Pierry Blog

What’s for lunch? This is a common question heard around the office, particularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when we have lunch brought in for free. Not only is having free lunches in the office twice a week a great perk for Pierry employees, but it also gives us all designated time to sit down, take a break, and share a meal together.

But meals don’t come so easy for many across the U.S., especially in the San Francisco Bay area where an estimated 1 in 4 go hungry every day, surpassing the estimated national statistic of 1 in 6. That’s why Pierry’s Redwood City office decided to team up with Re-Plate, a nonprofit food matching service that combines three of our favorite things around the office—technology, food, and giving back to the community.

Through their platform, Re-Plate is working to lower the Bay Area’s 1:4 hunger statistic by matching extra food from businesses and individuals with the communities that need them. Donating your food is as simple as filling out a form and waiting for someone to pick it up. That’s it.

While many times the lunches we have delivered are eaten immediately, we often find ourselves packing the refrigerator with our leftovers. And even though we encourage employees to finish what’s left the next day, they often sit there until the refrigerator is either overflowing with food, or has gone stale.

Our behavior is not atypical: Nearly 365 million pounds of food is wasted daily in the U.S., food that could go to someone who isn’t readily able to provide it for themselves. It’s a sad, eye-opening statistic, to say the least.

Since January 2016, Re-Plate has created over 77,000 meals and recovered nearly 93,000 pounds of food. We’re excited to be a part of helping to increase these numbers!

Currently, Re-Plate is available to those in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Oakland, New York City, and Brooklyn, with more to come. To learn more about Re-Plate, including how to donate food, visit www.re-plate.org.

Growing your subscriber list is a process that costs time and energy, but the rewards can be huge, helping you create repeat customers and build a stronger brand reputation. Of course, the choices you make when building your list can determine how well you’ll connect with your subscribers.

While you want your email list to grow, you also don’t want subscriber numbers to increase just for the sake of increasing. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to rapidly expand your list to as many people as possible. Customers who don’t know or care much about your brand will quickly unsubscribe, or worse, will consider your emails spam, which can damage your sender reputation—meaning those who actually want to hear from your brand may never actually see your messages.

Rather than stuffing the list with disengaged contacts who aren’t likely to bring return business, take the time to organically grow your list by attracting engaged customers who want here from your brand.

Get Their Attention (And Incentivize Them for It)

When done right, having a lightbox or pop-up on your website can be your #1 tool in growing your email list. In fact, one tester found that using lightboxes led to 1375% growth in subscribers.

But be sure to use your lightbox gracefully, or it could come off as annoying. Consider using scroll-triggered boxes that appear once a visitor has shown interest by scrolling down the page to read more. Or only have the lightbox appear after a set number of pages has been viewed. For example, a retailer could ask for visitors for their information after they’ve viewed 3 different products.

And remember, no website visitor will give you their information just for the sake of giving it. (Or at least they shouldn’t!) Your lightbox should get right to the point. Make sure your copy is punchy, clearly visible and includes a call-to-action that encourages visitors to subscribe to your list. This should include some kind of incentive such as 15% off their first purchase in the case of a B2C, or access to an exclusive downloadable ebook, in the case of a B2B.

Regardless of what you offer, make sure you have a clearly marked “close” button on the lightbox to prevent customers from getting frustrated.

Make it Easy to Subscribe

Your website’s layout and design can influence the amount of customers who elect to subscribe to your list. Add a subscribe button to your navigation or footer. Make sure the option to opt-in is immediately noticeable without being obtrusive or distracting.

If you have an e-commerce website, add an “Opt-In” button in your purchase process that customers can click to be automatically added to your subscription list. Be wary of “Opt-out” buttons, which customers must click to avoid being added to the list. These have been found to be much less effective, as customers may not see the button, and may not realize they are being automatically added to your list. Let them make their own conscious choice to opt-in—they’ll likely be more engaged in the long-run.

Ask for Referrals

Never underestimate the power of the email forward. Word-of-mouth recommendations are powerful and have been shown to have a huge impact on customer decisions. According to Nielson, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people—even if they don’t know them personally—over promotional content that comes directly from brands.

