getting added to block lists. It’s similar to borrowing the keys to your friend’s car — your buddy is going to be mighty angry with you if you crash his beloved wheels!

2) To Keep Your Domain’s Reputation Healthy

Another reason to execute a re-engagement campaign is to keep your domain’s reputation healthy. If you repeatedly email people who don’t open, read, or click on your emails, you run the risk of tarnishing the reputation of your company’s domain. Domain reputation is a big factor when it comes to getting into inboxes. And, most importantly, your domain reputation can follow you to different providers. So even if you hop from one email provider to another, you’re not fooling anyone if your domain reputation is tarnished.

3) To Stay Budget-Conscious

Lastly, executing a re-engagement campaign will enable you to make sure you’re not wasting your money. As your list gets older, you’ll end up getting less bang for your buck if you don’t clean out the stale contacts. A re-engagement campaign will ensure that you’re not wasting precious marketing budget on email sends to dead addresses.

How to Launch a Re-Engagement Campaign, Step by Step

Ready to launch your first re-engagement email campaign? Follow these 5 steps, and you’ll reap the benefits of a successful email re-awakening!

Step 1: Give Each of Your Contacts an Age 

First, establish a way to assign an age to each of your contacts. There are several ways you can do this, depending on what data is accessible. For example, you could either use the date the contact became a subscriber, the last interaction date, the date of the contact’s source, or any other indicator of age.

Step 2: Decide When Contacts Become Unengaged

Once you’ve established an age for each of your contacts, select a cutoff point where you suspect your list starts to become unengaged. Your cutoff can start anywhere between 3 and 6 months old.

Step 3: Segment Your List

Choose how granular you want to be about segmentation. The more granular you are, the more value you’re likely to get out of this campaign. That is, you can pinpoint your “dead” contacts more accurately if you group your list in 3-month segments versus 6-month segments. The idea is that there’s a cliff — i.e. there’s a certain point in which all contacts beyond a certain age are too cold to continue emailing. The question you want to answer is, at what point does the number of bounces, SPAM complaints, and dead addresses outweigh the benefits of the emails sent? The more refined your segmentation is, the better you’ll be able to pinpoint that age.

(For example, HubSpot’s revamped Email tool, which is currently rolling out to our customers, includes a sleek list segmentation tool that offers a simple way of doing this. You can quickly create cohorts of your database based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.)

When building your segments, you should aim to keep them around 5,000 contacts or fewer. This number is based on the fact that aside from bounce rate, the actual volume of bounces matters too. Depending on your ESP, it may be okay to have a high bounce rate if the volume of bounces isn’t too high.

Step 4: Design Your Emails and Craft Their Copy

The next step is to design your emails and develop the copy for the campaign. Create one email for each segment you’re trying to reawaken. You can either send the same email to each segment, or if you’ve decided to segment more granularly using other variables in addition to just age, you can choose to cater the content/offer and copy within that email to the interests of that particular segment of contacts. The one key component you can’t afford to ignore is that you should be offering something your unengaged contacts will think is highly valuable. Consider this to be your last chance to engage these stale contacts before you cut them loose. And ultimately, your goal is to try to get them to interact with the message. A good method for choosing the content/offer to include in your emails is to analyze the performance of past email sends, and choose something that you know already performs well.

Engagement is critical, because it’s a metric used by email providers to evalute whether or not to deliver email into an inbox. They’re actually looking at what subscribers are doing; for example, in the Gmail client, how many people archived your email without reading it? If they did open it, did they spend time reading it? Actions, like clicking “Reply,” signal positive engagement to email services, and strengthen your sender reputation as a result.

Step 5: Systematically Send Your Emails

Once you have your segments and emails prepared, start by sending your email to the youngest segment. Wait 24 hours, and then check your success metrics. These include: (1) bounce rate (2) complaint rate and (3) click and opens rates. If all of these numbers look healthy, proceed to send the email to your next segment. Repeat this process until the numbers start to look dicey.

You’re probably wondering, “What qualifies as dicey?” Here is a rundown of what you should be keeping an eye out for:

1) Bounce rates over 5% are cause for concern, as anything over 5% can get your account shut off by some ESPs. For more info on what an acceptable bounce rate is, you should check with your ESP. Most ESPs publish such information in their acceptable use policy.

