You take your mic and, with everything you’ve got, you focus right at the bored masses and rock your face off…nada. Maybe they want harder stuff, maybe they want ballads.  You try everything.  They don’t even flinch. Meanwhile you’ve got your back to half a stadium that’s leaning in, trying to catch the show they can no longer hear or see–but nonetheless, they’re amped. They LOVE you guys. But you spend the whole set doing everything you can to impress the bored, disinterested side of them room.  Sounds crazy, right?

Well, believe it or not, marketers do this everyday…at their metaphorical concerts, of course.

If the band played to their true fans, the ones that really wanted to be there, rather than pandered to the disengaged, they would have left having a totally amazing show. They’d be sailing on a rock n’ roll high from the crowd’s energy. Instead, they’re leaving with heads hung low, feeling like failures.  But that’s only because they took their true fans for granted.

Once users stop opening or clicking through on your email they’ve become like the bored spectators at the concert. Sure, it’s wise to occasionally remind them WHY they signed up in the first place, but you don’t want to become so obsessed with reengaging flagging interest that you forget to reward and target your most passionate users.   Equal, if not more attention should be paid to your super users; they are your brand ambassadors and the ones that will drive your growth and insure your brand success.

One of the automatic benefits of using Sailthru is that all of our sends are Horizon powered. That means your most engaged users always receive your emails first—a feature which improves delivery as ISPs monitor user engagement.  It also means you can easily segment and target lists based on activity.  Choosing to share special promotions and incentives with your loyal users (and telling them plainly that they’re being rewarded for their passion) is the kind of care that drives brand loyalty and viral growth.  Think of it like this: the incentives you give are like backstage passes to your next concert.  Who do you want to party with, the super fans who have bought every album and sing every word, or the passive spectators who sit in their seats and grudgingly admit to liking your “early stuff”?

Ain't no doubt about it. Baby, got to go out and shout it!

In the example pictured above you’ll notice charts displaying list member growth and engagement, mass and transactional send rates as well as campaign results.  The graphs on the left are customizable, allowing you to select durations from one day up to the entirety of your account history. On the right side of the dashboard is a pie graph depicting member activity by engagement as well as ledgers showing recent campaign results and scheduled campaigns.  (For more information on understanding engagment see engagement tags.)  For clients who only send transactional emails the dashboard will default to a display which shows only those applicable email metrics.

To navigate back to the dashboard from elsewhere in the site, just click on the Sailthru logo and, bam! you’re back.  We hope you’ll find the new dashboard useful, but this is just the first step: in the coming weeks we’ll be adding more functionality to the dashboard, as well as making it more customizable and deeply drillable.  We’re working hard to make our interface as intuitive, informative and revealing as possible, and we would love to hear what you think.

The New Features email is a a great way to refresh and reengage your audience.

I once worked with a client whose list had at one time been dominated by highly engaged users. But having become comfortable with the level of engagement and subscriber rate, they began to ignore the drop-off rate. Over time this drop-off accelerated, and one day, engagement had fallen so sharply that they were losing money on a once profitable program.

Rather than assessing why users had stopped interacting, they immediately launched a discount-on-purchase email. Not surprisingly, it failed.

When we stepped back and took a closer look at the drop-off rate, we realized that much of it came at a time when a competitor was in full swing with massive technology overhauls.  Now this client wasn’t living in the dark ages, they too had quite a number of updates and new features they had rolled out on their own, but they hadn’t made an effort to notify anyone.  So despite the realities, perception had shifted so quickly that it was as though their platform was an AARP member bumping along in a Jazzy and the competitor was rocketing past on a hoverboard.

After 2 weeks of strategizing and planning they deployed the first of their “New Features” quarterly email. Very quickly they realized a 13% lift in list engagement and a 20% lift in forwarding to a friend. This was activity that they had long missed out on. They awakened an audience that was hungry for information.

Marketers sometimes forget that as critical as it is to be busy making your product better, faster and stronger—it’s important to look as busy as you are. Be sure to tell your customers when you’ve created a cool new way to improve their experience. Never let them get bored with what your product does or how they interact with it. You and your team work hard–brag about it!

Who am I?  I’m a professional woman living in New York City between the ages of 18-35.

These are the differentiators that traditional marketers have gathered, and the ones that have identified me on every list I’ve joined in the last decade. Now the received wisdom dictates that I should be sent discounts on lipstick and anti-aging cream rather than those on equipment for grilling animals and hitting balls with crooked sticks (or whatever you brawny men like to do with your free time). These perceptions are fostered by the basic information marketers have gathered on me.

I finished tiling the walls early so I made this dress out of taffy!

But they are wrong.

People are far more varied than flat demographics and geography can show. We are complex individuals with eclectic interests that break the boundaries of standard or average.  With the explosion of the internet has come the birth of hundreds of thousands of niche interest groups.  We’ve excelled past generic labels and are demanding to be identified more specifically by the media we consume and the stores we shop in.