Provide shareable content in your emails and newsletters and help give your customers the opportunity to organically discuss your brand in a way that doesn’t feel forced or inauthentic.

And don’t be afraid to ask for a more direct referral. Something as simple as “Like this? Forward to a Friend!” can encourage your engaged subscribers to pass your promotion, newsletter, etc. on to someone they know.

Take the Call to Subscribe to Social Media

Facebook Ads or Twitter Lead Generation Cards can help you find new subscribers based on demographics, interests, and more. In other words, it can help you reach an interested audience and connect with them both on social and via email.

The advantage to this approach is that you can reliably expect your ads to be viewed by a large number of social media users, targeted to your specifications, and include the option to opt-in right in the ad.

The downside to this approach is it’s not exactly free. While the cost-per-click rates of social ads are much lower than that of traditional paid online ads, such as those run through Google Adwords, they are still an investment. The more successful your search, the more expensive it will be. Consider your resources when planning out a paid traffic approach, and make sure that your goals are clearly defined.

Make Connections the Old-Fashioned Way

Website tricks are nice for growing your list over time, but it’s hard to beat old-fashioned face-to-face brand advocacy. Making personal connections with potential subscribers can kickstart the relationship between brand and consumer. Consider opting-in subscribers networking events, tradeshows, or at your brick-and-mortar locations. You can even forge relationships with communities by partnering with local nonprofit or charity events. Think outside the box when looking for new subscribers and you might be surprised at the results.  Just make sure you’re always following the golden rule—build based on quality, not quantity.

It takes time to grow your list, but don’t give up! Over time you can iterate and refine to figure out the best approach to connect you and your customers. And remember, you only want subscribers on your list that have the highest likelihood of being engaged with your brand. A growing email list is nothing if you aren’t seeing an increase in opens, clicks, and conversions.

And of course, keep in mind that when customers subscribe to your list, it’s because they’re engaged with your brand and the relationship you’ve created with them.  Subscribing is just the first move. It’s up to you to ensure that relationship is engaging and rewarding for everyone.

Think about the current goals you have for your digital marketing program. Do they include boosting sales? Growing traffic to your website? Increasing subscriber engagement? And how are you measuring the success of these goals? Are you using metrics like page views, email opens, and total revenue stats?

If you answered yes to any of the above, I’ve got bad news for you. Your digital marketing program has no depth.

While digital marketing is no longer in its infancy, the way many marketers define its success certainly seems to be. Goals like “growing traffic” or “increasing engagement” are all we had to measure against in the onset of the digital marketing boom; all we really wanted was to see our website getting visitors, our social channels getting followers, and our email lists growing. The access to the data we had was limited. And we used this limited data to create strategies and establish benchmarks.

Today digital marketing gives us the ability to know more about our customers than ever before. We can see how they are interacting with our marketing materials, anticipate their needs, and provided a 1:1 experience that is targeted and relevant.

So why are so many of us still relying on vanity metrics like “page views” and “email opens” to drive our marketing strategy? It’s time to move your digital marketing program forward.

Here are 5 steps you can take to add some depth to your goals and keep them out of the shallow end:

1. Define the purpose of your digital marketing efforts.

This may seem trite, but have you actually ever thought about the purpose your digital marketing department serves and its impact on your organization as a whole? Much like every business has a mission statement, your digital marketing department should have one as well.

Your purpose should go beyond the basics of maintaining a digital presence for your brand. Think about what your department is trying to achieve through that digital presence. This could include things like building and maintaining a positive brand reputation and/or bringing awareness to the benefits of your brand’s products or services in order to bring in the highest quality leads for your sales team.

Don’t feel like you need to limit your mission to a single focus. Your department likely serves multiple purposes. And keep in mind, those purposes may change from year-to-year, so revisit your department mission statement each year to re-evaluate and update as needed.

2. Establish your KPIs.

What, numerically, are you trying to achieve? This is your key performance indicator, or KPI. And establishing these up-front can help shape both your goals and the preceding strategies you’ll put in place based on those goals.

KPIs should be specific in how they will impact the mission of your digital marketing department. For example, let’s say one purpose of your marketing department is to help increase sales. Your KPI may be to increase top of the funnel leads by 15% in the next 12 months.