2) SPAM compliant rates should be 0.1% or lower, although the actual threshold that most ISPs publish is 0.3%. Anything over 0.3% would likely result in a chat with your ESP’s abuse desk. In addition to the bounce rate, HubSpot’s own Email tool, for example, makes the SPAM complaint rate of every email easy to access:

3) Open and click-through rates are more subjective. The best way to determine a threshold for these is to think in terms of dollars. That is, ask yourself, “Is it worth it to continue spending money and time to email these people?” If you’re not getting a suitable conversion rate from a given segment, it’s time to let them go.

That’s all there is to it! Once you notice that your metrics are reporting some pretty dismal numbers, it’s safe to assume that any segment of contacts who are older than that should be removed from your list.

Have you ever tried executing a re-engagement email campaign? What challenges did you encounter?

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A study published by the Social Media Examiner unveiled several interesting statistics about how marketing professionals are leveraging social media in 2012. The study found that the majority of marketers, 59%, are using social media for 6 hours or more a week; 33% are dedicating 11 or more hours weekly. On the higher end, nearly 15% spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.

The study not only covered how much time marketers dedicate to social media; it also reported on the specific benefits:

• 69% of respondents reported social media marketing led to an increase in traffic.
• 58% reported lead generation was a benefit.
• 40% reported increased sales attributed to social media efforts.

This data begs the questions: How did these marketers produce these results? What about the 31% of marketers who didn’t see an increase in traffic? What are they not doing that the others are doing?

There are different factors at play, but they all point to one overarching reason: social media marketing success doesn’t happen overnight; it’s an investment that takes time and ongoing work.

Two Critical Factors to Long-Term Social Media Success

Time is the first key ingredient to your long-term social media success. Social Media Examiner’s study asked respondents to indicate how many hours per week they dedicated to social media, and whether or not they saw improved sales from these efforts. The results show that those who consistently put in the time, week after week, saw the best results. Of the marketers who spent 30 or more hours per week on social media, 65% reported increased sales directly linked to those efforts.

Experience is another factor. The longer you’ve been working at it, the more returns you will see. There was a striking correlation, as shown in the graph below, between the number of years marketers had been investing in social media and the improvement in sales. Those marketers with 3 or more years of experience were most likely to report an increase in sales attributed to social media:

 So how can you achieve these gains using social media?

1) Set specific goals.

What are your social media marketing goals? Are you trying to drive a record amount of traffic to your website? Or maybe you need to generate a certain number of qualified leads by the end of the month. There are a couple of simple ways you can calculate goals. If you have historical data on your social media metrics, you can develop a schedule of goals based on a target growth rate. So if I generated 1,000 social media leads last month and I want to achieve 20% growth month over month, my goals in the upcoming months will be 1,200, 1,440, 1,728, and so on.

Alternately, you can base your social media targets on your overall marketing goal. In other words, you can work backwards from the overall number — let’s say it’s a leads goal — by determining what share of your total goal will be supported by your social media efforts. For example, if you want to generate 10,000 total leads this month, you could commit your social media channel to a contribution of 8% (800) of those leads.

By setting specific quantitative goals up front, you will be able to prioritize your efforts and determine where your time is best spent. Your goals will also drive the type of content that you create and the calls-to-action you use. So if you’re trying to generate new leads who are interested in, say, unicorn footwear, you know you should spend your time building an information-rich offer on unicorn footwear that you’ll promote on your social media accounts via a dedicated landing page.

2) Determine which social networks will let you to reach your goals.

You’ve got the obvious options — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter —  along with a host of niche networks, from Epernicus (a professional networking site for research scientists) to Ravlery (a network for those who love knitting and crochet).

You’ll find that certain networks will be more effective for your business than others. The most recent State of Inbound Marketing Report found that different industries experience different customer acquisition results with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. For example, businesses in the Retail space reported tremendous success with Facebook (92%), whereas Healthcare businesses did not. Instead, Healthcare’s highest success rate was with LinkedIn.

