You’ve heard the expression “viral” used to describe a concept or trend that sweeps the internet like wildfire.

For businesses, “viral” refers to marketing that’s initiated by the company but carried out in large part by the company’s customers. Your email marketing campaigns, as well as campaign landing pages, should contain a viral component whenever possible. Here’s how to do it for email:

Include a prominent link or clickable graphic on your email that says something like “forward this email to a friend” or “let a friend know about this offer.” Some people will forward email even without this urging, but there are three reasons why you want to provide a specific link:

1. For many people, seeing the suggestion reminds them about a friend who would be interested in your product or service.

2. Most HTML email, especially with graphics in the layout, does not forward well. If someone tries to forward using their email program, your email can become garbled, or the links may break. If, instead, they use the “forward this email to a friend” link you have provided, that link takes them directly to a special page on your website. The page automatically fills in the customer’s email address, then allows the customer to add a friend’s email address and a short message before clicking the “send” button. Email sent out from this page will look identical to the original email blast, but you will want to code the links in this email slightly differently. That way, you’ll be able to measure how many click-throughs come from the second, viral, iteration of your campaign (as opposed to click-throughs from the original email blast).

3. In addition to gaining your brand and your offers exposure with a whole new circle of potential customers, viral email marketing gives you valuable customer information. It tells you about your original mailing list and who on it forwards your messages to others. With this knowledge, you can target loyal customers with special “reward” offers.

The people on your mailing list would have no trouble telling you exactly why they like the offer-specific landing pages: They click a link in your email and find themselves looking at a page full of information about exactly the product or service that caught their attention!

But visitor satisfaction is only the beginning. Here are three reasons why direct marketers should be just as wild about offer-specific landing pages as their customers are. An offer-specific landing page can:

• Harvest valuable information about how well your email offer worked. (Split your mailing list, sending recipients who get one type of marketing copy to landing page A, and recipients who get another type to landing page B.) A count of visits to the pages — and click-thoughs from those pages to subsequent sign-up and purchasing pages — will tell you which type of offer works best.
• Maximize the effectiveness of segmenting your mailing list. A retailer might segment a list between, say, households with children and households without, and design landing pages that appeal to each customer group.
• Offer the visitor multiple options and interactions that flow naturally from their existing interest in the product or service. A full page devoted solely to your offer gives you room to include a few of the following options, as appropriate: click to opt-in, click to buy, click to tell a friend, click to add to a wish list, click to view or download a freebie, click to upload a contest entry, and click to leave a comment).

The benefits of offer-specific landing pages are available to any e-commerce site with nimble, flexible web publishing processes. Tip: Resist the urge to create a unique landing page from scratch for each email marketing campaign. Instead, design and code an offer-specific landing page template, then populate it with pre-existing copy, images, and links adapted to each offer. Not only will this save time and effort, but it will help you maintain consistent branding and messaging.

If you’re one of the many direct marketers scrutinizing your email marketing metrics, chances are you’re looking closely at the difference between email click-through rates and actual website sign-ups.

Click-throughs, of course, are reason to celebrate. They mean that your email offer was compelling enough to lead the potential customer to your site. But, once there, did something happen to discourage them from signing up, opting in, or otherwise continuing down the path toward a relationship with your company?

Of course, the problem could be something as simple as an interruption or distraction that took them away from their computer. But all too often, the disconnect is caused by a website or web page that fails to live up to the promise of the email marketing and scares off the potential customer you worked hard to get.

Before you launch your next email marketing campaign, carefully review these three aspects of your company’s website experience and make sure they’re as visitor-friendly as you can make them:

• An offer-specific landing page. You don’t want visitors to have to hunt for your offer on the all-purpose homepage or (worse!) have to guess where the offer might be elsewhere on your site. If you can’t feature the email offer prominently on the homepage, you’ll want to create a dedicated landing page. Even if your company’s web production team requires that you plan for this weeks in advance, the results will be well worth it.
• An inviting sign-up form. If people responding to your campaign need to complete a sign-up form to receive freebies such as downloads, make that form attractive and simple. Of course you want as much information about people as possible, but keep in mind that visitors don’t like filling out long forms. And that they’ll be wary of extensive or intrusive questions.
• A special thank you page. You want a sign-up to to be followed by a click-through, but what should then follow a sign-up? Ideally, a special thank you page that includes links leading your new customer not just to their free download or other incentive, but to other parts of your site. Think of the thank you page as an opportunity to demonstrate what doing business with your company will be like.

Addressing these factors before sending out your email marketing campaign can greatly improve its effectiveness.

Over at Direct, Ken Magill lets email marketers know “Why the CMO Thinks You’re an Idiot,” taking the industry to task for failing to measure results. Magill bases his dim view of the field on findings from a recent Jupiter Research study (fee required) that found at least half of email marketers fail to regularly track basic key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as revenue per subscriber, average order size, and click-to-conversion rates.