It’s not enough to just set a KPl to help increase sales. You need to be more specific in how you define that increase, whether it’s a percentage or a dollar value.

3. Define metrics for regularly measuring success/failure.

Once your KPIs are established, you need to determine which metrics you’ll examine on a regular basis to determine whether or not you’re on track to reach them. The metrics you choose should help you directly measure your KPI.

If you’re looking to increase leads, you’d look at conversions and conversions-to-close ratios. You might also look to see if the content you’ve created to drive in more conversions is being engaged with by visitors, as well as path-to-conversion metrics.

Sometimes identifying metrics isn’t so clear-cut. Let’s say you establish a KPI to increase brand awareness by 30%. There’s no direct data point in Google Analytics, or any other analytics program, to directly measure that. Instead, you have to get a little creative. Reach metrics and follower metrics from your social media networks are one way to help measure brand awareness. New visitor metrics in Google Analytics can also give you some insights.

Think about the data you have access to and find the most direct way to use it as a point of measurement. Rule of thumb—if you have a KPI around it, you need to have a logical way to measure it. And sometimes that measurement may have to come from a few different areas.

4. Outline a brief marketing initiative for each KPI.

What will you need to do in order to reach each individual KPI? This could include things like additional content, new pages on the website, an A/B testing initiative, a new email newsletter, etc.

You don’t have to outline your whole strategy. Just give some thought to what you would need to implement in order to reach those KPIs.

5. Put it all together.

Now that you’ve taken the initial steps, setting non-vanity driven goals will be super simple. All you have to do is take what you’ve learned from the steps above and put it all together—Marketing Purpose + KPI + Metrics + Initiatives.

So for example, “In order to help increase company sales by 15%, the digital marketing department will create a new section of the website designed to help more top of the funnel sales convert and monitor the performance of these pages via engagement metrics, conversion metrics, as well as conversion-to-close metrics.”

Okay, it’s a bit of a mouthful compared to goals like “increase traffic to the website”, but it’s also a lot more impactful as it more specifically outlines what you are trying to achieve, where you want to achieve it, how you plan to achieve it, and how you’ll measure it.

Don’t let your digital marketing department run based on shallow goals that don’t mean anything. Instead, outline goals that clearly demonstrate what you’re looking to achieve and how. When you work with goals that have depth you’re better prepared to put together a truly robust digital marketing strategy, and you’ll have access to the types of information you need to adjust your strategy month over month, and year over year.

It’s no secret that in the digital marketing world, the skills of developers are in high demand—particularly the skills of developers familiar with Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. However, many the curriculum of most undergraduate programs and coding boot camps don’t have the opportunity to cover the many intricacies of these complex marketing platforms, meaning employers are left to fill that gap, often resorting to developers having to learn as they go on live-client accounts.

Needless to say, this system is not always ideal, especially when your client base is on a constant increase.

To remedy this, Pierry introduced “Pierry Academy” an intense 4-week pre-employment training program designed to train developers in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform and various integration processes.

All participants in the Pierry Academy were recent graduates from San Francisco’s General Assembly, a global network of campuses that provides technical, creative, and business training programs designed to prepare students for today’s technological needs. Each participant was interviewed by Pierry staff and chosen to participate in our Pierry Academy with the understanding that successful completion would result in permanent employment.

Over the course of four weeks, the Academy participants came to the Pierry headquarters in Redwood City, CA, where they participated in intense training sessions, while also gaining exposure to real-life, hands on client work.

We are happy to announce we had a 100% passing rate among our academy participants, giving them the knowledge and experience to not only work in Salesforce, but also some real-world experience dealing with the multiple, often complex implementation issues that our clients require

But what made Pierry Academy so successful? We caught up with three of our recent grads (Hila Vaisler, Ayush Jha and Bryan Smith) to discuss life after post-Academy:

What was your biggest takeaway from Pierry Academy?

Hila:

I really appreciated the technical knowledge that I gained from the class, especially since I haven’t worked in Salesforce and Marketing Cloud before. We learned its uses and how to create data extensions, Journeys etc. It was nice coming in as a group with people you went to school with, getting trained as group and working on projects together. It felt like a continuation of General Assembly because we were all together in a class setting.

