Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Why Would You NOT Fucking Do That: Do312’s Targeted Email Lists

This part of a series lovingly titled WWYNFDT?! -- or, “Why Would You NOT Fucking Do That?!” This series highlights great ideas that were conceived by one of your fellow metros and turned into a big win. Every one of these ideas is easy to copy in your own metro -- and will hopefully earn you similar results.

This WWYNFDT?! post comes to us from the team at Do312. As one of the older metros in the Network, Chicago has built up a ton of subscribers to its weekly Top Picks email. At last count Do312 had nearly 170,000 emails.

There are a lot of promoters out there without the budget to pay for a dedicated email blast to their entire list, so Jeremy and his team have come up with a creative way to sell dedicated emails targeted at only a segment of subscribers -- and make both their advertisers and users happier in the process.

The Problem With Dedicated Blasts

While they’re an important source of revenue no matter what size your metro is, dedicated email blasts become increasingly costly for your partners as you grow.

We strongly recommend you set your rack  price for dedicated emails at a $100 CPM (cost per thousand subscribers). That means you’re asking five grand per email at 50,000 subscribers. At 150,000 you’re asking fifteen grand. There are not a lot of straight up event promoters with that type of per show budget, unless you are looking at a festival or other major event. .

The other problem with dedicated blasts that we’re all familiar with is that they can really hurt your unsubscribe rate. Your users understand that they’re going to see some advertised content in addition to your curated top picks, but if dedicated emails start showing up in their inbox too often or feel irrelevant to them they’re going to tune out.

Do312’s Targeted Email Campaigns

Do312’s new dedicated email strategy attacks both of these problems by segmenting out smaller lists that fit the advertiser’s budget and only target relevant users.

When an advertiser comes to Do312 looking to buy an email blast, instead of starting with a quote for their entire list Jeremy talks with them about their budget and their intended audience.

With this info, Jeremy can then tell them about how many emails they can expect to reach and what a package would look like. The CPM is always consistent, but he can craft a campaign that works for both the advertiser and Do312 instead of squeezing them into a one-size-fits-all email blast.


How Do312 then picks the emails to target is the really important part. Just pulling 2,000 or 5,000 emails out from a list of 170,000 at random can be risky. You don’t really know how well the campaign will perform and there’s a chance you could piss off one of your partners -- not to mention annoy users and hike up your unsubscribe rate.

So Do312 looks to data that’s already sitting in front of them -- past events and RSVPs on the site -- to pull together a list of usernames and emails that would be interested in the promotion. It’s a way of cherry picking the best demographics for a promotion so users see dedicated blasts that are relevant to them and Do312 gets to report better than expected engagement.

Everyone walks away happy.

How to Create Targeted Email Segments

According to Jeremy at Do312, the most crucial part of this strategy is finding the right emails. It takes a bit of creativity and a bit of scrappiness to pull together a targeted segment of the users on your site.

If the dedicated blast revolves around live music, the easiest place to start is by searching for past events in your metro that included that band or bands. You can be fairly certain that if someone voted on a show with that band in the past, they’re going to be interested in knowing when that band is back in town.

To pull the emails for everyone that RSVP’d for a past show, log into Radmin* and head to the Approved Events queue. Use the Filters drop-down to search for the Event, being sure to check the “Recent Past Events” box.

*NOTE: RSVPs have been moved completely over to Radmin, but exporting votes have not. For now you will need to use old Admin to find votes. This post will be updated in the coming weeks once exporting votes has been integrated into Radmin.

When you find the show you want, click on the cog icon on the far right and select “RSVP” from the drop-down to open up the RSVP modal. Select the “List” tab and click on “Download Email List”. This will download a .txt file to your hard drive that can then be copy-pasted into Google Sheets or Excel to sort out the emails.


If you want to pull emails for everyone that voted for a show -- or if the show didn’t have an RSVP -- you can now do that through Radmin as well.

Once you find the right show in Radmin, click on the cog wheel icon in the Approved Queue or on the Event details page and select “Export Votes”. An email containing a .CSV file will be sent to your inbox immediately.

If you can’t pull enough emails by searching for just a single band, think of other similar bands that might have a common audience. Promoting a show for Arcade Fire? Try pulling emails for fans of other big indie rock acts like The National or Interpol.

If the event non-music related, like a restaurant opening, you’ll have to get really creative. What are past RSVPs or festivals that you could pull from to find the right audience for this campaign? Which events in your metro tend to pull the type of crowd you’re going after?