You can figure out which networks are right for you with a little bit of market research and experimentation; we also have a blog post on the subject to guide you through the social network decision making process. Once you have some data points, you can create more granular goals by channel. The more you experiment with different social networks, the easier it will be to make informed decisions about which networks should be contributing the most to your goals.

3) Create a content plan.

Now that you have goals set and a sense of which social networks to leverage, you can build out a content plan. Because what else will you fuel your social presence with? If you’re trying to drive traffic and leads, you need a ton of content to actually meet those goals.

To start, you will want to build a list of your current inventory of offers so you can see what you already have to work with. This will also make it easier to rotate old offers back into the mix at a later date — remember, content you post to your social media accounts expires quickly, so it’s okay to resurface offer content. Next, your team should keep a document outlining the content in the pipeline to be created, and each offer’s expected date of completion. Keeping a schedule like this not only helps keep everyone informed — it also helps keep people on track to meet their content creation goals if they know your social media success depends on it!

There are a wide range of offer types to consider adding to your pipeline, from videos, to infographics, to information rich ebooks. Some of these formats will be better at generating general traffic, while others will appeal to a more targeted audience that can convert into qualified leads. That’s why it’s important to go back to your goals. Ask yourself: Are the offers we’re planning to create and promote aligned with our social media goals? 

4) Create a schedule.

Once you know what content you have at your disposal, it’s time to create a publishing calendar. This should be a schedule that you will adhere to on a daily basis. It doesn’t have to be complicated — it can live in a simple Google Doc or shared spreadsheet that multiple team members can access. Also, don’t feel that you need to build everything out a whole month in advance! Usually a week or so is all you need.

The calendar should contain everything you need so that you can execute the updates quickly. For example, for Twitter you should have the tweets pre-composed so you can just copy & paste, or schedule them using a social media publishing tool. There are lots of different update types to choose from, so get creative. And for some excellent tips on how to compose highly optimized updates, I recommend you check out this recently published guide on the subject.

5) Set aside time in advance.

Social Media Examiner data also shows that consistency is key. Make sure you block off a bit of time in your calendar every day to monitor how your fans and followers are engaging with your content, keep the conversation going, deal with any problems that arise, and assess (even if just anecdotally) what type of content is resonating with your community. You should also proactively find people to connect with — look for influencers in your industry you can follow or retweet on Twitter, for example. This doesn’t need to take up too much of your day, but a periodic check-in will help you build your reach faster, and maintain a good reputation with your fans and followers.

Think of it as an investment. You won’t experience social media success overnight; but with time, your social media presence can become a valuable asset to help you achieve your goals!

Have you had success or disappointments with investing in social media marketing? Tell us about your experience.

Image credit: deb roby

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At last week’s eM+C event, All About eMail Live!, several questions arose at a roundtable discussion about the benefits of a shared IP versus a dedicated IP for your email marketing sending. If you’re weighing these two options, it can get a little confusing as one solution is not always better than the other for every business.

Selecting the right solution for you depends on a variety of factors. And the first step to figuring out whether you should opt for a dedicated or shared IP is by understanding what exactly the difference between these two options is. Let’s get started with some definitions:

• Shared IP: A shared IP is one that is used by more than one sender, i.e. a pool of companies.
• Dedicated IP: A dedicated IP is one that is used by a single sender. The sender must purchase and set up the dedicated IP with their email marketing vendor.

Now let’s dive into the factors that should go into selecting a dedicated or shared IP.

Cost

This aspect of the decision is fairly straightforward. Shared IPs are usually less expensive than dedicated IPs because your email marketing vendor can spread the cost of a shared IP across more customers. Companies opting for a dedicated IP also typically have to pay for the initial setup fees and/or recurring maintenance costs. But you’re probably not making a decision based on cost alone, so let’s move on to the next factor that will impact your decision.

Maintenance

With a dedicated IP, you need to need to make sure you’re sending out enough email to maintain a top notch reputation with ISPs. (We’ll talk more about reputation as a factor in your decision next.) If you opt for a dedicated IP and you either don’t send much email, or you don’t send email on a consistent basis, then it could be difficult to establish yourself as a trustworthy, spam-free sender. This negatively impacts your deliverability; ISPs and webmail services look for a decent amount of consistent volume before they allow you to reach their users’ inboxes.