Ayush:

I liked the opportunity to collaborate as a team, and having experienced implementation consultants come in and show how the teams behave and work together was helpful. Everyone was very accommodating and Pierry’s organizational structure made it easy to get to know everyone quickly.

Bryan:

I feel I got a much better understanding of the Salesforce atmosphere.

What was your favorite part about “Life at Pierry”?

Hila:

The people! It’s a younger environment with a lot of collaboration. And someone is always there to help when questions come up. Everyone is willing to drop what they are doing and help out, even if they are busy. All the functions outside of work are fun also– getting to meet the team in a more casual environment, plus having the dogs around is great.

Ayush:

The open atmosphere. I like knowing that as long as I work hard and am responsible for my tasks, then everything will go well. The youthful environment is great because people are more open to new ideas for tasks and projects.

Bryan:

The vibe and the people. It’s a work hard / play hard attitude.

What has been one of your biggest challenges since working at Pierry?

Hila:

Dodging all the nerf bullets!

Ayush:

Getting ready for the certifications has been tough and getting trained up on the tools takes time.

Bryan:

Working through the technical issues since I am new to the Salesforce platform.

What advice would you give to new hires at Pierry?

Hila:

Talk to everyone and ask questions, ask for examples of similar work that they have done in the past.

Ayush:

Focus on getting familiar with Salesforce and ExactTarget. Everyone is super helpful and is willing to help you.

Bryan:

Practice makes perfect. Make sure you go through the program and understand how it works and is set up.

We’re excited to see our recent Pierry Academy graduates working on projects and fully integrated into the day-to-day. As we continue to grow, we’ll be working to build more programs like Pierry Academy to not only help empower potential employees to build upon their skills, but to ensure every brand and company we partner with at Pierry has the resources to make their marketing technology needs a reality.

Congrats to the first graduating class of Pierry Academy! Excited to have you in the Pierry family and to see what you can do!

We’re blogging, we’re info-graphing, we’re creating listicles, and gifs, and videos, and images. We need content for our emails, our website, our Snapchat, our Instagram, our Tumblr. New channels for marketing your brand seem to pop-up every day. And in our efforts to help our brand stand out above the rest, we’re all creating more content than ever.

And to be honest, we’re likely all creating far more content than we have to. Why? Because our customers are already creating content for us.

What is User Generated Content?

User generated content is, as the name reflects, content that is generated by the user, a.k.a. your customer, and often comes in the form of a review, photo, video, blog post, or a social media post.

This type of content isn’t created as a result of hour-long strategy sessions, persona development, or a deep analysis of your past content performance. This content is created by a real customer using your products or services in a real way, and sharing it with others.

And with proper permissions, you can post user generated content pretty much anywhere you need content, from your website, to social channels, to emails, to landing pages and banner ads.

Of course, like any piece of content, you don’t want to just use it for the sake of using it. Make sure you have a strategy around the types of user generated content you want to collect, how you’ll use it, why you’re using it, and how you’ll measure its success.

But Is User Generated Content Effective?

65% of millennials feel that user generated content is more honest and genuine [http://investors.bazaarvoice.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=649677] than content put out by brands themselves. 86% find that user generated content is a good indicator of quality products or service.

So yes, user generated content can be extremely effective as it gives consumers an objective view of your product or services, showing your brand and building its reputation in a way that your marketing department can’t.

How Can I Get User Generated Content?

Getting user generated content isn’t as difficult as some marketers may think. Really all you have to do is ask for it.

Reviews

Reviews are one of the oldest forms of user generated content. But don’t anticipate that customers will actively think to go and leave a review on your website after they’ve received their purchase. About a week or so after they’ve received their product, send a quick follow-up email asking them to let you know what they thought.

Often just asking for a star ranking (i.e. 1-5 stars) and a simple description of their experience with your product or service is enough, but you could also take the review process one step further by asking customers to upload a photo of them using the product.

