No man is an iland

As a young and creative September jumps into town, it’s time for the annual holiday email marketing resources post.

Check back regularly, as I keep this post updated with the best links on the topic.

Of course, this isn’t the first year anyone has celebrated Christmas (Dec 25th), Hanukkah (begins Dec 2nd), Kwanzaa (begins Dec 26th) etc., so there are also links to goodies from previous years…

[P.S. If you have a relevant article to recommend, let me know in the comments.]

• Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season: Chad White’s 41-page roadmap for retailers, with advice on winning tactics and strategies, as well as stats and insight based on what B2C marketers did last year.
• E-mail: Make It the Linchpin of Your Digital Holiday Planning: Ed Henrich on where to focus efforts for the holiday shopping season.
• Early planning means happy holidays: Ryan Phelan with five tips on how to get your email ready for the big shopping spree.
• Holiday Email Campaigns: Tips 1-2 | Tips 3-4 | Tips 5-6 Megan Ouellet discusses phased holiday messaging, campaign reviews, deployment schedules, best practices, landing pages and pre-holiday messaging.
• The 2010 holiday marketer: Experian CheetahMail with a broader report which includes email-specific info on volume patterns, offers, countdown tactics, subject lines, creative etc.
• Christmas In August: Smart Holiday Sending: Alex Madison and Lisa Harmon with ideas on drawing in social elements, creative approaches, the role of mobile and more.
• Retailers: How Good Are Your Holiday Plans?: Gretchen Scheiman discusses segmentation tactics and how to give triggered and transactional emails a holiday feeling.
• 3 Reasons To Pull in the Reins on Holiday Email Frequency: Linda Bustos picks out some key messages from Chad White’s guide (see top link).

Previous “Holiday email marketing” editions:

• 2009 (last year’s edition with 20+ links)
• 2008 (another bunch of links from 2008)
• 2007 (no surprises for guessing what you’ll find here)

Special holiday email blog series featuring top retail experts:

• Getting ready and role models
• Frequency and focus
• Final days and follow-ups
• Not everyone buys/sells Christmas presents

Find related articles:

• Channel: Holiday tactics

Isn’t email marketing great? It continues to deliver good results, even when done badly.

At least it used to.

Because barely a day goes by without another nail plunging into the coffin of those who practice status quo email marketing.

And Google’s new Priority Inbox is more of a steel stake than a 2-inch nail.

In essence, the feature (which all Gmail users will get over the next few days) allows users to split the inbox into three sections.

The default top section contains all the email Google feels is important to you. The second is the email that’s been starred for later reading, and the bottom section is for “everything else”.

Guess which section is likely to get most attention?

Indeed, according to Mashable…

“…the search giant found that users spent 16% less time reading insignificant e-mail.”

At Gmail, not every message now gets an equal chance of attention. That’s 100+ million Gmail users where the inbox is no longer a level playing field.

Back in March I wrote:

“It seems inevitable that ‘intelligent’ inboxes will highlight ‘priority’ messages, based on the user’s previous interactions with that sender’s messages or whether the recipient has some formal connection with that sender.”

“The inbox becomes an expert system, looking for signals that indicate an important email or one that can be safely ignored”

Here we are just five months later and Gmail explains that it…

“…uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most…and which messages you open and reply to…”

The intelligent inbox is here. And not just at Gmail.

Yahoo, for example, allows users to switch the inbox display to “view emails only from your Contacts or Connections”.

Hotmail has the “sweep” feature which lets recipients move all messages from a particular address to a folder or the trash at the click of a button…and tell Hotmail to repeat that procedure for all new messages from the same source.

These developments make a mockery of the status quo marketer’s success mantra:

“As long as what we’ve always done is more than we can get away with, all is well”

Intelligent inboxes mean you can get away with less and less. They are driving a welcome wedge between bad and good email marketing.

The rewards for providing valuable, wanted messages that people interact with are ever greater: better inbox positioning in a less-cluttered inbox.

The penalties for not doing so are also greater: poorer inbox positioning or never reaching the inbox in the first place.

In January, I argued that the bar for what you can get away with is rising faster than the quality of most people’s email marketing. 2010 would be the year when many marketers would find the lines crossing:

I was wrong.

Intelligent inboxes mean the graph looks like this:

So what needs to change to turn intelligent inboxes into a marketing win? Gmail’s priority inbox was only announced yesterday, so all the implications will take time to reveal themselves.