In the case of a shared IP, however, this is not a problem — your email service provider (ESP) can pool the emails of multiple senders, and thus maintain the IP’s reputation so you don’t have to worry about maintaining the proper sending volume.

Reputation

As you may already know, your sender reputation is everything when it comes to deliverability. If you are sending from an email server with a spic-and-span reputation, your emails will make it in front of the eyes of your subscribers. And as we noted previously, your email volume is one factor that goes into the decision to place your emails in a recipient’s inbox. The other contributing factors pertain to list cleanliness, which is determined by metrics like hard bounce rate, spamtrap hits, and SPAM complaint rate.

Senders on a shared IP are lumped together from a reputation standpoint. The reputation of the IP you’re using is determined by the email practices of everyone who uses that IP. For that reason, ESPs are often proactive about list cleanliness by establishing import rules, and typically monitor their servers for senders employing poor or black-hat email marketing tactics that could hurt deliverability for everyone.

Now you may be thinking, “If I go with my own dedicated IP, I’ll never have to worry about the consequences of other senders’ bad behavior.” That’s true — but this means you need to be completely honest with yourself about your own email practices. If you’re not completely confident in the cleanliness of your list, it’s possible that you can actually benefit from the good habits of your neighbors on a shared IP. I’m not advocating that you test your ESP’s threshold for bad practices, rather pointing out that you are more accountable for your actions when you use a dedicated IP.

What to Do Once You Decide on Shared vs. Dedicated IP

So let’s say you’ve made a decision. What are the next steps? 

If you’re going to go with a shared IP, make sure you ask your ESP these two questions:

1) What are your rules for importing subscribers? (Here is a list of the questions HubSpot asks of our own customers.) These rules are important for you to know — not only because your IP neighbors have to abide by them, but also because you have to, too!

2) What are the acceptance rates of your shared IPs? You can follow this up by asking for their Return Path Sender Score, the trusted standard for email deliverability. To give you a sense of what is normal, a recent study from Return Path reported that for servers with a Sender Score of 91+ (i.e. legitimate servers), only 88% of messages actually ended up in the inbox.

If you go the alternate route and decide you’re ready for a dedicated IP, talk to your ESP about their offerings and be prepared to warm up any new IP addresses. Warming up an IP address is a critical step to earning a stellar reputation. The idea is that you want to gradually increase the volume of email sent, rather than blasting out a large volume too quickly. As a new IP address, ISPs won’t recognize you as a “good sender” right away, and therefore could mistake your new blasts as malicious, impacting your deliverability.

Have you ever been through the process of deciding between a dedicated or shared IP? Share the process you used to evaluate the pros and cons in the comments!

 

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HubSpot’s newly released 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report reveals fascinating data around marketers’ lead generation costs and how various lead sources compare to one another.

The study, which is based on a survey conducted in January 2012 of 972 marketing professionals, found that inbound marketing-dominated organizations experience a 61% lower cost per lead than organizations that predominately leverage outbound marketing. The average cost per lead for outbound-dominated businesses was $346. In comparison, the average cost per lead for businesses leveraging primarily inbound techniques was $135. Take a look at the data in more detail below.

Inbound marketing techniques include SEO, blogging, and social media. The focus of inbound marketing is to get found by relevant prospects who are using the Internet to learn about products and services. Outbound marketing techniques include direct mail, trade shows, and telemarketing. Outbound methods are a more traditional approach to marketing wherein businesses push their messages to prospects, as opposed to attracting prospects to them.

The survey also asked participants to classify each lead generation category as ‘Below Average Cost,’ ‘Near Average Cost,’ or ‘Above Average Cost’. The results of the survey showed:

• Blogs, social media and organic search maintained the top slots as least expensive.
• Blogs had the highest instance of being reported as ‘Below Average Cost.’
• 52% of companies who blog indicated leads from this channel were ‘Below Average Cost.’
• Trade shows, direct mail, and telemarketing were most frequently ranked as more expensive.

 

These findings don’t necessarily mean that every business should entirely eliminate outbound marketing methods. Rather, it’s important to strike the right balance for your own business, and determine which channels actually deliver the highest ROI. In addition, some of your target segments may be more or less receptive to a certain channel. The easiest way to track the performance of each channel is with a closed-loop marketing system, which tracks leads from their initial channel, through their first conversion, until they become a customer.