This tactic can be especially useful for retailers looking to create content shaped around how actual customers are wearing the items they sell. Not only does having these customer images make it easier for potential buyers to see what a certain item could look like on them, but it also allows retailers to show of the versatility of their pieces without having to pay for a stylist, models, etc.

Social Media

As social media has grown in popularity and new channels have been born, it’s become one of the best ways to gather user generated content.

Brand specific hashtags and special promotion hashtags are easy ways for consumers to tag images of how they’re using your products in their everyday life; for millennials in particular, social media is the way they find new products. Statistics show that 68% of 18-to-34 year olds are more likely to make a purchase after seeing it on an influencer’s or friend’s social media account.

Taking the time to create a clever or memorable hashtag [https://blog.hootsuite.com/4-excellent-user-generated-content-contests-using-social-media/] allows you to take advantage of content those users likely would have been posting anyway.

But don’t just promote hashtag campaigns on your social media channels. Include it on your website, in your email newsletters, on non-digital advertising spots, etc. to maximize the exposure of the campaign and the potential for engagement.

Contests

If you want to obtain a lot of user generated content in a short amount of time, a contest is the perfect way to go.

There are a number of tools you can use to help you run your contest, but in some cases, you can keep it even more simple than that.

Take for instance, Kissmetrics, a B2B behavior analytics platform, that created a Pinterest board to house all the entries for their Messy Desk contest. The entry with the most re-pins won. It was a fun, simple contest that engaged their audience, helped promote their brand through sharing, and gave them some fodder for their blog.

How Can I Get Started with User Generated Content?

First, think about where you might have some gaps in your content strategy, or where you could use some added support. Maybe you’re not seeing the type of engagement you’d like on your Facebook page, or perhaps you need some fresher content to liven up your monthly newsletter.

You then want to consider your goals around user generated content, regardless of whether you’re doing a one-off campaign, or if this will be part of an on-going effort. When you know what you’re working to achieve, you’ll be better equipped to determine where to seek out user generated content and how to ask for it.

Finally, always make it clear that the content you’re sharing is from a real customer. Your brand should engage with this user and their content as if your brand is a person and the customer is a long-time friend. This can help further promote engagement and help you drum up even more user-generated content.

Every brand likes watching their subscriber list grow. Why? Well, that’s a great question that not many stop to ask. Really, the only reason we get excited when we see our subscriber numbers climb day-to-day and month-to-month is because, in marketing, bigger numbers are better. Except when they’re not…

Yes, you ideally want to see your subscriber numbers steadily increase. But what’s more important than subscriber growth is the number of engaged subscribers. These are the subscribers who are opening, clicking, and converting from your email; these are the subscribers who are truly invested in your email campaigns.

Unfortunately, these subscribers likely make up less of your list than you thought.

According to research from Silverpop, nearly 60% of subscribers on any given list are considered inactive, meaning they haven’t opened or clicked any email in at least 12 months. In some cases, they may have never interacted with a single email you’ve ever sent them, which was exactly the case for a popular Consumer Package Goods (CPG) brand we recently worked with.

With a subscriber list of more than 1.2 million, the open rates on their monthly newsletter barely made it above 10% on any given month. Why? Nearly 800,000, or 68%, of their subscribers never engaged with a single email sent. And because this client had never executed a re-engagement campaign before, there’s no wonder why the percentage of unengaged subscribers was so high.

What is a Re-Engagement Campaign?

Just as the name suggests, a re-engagement campaign is meant to help re-engage your subscribers. It works by sending a tailored message specific to those subscribers you have deemed inactive, with a goal of getting them to interact with your campaign in a way that encourages them to be active with your emails again.

While strategies will vary, you generally want to include the following in your re-engagement campaigns:

• A special offer or promotion
• The option to re-subscribe or unsubscribe
• The ability for subscribers to update email preferences
• A glimpse at what subscribers have been missing by not opening your messages

As a best practice, we recommend sending a series of 2-3 re-engagement messages over the period of a month. Each message should have a slightly different subject line as different messaging will appeal to different subscribers.

If a user does not engage with any of the messages in this series, or does not follow the steps required to consider them active, remove them from your subscriber list. Keep in mind, you don’t have to completely delete them. Just move them to a list with other inactive subscribers. You may find a reason to email them again in the future. (Note: Inactive is very different than unsubscribed. Anyone who actively unsubscribes from your list should never be sent additional messages.)