BtoB Online reports similar observations from a study conducted by Marketing Management Analystics for Financial Executives International. Fewer than 20 percent of the financial executives surveyed were happy with the quality of the metrics they get from their colleagues in the marketing department. Poor communication was a problem, but the lack of a budget specifically for measuring marketing effectiveness was also blamed — fewer than 10 percent of the companies surveyed had one.

Perhaps not coincidentally, a new article at MarketingProfs.com reports on the emergence of new role in organizations: Marketing Operations. Its function is “to drive the connection between marketing strategy and execution and actual results.”

On the lighter sider: Get a glimpse of the online version of the Nashville Zoo’s attention-grabbing new direct mail campaign urging patrons to “get behind” the zoo.

Every month you get a mailer from a home services business offering a 10 percent discount on window washing. The mailer comes, you recognize it, usually you toss it, but sometimes (if you’re planning on getting the windows done) you keep it to use.

But what if the business made a different offer in each mailer? What if it sometimes offered a different service at a discounted price, such as the full-price window service bundled with gutter cleaning or pressure washing at half price?

You’d be reading those mailers more closely — and getting more information about the business and all that it offers.

Marketing expert Seth Godin calls to this strategy “rotating crops,” referring to the agricultural practice that keeps fields yielding their best.

Curious to know if rotating your offers will improve a ho-hum ROI? This is a great opportunity to test your mailing lists or email lists. Split the list and send one group your same-as-usual offer; send the others something new and different. Mail coded pieces at least three times (with something different for the “test” group each time) and compare performance between the two sub-lists.

The owner of a mid-size business in a regional market wrote in with this question about direct mail strategy for introducing a new product:

“If you had a choice of mailing to several communities one time (possibly twice) as opposed to mailing to a few communities two (maybe three or four) times, what would you recommend?”

In all but a few situations, our answer to this type of question is going to be “go with frequency.” It’s essential that your mailer be there during the critical time frame in which the customer is interested in your product. And you don’t know when that will be.

For instance, you may have the best deal on dishwashers in the state, but your offer will barely register as people sort their mail…until the month comes when they notice their old machine is starting to leak, or they’re getting ready to sit down with their contractor and spec out the kitchen remodel. If you’ve been mailing on a steady basis, your offer will likely get their consideration. If you’ve mailed only once, they’ve probably forgotten about it.

Of course while frequency is a key, it won’t do you any good to mail frequently to the wrong lists or to the wrong list segments. That’s where mail list testing comes in.

You might consider doing an initial, broad mailing to several list segments and carefully tracking response to that initial mailing. (Make sure your employees know to ask customers who call or come in to your store how they heard about the new product.) If particular segments of the initial mailing perform better than others, and your mailing budget is limited, we’d recommend following up with a program of frequent mailings to those top-performing segments rather than only one additional mailing to the broader list.

Segmenting and testing lists is an art, and much of it is influenced by how well you — and your list broker — know the lists you are using. Our direct marketing consultants pride themselves in helping clients tailor the right lists to find the right buyers. Please contact us for help finding the mailing lists that will work best for you.

Whether your winter holidays are spent out of the office with friends and family or at your desk madly wrapping up year-end projects, chances are you’ll be taking a few minutes to reflect on the year that’s coming to a close.

On the professional front, think about your direct mail experiences — not just the trends you’ve been reading about in trade publications, but your own campaigns. Jot down a few notes to refer to when you get back to the office in January.

• What was your biggest direct mail success? To what factors do you attribute that success?
• What was the biggest problem you encountered in a direct mail campaign this past year? How could that problem be avoided or dealt with in the future?
• What did you do that was new or different in your 2006 direct mail marketing? How well did it work?
• What direct mail projects (new campaigns, new messaging, new tracking software, new lists, list testing, etc.) were on your “to do” list for 2006 but didn’t get done?

Now, put those notes where you can find them and refer to them. We’ll be back with another round of questions — and some answers — in the new year.

Tracking response to individual mailings is a critically important part of evaluating a mailing list’s performance and your overall direct mail marketing strategy. Here is an overview of four key mail metrics: bounce rate, open rate, and click-through rate (for email) and conversion rate (for both email and postal mail).

Bounce rate (email)
Bounce rate is the percentage of email that is undeliverable. Email may be undeliverable because an address does not exist (a “hard bounce”), or it may be undeliverable because the mailing has been caught en masse by an ISP’s spam-blocking program. It’s important to have your ESP (email service provider) analyze the bounced messages to determine which is the case, so valid addresses won’t be dropped from your mailing list. (When you use a Marigold list, we take care of analysis for the list and ensure that your offer is delivered to the number of addresses you have requested.)