For an in-depth review of the study’s findings, join us for the upcoming 2012 State of Inbound webinar on Thursday, March 1st, 2012.

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HubSpot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report is now available! The report is based on a survey conducted in January 2012 of 972 marketing professionals. The study includes data and insights about marketers’ costs, budgets, lead quality, and priorities.

This is the fourth consecutive year HubSpot has conducted this study, so the latest report includes not only current data, but also trends from 2009 to 2012.

For an in-depth review of the study’s findings, you can attend the upcoming 2012 State of Inbound Marketing webinar this Thursday, March 1st at 1 PM ET. Here, we’ll reveal some of the most interesting statistics from the report.

Cost and Budget Statistics

1) Inbound leads cost per lead 61% less than outbound leads. Tweet This!

2) The average cost-per-lead for outbound-dominated businesses is $346. Tweet This!

3) The average cost-per-lead for inbound-dominated businesses is $135. Tweet This!

4) 89% of businesses are either maintaining or increasing their inbound marketing budgets. Tweet This!

5) The average budget spent on company blogs and social media increased from 9% in 2009 to 21% in 2012. Tweet This!

6) The average budget spent on telemarketing decreased from 10% to 5% in 2012. Tweet This!

7) In 2012, small businesses plan to spend 43% of their budgets on inbound marketing, while large businesses plan to spend 21%. Tweet This!

8) In 2012, small businesses are only giving 14% of their budget to outbound, while large businesses are allocating 33%. Tweet This!

9) In 2012, small businesses plan to spend dramatically more of their budgets on social media and blogs than large businesses. Tweet This!

Lead Quality and Sales Statistics

10) 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog. Tweet This!

11) 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog. Tweet This!

12) 62% of companies using LinkedIn have acquired a customer from the network. Tweet This!

13) 70% of marketers indicate that they blog at least weekly. Tweet This!

14) 77% of B2C companies report that they have acquired a customer through Facebook. Tweet This!

15) 65% of B2B companies report that they have acquired a customer through LinkedIn. Tweet This!

What’s Important to Marketers

16) 62% of companies report that social media has become MORE important as a source of leads. Tweet This!

17) 51% of companies reported that direct mail has become LESS important as a source of leads. Tweet This!

18) 25% of marketers report that their company blog is “critical” to their business. Tweet This!

19) Over 40% of marketers report that Google+ is useful to critical for their business. Tweet This!

20) 81% of businesses reported that their company blog is useful to critical for their business. Tweet This!

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Are you doing anything this weekend to generate traffic to your website? If you’re a B2B marketer, chances are you’ve probably asked yourself at some point: How do I keep marketing effectively when nobody is in the office? You want to continue to drive traffic and leads, but you don’t know exactly how.

The wrong thing to do is assume that nobody is listening on holidays or during weekends. Depending on your audience, this could actually be a good time for a new blog post, video release, or email. Data from a recent Xobni survey shows that people are still wired into work during time off: 68% of working adults say they check email while they aren’t working, and 27% of those people will check email more than once.

Here are some tips on how you can use this knowledge to the advantage of your marketing program.

Be Creative in Your Communications

Try something a little zany, and see what happens. Marketing on a day off can sometimes work in your favor because there’s less clutter in people’s inboxes and social media feeds. It could also make your job a lot harder because people don’t want to be bothered. This means you’ve gotta step it up!

The email below is a great example of what we’re talking about. Aside from witty copy, the sender has an extra special offer:

The result of a creative message like this is not only traffic and leads to your site, but it’s also an entertained email recipient. The readers of this email probably felt lucky even though they were working on holiday. And if your readers feel lucky to be getting an email from you on a day off, that’s a wonderful thing! Think of creative ways you can stand out in your audience’s social media feeds and inboxes during off-times or holidays by playing with witty language and special offers.

Test and Measure Your Marketing Tactics

If you’re going to try out some out-of-the-box communication tactics, you’re going to want to walk away from the experience with some lessons learned. The best way to do this is to take a scientific approach through which you can use testing and data to drive future decisions.