Making the Case for a Re-Engagement Campaign

Needless to say, our CPG client was hesitant to think that their total subscriber numbers could be cut in half as a result of the re-engagement campaign’s performance (and this is generally the reception you’ll receive when recommending a re-engagement campaign). So we focused on the benefits that come from this type of series:

1. You’ll have a more accurate view of your subscribers. Active subscribers are active for a reason. There’s something you’re delivering to them that resonates and gets them to keep coming back. By focusing on those active subscribers and how they’re engaging, you’ll better understand your audience and their needs.

2. You’ll gain a better understanding of when subscribers disengage. Regularly performing a re-engagement campaign forces you to continue to look at things like the subscriber lifecycles. When are your subscribers initially disengaging? Is it after one email, two emails, five emails? Discovering trends among your inactive subscribers can lead to a lot more questions around why those trends are occurring.

3. You’ll vastly improve your ROI. Every individual email you send comes with a cost. By no longer paying to send to subscribers who are disengaged, you’ll see a truer picture of your ROI.

And keep in mind, you should make re-engagement campaigns a regular part of your email marketing strategy, particularly if you notice that while your subscriber numbers are quickly increasing, your open rates are falling. We often recommend clients examine their inactive users twice a year, and to run a re-engagement campaign at least once per year.

Remember, Not All Inactive Subscribers Remain Inactive.

The point of a re-engagement campaign isn’t just about clearing away those inactive subscribers. While that’s a big, important part of it, these types of campaigns should also work to move subscribers from inactive to active.

In the case of our CPG client, nearly 80,000 subscribers became re-engaged as a result of their first re-engagement campaign. And remember, these are subscribers who never opened a single email from them since initially subscribing. In addition, our client generated $1,000 in revenue based on the call to action from these subscribers that had once been completely disengaged.

The Final Results

Following the re-engagement campaign, our CPG client saw their unengaged subscriber list decrease from around 800,000 to 730,000. And this decrease lead to some impressive increases elsewhere. In just one month, their open rate increased by 100%, taking them to a nearly 20% open rate.

Of course, the loss in subscriber numbers is a bitter pill to swallow. After all, we want all of our subscribers to be actively engaged with each message we send. But in reality, we learn more from the engagement of active subscribers than we ever will from the number dictating our total number of opt-ins.

For many, Alzheimer’s is known as a disease that comes with many shocking statistics. It’s the 6th leading cause of death in the United States. It’s is diagnosed every 66 seconds. It affects more than 5 million Americans. But for me, Alzheimer’s is much more than facts and figures—it’s a disease that has changed the person I love most in this world, my mother.

Lucille Barisonek has always had a strong spirit. She raised five children; she worked as a nurse, a magazine editor, and trained to become a pilot. Even as she aged, she didn’t really see the need to slow down. She went on to get her diving certificate and — even in her late seventies –took up kayaking.

But my mother, who lived her life as an unstoppable force, has been no match against Alzheimer’s Disease.

I wish I could say that this chapter in my mother’s life was different, or that she was beating the odds and winning the fight. Instead, I’ve watched her decline over the years. I’ve watched my father care for his wife of sixty years while searching for a treatment or remedy that could slow the progression of this terrible degenerative disease. I’ve watched my mother go from a woman who would try anything, to someone who couldn’t remember where she was going or why.

Today my mother requires around-the-clock care. The only thing Alzheimer’s hasn’t taken away from her is her wide, beaming smile.

Which is why I’m walking to end Alzheimer’s.

On Saturday, October 1, 2016, I’ll join my team, Senior Care of Sacramento, in a walk to raise money that will support the Alzheimer’s Association and their goal to end Alzheimer’s. Held in more than 600 communities across the country, the Alzheimer’s Association Walk to End Alzheimer’s® is the largest event for raising awareness and funds towards Alzheimer’s care, support and research.

Every dollar counts in the fight against Alzheimer’s. I hope you can join me in supporting the fight. Please visit my donations page for more information.