In the end, you’re going to want to build a list with about 30% to 40% more emails than what you sold to advertiser. This is because MailChimp will automatically scrub duplicates and users that have since unsubscribed, leaving you with a smaller list than you imported.

Creating Your Segments in Mailchimp

Once you have your list of emails, the next step is creating a new list segment in MailChimp. It’s important that you use the segments feature in MailChimp instead of creating new lists each time or you’ll start getting charged for more users.

To create a new segment, click on your primary list and under the “Manage subscribers” section click the segments button (see below). Create a new segment and click on the link in the top right that says “create a segment from a list of emails”. Paste in all the emails you downloaded from Radmin into this box and press “Save Segment”.


Once the segment is created, you’ll be able to see how many emails you’re left with after duplicates and unsubscribed users have been omitted. If it’s less than you sold, you’ll need to find more users in Admin to target. It’s it’s way more than you sold, you should pare down the segment to match what the advertiser paid for.

When you’re ready to send the dedicated blast, just select “Send to a saved segment” when you set up the campaign and find the proper segment.

The End Results

Not surprisingly, Do312 has reported that these targeted email campaigns well outperform their weekly Top Picks emails. A recent targeted blast like this produced an open rate of 20% -- roughly double what they see for the list as a whole.

A Goose Island email blast targeted only at users who RSVP'd for a previous Goose event had a 40% open rate!

That's some serious value for your event partners, and the type of numbers that are going to keep them coming back well into the future.

And before you think this is a strategy to try when you hit 150,000 subscribers, we're confident that this will work in any metro. There are promoters and brands all over your city that are looking to reach new fans but don't have an easy way to do so.

By putting together a targeted segment of your users that's sized to their budget, you're providing a service that no one can match in your city -- not even Facebook.

Why would you NOT fucking do that?!

1 comment:

  1. UPDATE: This post was edited to describe the process for exporting votes in Radmin. This feature was moved over to Radmin earlier this week, so Admin is no longer needed at all in order to build a targeted email list. See the Product Update below for details.

    http://doingbigstuff.blogspot.com/2015/01/product-update-january-19th-edition.html

    ReplyDelete

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Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Why Would You NOT Fucking Do That: Do312’s Targeted Email Lists

This part of a series lovingly titled WWYNFDT?! -- or, “Why Would You NOT Fucking Do That?!” This series highlights great ideas that were conceived by one of your fellow metros and turned into a big win. Every one of these ideas is easy to copy in your own metro -- and will hopefully earn you similar results.

This WWYNFDT?! post comes to us from the team at Do312. As one of the older metros in the Network, Chicago has built up a ton of subscribers to its weekly Top Picks email. At last count Do312 had nearly 170,000 emails.

There are a lot of promoters out there without the budget to pay for a dedicated email blast to their entire list, so Jeremy and his team have come up with a creative way to sell dedicated emails targeted at only a segment of subscribers -- and make both their advertisers and users happier in the process.

The Problem With Dedicated Blasts

While they’re an important source of revenue no matter what size your metro is, dedicated email blasts become increasingly costly for your partners as you grow.

We strongly recommend you set your rack  price for dedicated emails at a $100 CPM (cost per thousand subscribers). That means you’re asking five grand per email at 50,000 subscribers. At 150,000 you’re asking fifteen grand. There are not a lot of straight up event promoters with that type of per show budget, unless you are looking at a festival or other major event. .

The other problem with dedicated blasts that we’re all familiar with is that they can really hurt your unsubscribe rate. Your users understand that they’re going to see some advertised content in addition to your curated top picks, but if dedicated emails start showing up in their inbox too often or feel irrelevant to them they’re going to tune out.

Do312’s Targeted Email Campaigns

Do312’s new dedicated email strategy attacks both of these problems by segmenting out smaller lists that fit the advertiser’s budget and only target relevant users.

When an advertiser comes to Do312 looking to buy an email blast, instead of starting with a quote for their entire list Jeremy talks with them about their budget and their intended audience.

With this info, Jeremy can then tell them about how many emails they can expect to reach and what a package would look like. The CPM is always consistent, but he can craft a campaign that works for both the advertiser and Do312 instead of squeezing them into a one-size-fits-all email blast.