Imagine being able to really know who your customers are; what content they care about (the gulf oil  spill and the Red Sox), what items they’re browsing (leather belts and smartphone apps), buying (hip-hop music and vegan cookbooks) or abandoning (football tickets and summer shoes), and then being able to use that information to speak directly to them.

Knowing WHO is in your database has become the new standard of excellence. The ability to market to the individual means that you, as marketers, are on the pulse of the very audience that can make or break you.

Thanks StartupDigest for the nod last week when you included us in your Email Mafia as “The Upstart” -http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/07/28/email-mafia-paypal-mafia-email/.

We like the scrappy nature of the name that conjures up an image of a fighter in the ring with new moves and something to prove. We are that company, and as part of those new moves look for more blog posts, collateral, and market coverage on how our Horizon solution is changing the game of email from quantity to quality.

What isn’t included in this choice piece of media meat is that we are also serious technologists, entrepreneurs, marketeers, and business developers. We have created, bought, sold, marketed, developed strategy for, and implemented some amazing technological solutions. We have also brought on a cadre of experienced technology and media investors to compliment our growth in premium online content, community, and marketplace clients.

What does all this mean for you? First, stay in contact with our blog, newsletter, twitter, or smoke signals to hear what the “The Upstart” does next. Second, we promise to beat any existing contract you have with an email service provider to deliver your mass and transactional emails to your community.

Yep, you read that right. We will provide you an email solution which will match or exceed your current technology at a better price. If we can’t, we’ll post on our blog who beat us and why. We’re that confident.

What’s the catch? Zilch. We know our solution will outperform what you have. We just ask you to speak with us, try it out, and come on board without all the flashy marketing promotions and collateral. As a savvy business person yourself, we suspect you’ll prefer performance, reliability, and reducing that ESP line item much more than a video, animal mascot, or folders of collateral on your shelf.

Now we believe we’ll always compete well with any email provider out there, but we can’t guarantee this forever (our investors might start asking questions). So take a break from your vacation quarter and give us a call to find out more and try out the system. There’s nothing like starting off Q4 with a cost reduction of up to 50% and a performance increase to boot.

Cheers,
The Upstart

Now try and say “test send text only” five times fast.

In addition to the change, you can also select the time interval to display.  Select from “daily”, “weekly” or “monthly” from the duration drop-down menu, depress the refresh button, et voila! a powerful new chart is displayed.  Finally, in the view drop down menu you are also able to select to calculate the growth report against the total number of email addresses in your list (including optouts and hardbounces) or against valids only.  Yep, it’s pretty cool.

Stay tuned as we bring many powerful new features online over the coming weeks.

Clicking the banner takes donors directly to the Red Cross donation site where they can choose between the Haiti Relief and Development and the International Response Fund.  Including the banner costs nothing but may help to ease the suffering of a people in need.  We hope that you will consider including one of these banners in your outgoing emails and we’d love to hear ideas you have about helping out.

So that’s it.  Problem solved, right?

I wish.  Whether from the unscrupulous selling of emails, to the hijacking of address books, etc., there are still many slices of spam slipping under the door to the inbox.  Enough in fact that we’ve become quick on the draw when it comes to flagging messages.  And it’s evident that users fatigued from dealing with an ever increasing volume of email have taken to flagging many legitimate messages merely because they seem spammy, are annoying or because they’re seeking vengeance against senders that abuse our patience.  And therein lies the trouble.  It’s helpful and necessary to identify true spam, but when a sender’s legitimate messages get flagged it hurts the brand, the delivery rate of the IP address (and anyone sharing that address) and may even cause loss of whitelisting.

Here at Sailthru we’re constantly advising our clients that spam is in the eye of the beholder.  Just because you obtained a user email though sound practices doesn’t mean you can take that interest for granted.  Behavioral studies are showing that people react to what’s happening on their computer screen the same way they do in life.  Which is to say, if you wouldn’t do it out there, don’t do it in here.  Would you leave five voice mails with a friend during the day just to say “hi”?  (note: if you said yes…you might need a hobby.)  And which would be more annoying, the frequency of the calls, or the fact that they were devoid of content?  Answer: it doesn’t matter.

If you want an engaged, responsive user base that looks forward to your messages and keeps you in the inbox, then be sure to follow these five C’s:

-be CONSIDERATE.  There are real people, real busy people just like you receiving those emails who deserve to be treated like friends.
-be CONTENT driven.  We all want real content–a reason to open and spend time with messages.
-be CONCISE.  There’s no prize for longest or most busy email.
-be CREATIVE in design, branding and delivery.  Think about, test and get feedback on the user experience to your messages.
-be CONSISTENT.  More isn’t necessarily better, but if you’re weekly BE weekly, if you’re daily BE daily.

Because ultimately spam is whatever you say it is.