Donate Now

It’s no secret that the holiday season is a big time for retailers. And with all the noise around holiday shopping, it’s important that marketers stand out—not just by providing the best deals and promotions they can, but by providing the best customer experience they can, one that helps make the shopping process easier.

With nearly 50% of consumers planning to do the majority of their holiday shopping online, and with 54% of holiday shoppers planning to do most of that online shopping on their smartphone during spare moments throughout the day, being able to create effective micro-moments for consumers is key for retailers.

The days of the one-day shopping spree are coming to an end, making your “batch-and-blast” email approach less and less effective.

On all fronts of digital marketing, but email in particular, consumers are looking for something more. They want a 1:1 personalized experience—one that helps them get the products they need and helps them uncover new products they didn’t even know they wanted.

Email marketers already know a lot about their consumers—from first name, to gender, to purchase history, etc. But what if you could take that a step further by collecting data such as browse history and abandon cart history? And what if that could be used to create a truly personalized email experience for every subscriber?

Incorporating live data into your emails can lead to higher engagement, as well as an increase in revenue per click. In other words, live data isn’t just useful to your consumers, but to your bottom line as well.

Want to see more on how live data can bring your customers a completely new experience this holiday season? See use cases, tips for shaping your customer journey, as well as how to get buy-in internally in this recent webinar, Delivering a Better Holiday Email Experience with Live Data, hosted by Pierry and Movable Ink.

Learn More and Watch the Webinar Now

The moment of truth has arrived. Your deployment went smoothly, the artwork was enticing, and now you are ready to see your results. You have followed all the email best practices and so your metrics should all be good. You scan the results and see successful open rates. Your click-throughs are double digits and your deliverability is as close to 100% as it gets. Then you see it—the unsubscribes. The number isn’t significantly high, but your heart sinks. After all your time and effort, people still do not want to receive your communications. And while understandably disheartening, unsubscribe requests are not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there are multiple reasons you actually want people to unsubscribe.

The Silver Lining of Unsubscribes

They can warn you of bigger email issues.

If you see a steady spike in unsubscribe requests, it is probably an indication that something in your email program needs to change. What are you promising subscribers when they initially sign up? Are you living up to that promise? Have the types of content in your emails changed significantly? Or has your audience changed in some way?

An upward trend in unsubscribes could be a sign that you should test new content. Or perhaps begin to experiment with segmenting your audience based on additional data you have on them.

They save you money.

If someone doesn’t want your email, then you shouldn’t spend money sending it to them. With many ESPs charging by subscriber or number of sends, the unsubscribes will lower your overall cost for sends. This savings could be directed towards other efforts such as social media advertising or another channel where your customers can be found.

They can help support marketing decisions.

Every marketer can agree—the more data you have, the better. After all, data is the best way to back-up any beliefs you have about your customers. High spikes in unsubscribes can give you insights into what your audience doesn’t want from your brand. It could also signal a shift in who makes-up your actual audience. Either way, these types of insights can help inform not only your email marketing strategy, but your digital strategies as a whole.

Getting More Out of Unsubscribes

While there is plenty of info you can infer by examining unsubscribes, there are also measures you can put in place for them to volunteer more information. Exit surveys are a great way to measure more information about why subscribers are opting out. Questions to consider on your exit surveys include:

• Send frequency questions, i.e. do they receive too many emails from you?
• Content relevancy, i.e. are they getting value from your emails?
• Confusion over opting-in, i.e. they don’t even remember signing up for these emails
• Other reasons, i.e. a spot for a soon-to-be unsubscribe to give you additional information; Often times, brands get some of their most honest customer feedback here

Preventing Unsubscribes

While unsubscribes can teach you a lot, you also don’t want to see customers unsubscribing from your email marketing program simply because they are signed up for the wrong thing. To prevent this, consider using a Custom Profile Center instead of a one-click unsubscribe. This gives subscribers the opportunity to choose what type of emails they do or do not want to receive. Custom Profile Centers can include things like:

• A listing of interests or preferences specific to your brand
• Send frequency options
• Demographic information which can help for better segmentation in the future

While this won’t stop all unsubscribes, it will help steer many customers towards more relevant content.