How Do312 then picks the emails to target is the really important part. Just pulling 2,000 or 5,000 emails out from a list of 170,000 at random can be risky. You don’t really know how well the campaign will perform and there’s a chance you could piss off one of your partners -- not to mention annoy users and hike up your unsubscribe rate.

So Do312 looks to data that’s already sitting in front of them -- past events and RSVPs on the site -- to pull together a list of usernames and emails that would be interested in the promotion. It’s a way of cherry picking the best demographics for a promotion so users see dedicated blasts that are relevant to them and Do312 gets to report better than expected engagement.

Everyone walks away happy.

How to Create Targeted Email Segments

According to Jeremy at Do312, the most crucial part of this strategy is finding the right emails. It takes a bit of creativity and a bit of scrappiness to pull together a targeted segment of the users on your site.

If the dedicated blast revolves around live music, the easiest place to start is by searching for past events in your metro that included that band or bands. You can be fairly certain that if someone voted on a show with that band in the past, they’re going to be interested in knowing when that band is back in town.

To pull the emails for everyone that RSVP’d for a past show, log into Radmin* and head to the Approved Events queue. Use the Filters drop-down to search for the Event, being sure to check the “Recent Past Events” box.

*NOTE: RSVPs have been moved completely over to Radmin, but exporting votes have not. For now you will need to use old Admin to find votes. This post will be updated in the coming weeks once exporting votes has been integrated into Radmin.

When you find the show you want, click on the cog icon on the far right and select “RSVP” from the drop-down to open up the RSVP modal. Select the “List” tab and click on “Download Email List”. This will download a .txt file to your hard drive that can then be copy-pasted into Google Sheets or Excel to sort out the emails.


If you want to pull emails for everyone that voted for a show -- or if the show didn’t have an RSVP -- you can now do that through Radmin as well.

Once you find the right show in Radmin, click on the cog wheel icon in the Approved Queue or on the Event details page and select “Export Votes”. An email containing a .CSV file will be sent to your inbox immediately.

If you can’t pull enough emails by searching for just a single band, think of other similar bands that might have a common audience. Promoting a show for Arcade Fire? Try pulling emails for fans of other big indie rock acts like The National or Interpol.

If the event non-music related, like a restaurant opening, you’ll have to get really creative. What are past RSVPs or festivals that you could pull from to find the right audience for this campaign? Which events in your metro tend to pull the type of crowd you’re going after?

In the end, you’re going to want to build a list with about 30% to 40% more emails than what you sold to advertiser. This is because MailChimp will automatically scrub duplicates and users that have since unsubscribed, leaving you with a smaller list than you imported.

Creating Your Segments in Mailchimp

Once you have your list of emails, the next step is creating a new list segment in MailChimp. It’s important that you use the segments feature in MailChimp instead of creating new lists each time or you’ll start getting charged for more users.

To create a new segment, click on your primary list and under the “Manage subscribers” section click the segments button (see below). Create a new segment and click on the link in the top right that says “create a segment from a list of emails”. Paste in all the emails you downloaded from Radmin into this box and press “Save Segment”.


Once the segment is created, you’ll be able to see how many emails you’re left with after duplicates and unsubscribed users have been omitted. If it’s less than you sold, you’ll need to find more users in Admin to target. It’s it’s way more than you sold, you should pare down the segment to match what the advertiser paid for.

When you’re ready to send the dedicated blast, just select “Send to a saved segment” when you set up the campaign and find the proper segment.

The End Results

Not surprisingly, Do312 has reported that these targeted email campaigns well outperform their weekly Top Picks emails. A recent targeted blast like this produced an open rate of 20% -- roughly double what they see for the list as a whole.

A Goose Island email blast targeted only at users who RSVP'd for a previous Goose event had a 40% open rate!

That's some serious value for your event partners, and the type of numbers that are going to keep them coming back well into the future.

And before you think this is a strategy to try when you hit 150,000 subscribers, we're confident that this will work in any metro. There are promoters and brands all over your city that are looking to reach new fans but don't have an easy way to do so.

By putting together a targeted segment of your users that's sized to their budget, you're providing a service that no one can match in your city -- not even Facebook.

Why would you NOT fucking do that?!

1 comment:

  1. UPDATE: This post was edited to describe the process for exporting votes in Radmin. This feature was moved over to Radmin earlier this week, so Admin is no longer needed at all in order to build a targeted email list. See the Product Update below for details.

    http://doingbigstuff.blogspot.com/2015/01/product-update-january-19th-edition.html

    ReplyDelete

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