Open rate (email)
The open rate tells you the percentage of email that reaches the addressee and gets opened. Open rates will be highest with opt-in email communication, especially newsletters consumers have signed up for at a website. To measure open rates accurately, you must send email messages in HTML format. HTML allows you to include graphics that — when the email is opened — are loaded from a server and the count is generated. Keep in mind, however, that some email clients allow users to turn off image loading, and that can cause your open rates to be underreported.

Click-through rate (email)
Measuring the click-through rate tells you how many visits to your site are generated by your email offer. Just as you use a response code for postal campaigns, links in your email should include code that allows you, or your email service provider, to count the number of click-throughs from a specific email offer to your site. Clients using Marigold’s opt-in email lists receive statistics on the quantity of emails delivered, open rate, and click-through rate for each mailing.

Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures how many recipients of postal mail or email act on your marketing offer. The action you measure can be anything: filling out an online form, calling your telephone number for more information, opting in to future email, or ordering your product or service. Measuring online conversion is becoming increasingly sophisticated and accurate. With websites able to set cookies on visitors’ machines, and thus identify activity by a unique user across repeat visits, it’s often possible to identify an email-driven conversion even if the email recipient does not act on your offer on his or her first visit. This is the online equivalent of using response codes and catalog codes in postal campaigns.

While setting up systems to collect, analyze, and track the performance of mailing lists and mailings requires some initial effort, it will pay for itself rapidly in an increased ability to test and tailor campaigns to generate maximum ROI.

In the increasingly complex world of online marketing, having a targeted mailing list and a sending a great email offer are as important as ever. But a third factor has emerged as a critical determinant of direct marketing ROI: the offer-specific landing page.

Experienced online marketers will tell you that consumers expect email links to take them directly to your offer. If a link puts them on the plain-vanilla home page for your site — or on any page where they can’t immediately spot the product or offer your email promised — they’re as likely to click away to another site as to spend time hunting for it.

Capturing these busy and easily distracted consumers (and their data and business) requires a landing page designed specifically to support your campaign. If you are mailing to a list of existing customers with cookies for your site, a prominent box on the page that greets the customer (“Welcome, Susan. Click here for your free mp3 download.”) may also work. Here are a few tips for crafting a direct mail landing page that will engage the click-through consumer:

• Keep the landing page clear and concise. Use a clearly recognizable order form, survey, or registration form.
• In the headline, refer to the email offer so people will know immediately that they’ve reached the right page.
• Stay on-topic about the offer. This will increase the likelihood that people will follow through and make the purchase or provide the sign-up data you want. Resist the temptation to talk about other products and services. (Some marketing experts even suggest removing the standard site navigation from the page to reduce distractions.)
• If your site structure allows it, keep the order/registration/survey on one page, followed by a “thank you” page that appears after the sign-up or order is submitted. This “thank you” page is the place to put standard site navigation and other information that will entice them to explore your site.

The good news about offer-specific landing pages: They not only help you meet the expectations (and gain the business) of increasingly choosey consumers; they present relatively easy and inexpensive opportunities for direct marketers to test lists and to test direct mail copy. Simply create multiple landing pages, one for each version of your mailing, then count click-throughs, signups, or sales to compare ROI.

Never have consumers been courted and wooed as they are today, surrounded by branding, PR, advertising, and marketing campaigns urging them to try — and remain faithful to — a panoply of products and services.

Consumers hear so many messages from so many media sources that it’s often difficult to tell which message has motivated them to respond or to make a purchase. Was it a memorable television ad? A recommendation from a trusted co-worker? Or an email offer that landed in their inbox at just the right moment?

When it comes to causality, the effect of a direct marketing campaign (as opposed a PR or brand-awareness campaign) on sales is relatively easy to measure. But accurate measurement of consumer responses and sales doesn’t just happen. Good data tracking tools need to be built into your campaign so you can test and refine your offers, your direct mail formats, and, of course, your mailing lists.

The Credit Union National Association article “Tracking the Results of a Direct Marketing Campaign” offers tips for getting started with measurement. Developed for the credit union industry, these can easily be adapted for campaigns for a wide range of products and services:

• Collect “front-end” data. How many consumers responded compared with how many actually carried through and made a purchase or signed up for future contact?
• Determine the causes for the difference between the two rates. For a web offer, you can tell if a click-through resulted in a long visit or just a second or two on the site (indicating that the website itself is not compelling enough). For a mail campaign, review mail-in forms or ask front-line staff for their feedback on why the inquiries they received didn’t evolve into sales or sign-ups.
• For measuring results by product line, use historical data. If you usually sell 1,000 units of a particular product a month, and during the campaign response period you sell 1,050, you have an indication of effectiveness. (When using historical data, be sure to take seasonal variations in sales activity into consideration.)