In general, all we need to do is all the things we’ve long-known we should be doing…better targeting and segmentation, striving to provide more value, trigger emails, etc.

Specifically…

1. Intelligent inboxes need intelligent messaging

Email marketing went a long way with the shotgun approach. If some people respond to the message and the rest aren’t too bothered, then the “blast” approach survives.

This survival depends on a low penalty for being “uninteresting”. But all these inbox developments (not to mention changes to the deliverability landscape) now mean this isn’t the case: your position in the inbox becomes directly related to the worth of your message.

2. Intelligent inboxes demand interaction

In the spirit of the social inbox, interaction drives inbox success.

The more people interact with your message and the sender, the more weight an intelligent inbox gives that message and sender.

This speaks to the whole quality of your email marketing program. It begins with setting the right expectations at sign-up, then delivering value all the time. Every time you compromise, there is a penalty.

Even if your promotion per se isn’t getting a response from everyone, you can still drive meaningful interactions with requests for feedback, surveys, competitions, content, secondary CTAs, etc.

Here’s a post with dozens of ideas for getting a click when the main offer or content isn’t interesting enough on its own.

3. Intelligent inboxes demand a strong start

Your welcome messages are the initial interview that decides whether you deserve a place in the prime inbox real estate. Use them to:

• reinforce benefits
• encourage recipients to add you to their personal whitelist, safe sender list, connect at social networks, etc.
• provide links and offers that you know will get a high response: consider making a short-term loss here at a long-term gain in attention and profit

4. Intelligent inboxes demand connectivity

The intelligent, social inbox values connections, since connections are a measure of trust and value. Any formal recognition of a subscriber’s connection to the sender (as follower, fan, address book contact, whatever) is a quality signal to the email address provider.

Integration of social and email marketing is still in its infancy. What works and what doesn’t is still under investigation. But it seems likely that it won’t just be about having people share your email on Facebook or visit your newsletter achive through a tweeted link.

The very existence of multichannel connections looks set to help lift the priority of your individual messages through each channel.

The inbox is changing, email is changing…is your email marketing changing, too? Love to hear your thoughts on all this!

Update: some ideas from others in the field on the impact of intelligent inboxes on email marketing:

Are You Ready for the Ultra Managed Inbox? by Stephanie Miller
What does Gmail priority inbox mean for email marketers? by Elliot Ross

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing strategy

I’d dump Q and maybe J.

Because if attention spans continue shrinking, we’ll need to cut down the alphabet to make words shorter (shrtr).

Given the online ADD epidemic, it surely makes sense to go short if you’re producing articles for a newsletter, blog or website?

Not necessarily.

If short was always the way, this blog would be dead. We just assume people won’t read long articles. The ADD problem has been hammered home so often that we hardly pause to think anymore.

But it’s not that simple.

Like everything online, the “ideal” content length depends on context: the ideal length is the one that says everything you need to say to get the right response.

Not short. Not long. But what suits your needs and the audience you’re targeting.

The problem isn’t really people’s inability to pay attention, but the greater competition for that attention.

If they read your content, that comes at a cost to them. It means they’re not doing something else. And there’s so much else they could be doing online.

The short content solution

Short articles address that problem by making the cost of giving attention as low as possible. Hence their attraction.

If it only takes a moment to read your content, the cost of doing so is low and so people are more likely to do so. D’oh!

That’s not the only reason to go short:

• It’s much easier and faster to whip out a 200-word blog post than a 1200-word one
• Short articles are great for communicating quick, pithy content and concepts, like Seth Godin or Chad White do so well
• Chances are people will read the whole content, which helps when it comes to getting comments or links

The downside (and it’s a big one) is that it’s very hard to be unique, meaningful and valuable in just a few words. Not impossible, but hard.

There is a difference in experience and impact between reading:

“So this boy and girl meet and fall in love. But the families aren’t keen and the girl is kind of promised to another. So they get a priest to help them. Unfortunately, the plan goes wrong and they both die.”

…and reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The long content solution

Long content works with the other side of the attention equation. Instead of lowering the cost of giving attention, it increases the value of doing so.

Long content lets you:

• get into the detail necessary to communicate extensive knowledge, build an argument or tell a good story (or all three)
• better demonstrate in-depth knowledge and expertise
• attract links, Tweets, comments etc. through its comprehensivenes

The main disadvantage is that it takes more effort, skill and time to create. Though the compensation is that you don’t need to produce it so often.