An excellent example of a company that tried this is Brewer’s Market. The test was featured on subscription site WhichTestWon.com as an example of how to test during the holidays. The goal was to determine which copy was most appealing to gift-buyers. The company did an A/B split test on its homepage and found that its control page performed 61% better than the treatment page from December 16th to the 23rd. The article concludes with an excellent insight:

Although in hindsight, it makes sense to adjust your copy length and benefits for your seasonal visitors’ perspective, the idea was a huge point of contention between the site’s execs, some of whom “hated” the winning version… before they saw the results data. Now, their 2012 design plans include tweaked homepage versions for all major holidays from Valentine’s Day on.

While this an example of how a business used A/B testing to optimize their homepage for the holiday season, holidays and off-hours are also a safe time to conduct tests in general, due to a reduction in traffic and attention. You’ll just want to make sure you’re still generating enough traffic to make your tests statistically significant.

Don’t Quit on Content 

Just because it’s the weekend or a holiday doesn’t mean your audience will completely stay away from the internet (in fact, we’ve heard of some people even using work as an excuse to take a break from a lot of family time). Maybe your audience just prefers to use Twitter more on the weekends. The only way to find out is to try using a variety of channels and analyze what works best for your individual audience. QuickenLoans, for example, recently used its blog during the quietest week of the holiday season to drive traffic to their site. The company posted a series of timely articles, from what to do with unwanted gift cards, to how to handle post-holiday returns, to fireplace alternatives that will keep you cozy and New Year’s Eve safety tips. The takeaway here is that you shouldn’t stop publishing content when people are out of the office. Instead, you should adjust your content so that it’s timely and promoted using the channels your audience uses during their time off.

Use Data to Make Informed Decisions

If you know a certain segment of your audience is more likely to be working on Sundays (young and hungry entrepreneurs perhaps), you can use that knowledge to drive your decisions and create targeted, relevant content directed toward that segment. Likewise, if you know a certain demographic is going to be annoyed by certain messaging over the holidays, you can avoid a bad situation. The Xobni survey found that younger adults between the ages of 18 to 44 were most likely to feel annoyed or frustrated about receiving work-related emails during the holidays.

You can learn more about your audience’s preferences by observing which demographics convert on certain days. If your landing page forms ask the right demographic questions, you can export your lead data, along with the conversion dates, and do tons of great analysis like figuring out exactly who converts on Saturday mornings? Knowing that will help you identify the kinds of people you should hit with your Saturday morning email send, for example.

Show Your Brand’s Personality

Holidays and weekends are the perfect time to lighten things up, have a little fun, and show off the part of your brand’s personality that makes it relatable to your audience. Google is known for doing this and doing it well. Its most recent treat was an interactive Google logo that played “Jingle Bells.” This past Halloween, HubSpot released a video of our very own flash mob, complete with zombies and gore, to the soundtrack of Michael Jackson’s hit, “Thriller.” Not only did we have a blast making the video, but we also managed to give our audience a Halloween treat and show off our brand’s unique personality.

Have you had any success with marketing during the holidays or off hours? What worked (or didn’t work) for you?

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Kim Kardashian is a hot celebrity these days (even though nobody’s clear on what her actual talents are). So we’d like to pose the question: How do you think your marketing compares to hers?

Marketing.Grader.com can provide the answer. We pitted Kim against 4 other superstars to find out: Who does it best?

The results were fascinating. Kardashian killed the competition with the top overall score. Lady Gaga and Britney Spears didn’t go home empty handed though. They each won in something: Gaga for Popularity and Spears for Connectedness to Fans.

So how did Kardashian win? For one thing, she gets over 2x the amount of web traffic Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber get combined. She’s able to get all of that traffic not just because of who she is, but because of all of the content she’s creating online. Her site has over 200,000 web pages; that’s by far the highest number of pages among this bunch. In comparison, the 2nd runner up, Justin Bieber, has 59,000 pages.

Try Marketing.Grader.com for yourself and let us know: Were you able to beat Kim with your marketing prowess?

(To participate in more discussion about Marketing Grader, join our Twitter Chat tomorrow, December 20 at 3:30 PM by following the hashtag #InboundChat).

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