Quality trumps quantity in a world where quality is in short supply and quantity…um…isn’t.

This “disadvantage” is also a real advantage in a world full of people looking for information. Short content is easier to produce, so there’s an awful lot more of it: an awful lot of people saying more or less the same thing.

If you’re prepared to take the long content route, there’s less competition and it’s easier to be unique. It’s easier to develop a loyal audience that simply can’t get the same information elsewhere.

A real problem with long content, however, is the cost side of the attention equation.

Before people can see the value, they need to read the content. But they don’t want to read such lengthy content because of the commitment that demands.

That’s why long content needs to ensure it has:

• a good title: like an email subject line, it should grab attention, raise interest and encourage further reading
• a strong introduction: the introduction needs to draw in the reader with crisp, engaging writing and/or (if the title hasn’t done so already) quickly communicate the value of reading further
• an eye-friendly structure: headlines, bold and italics, bullet points and, most important, sensible use of paragraph and line lengths (as discussed in detail in a previous post)

Snacks versus meals

A problem with many sites, blogs and email newsletters is that have become slaves to ADD. They are snack foods that satisfy a short-term craving, but don’t fill anyone up.

It’s hard (not impossible) to stand out when you’re just selling snacks. Hard (not impossible) to build a real gourmet experience that has people raving to their friends about you.

Snacks are popular, but don’t confuse popularity with influence or longevity. Snacks are easy to copy, gourmet meals aren’t.

Equally, if you’re trying to provide a gourmet experience, you can’t offer bland meals that leave no lasting, positive impression.

Ifs and buts

I started life as a scientist, the worst possible training for writing just about anything in an engaging manner. But it means any general advice (like that above) has to be qualified by ifs and buts.

1. The choice of long or short is often dictated by circumstances and markets

For example, news-type content is going to lean toward short to make up for the high frequency demanded to stay current.

2. There is nothing wrong with a mix

In fact, a mix of long and short often works well.

For example, the lengthy blog posts I publish are mixed up with the occasional famous inbox or stats update.

The inverted pyramid structure used by news journalists is another example of short and long content. The first few lines communicate all the critical information, and the rest of the article expands, argues and explains. People can explicitly choose between long and short content formats, depending on how much detail they want.

Another example is providing article summaries in a newsletter, with links to the lengthier article back at a website.

Short content communicates facts, principles and concepts quickly. Which is a good thing for us time-pressed citizens of the brave new web world.

The danger is it does so superficially. It’s hard to touch an audience meaningfully in a few short words (we can’t tell everyone “I love you” and mean it).

The move to concise, succinct, snappy content has many advantages, but don’t forget the opportunity that long content has in letting you reach people in a deeper, more influential, way.

3. There is no right and wrong approach

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt online it’s that there are very few hard and fast rules.

If you go short, you leave some people looking for more detail. If you go long, some people will never read it: in a comment elsewhere on this blog, “Jake” introduced me to the lovely acronym TLDR (too long, didn’t read).

For those who prefer short-form content, here’s the one-line summary:

Make your content as long as needed to say what you need to say to get the best response from your target audience.

So…long or short? What do you think?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Copywriting

After the Muppet show, Kermit pulls up his iPad on the lily pad and checks the day’s mail. This is what he sees…

Previous famous inboxes: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Julius Caesar, Satan, James Bond

Find related articles:

• Channel: Marketing humor

Traditional direct marketing has the 40/40/20 rule.

40% of your success is dependent on the audience, 40% on the offer and 20% on everything else.

Email marketing has the 90/10 rule.

90% of your success is dependent on the subject line and 10% on everything else.

At least you’d think so, given the volumes of space dedicated to the topic of writing subject lines. Mea culpa.

When a promotion or newsletter pulls in unexpected results, our first thought is to point the finger in the direction of the subject.

After all, we sent the email to the usual list with our usual sender name and standard design template, with a typical offer or tidbit of content. It must be the subject line that did the heavy lifting or screwed up.

Or not.

Even if you exclude the offer/content and list from the equation, there are many other factors that could be skewing results one way or another. It may indeed be the subject line, but it may be something else.

The wider we cast our analytical net, the better we understand why we got the results we did and how we can exploit that knowledge to do (even) better next time around.

Here’s my list of other factors influencing results…what would you add?

Deliverability

Hear that noise? Me neither. It’s the sound of an email not landing in an inbox. A depressing non-sound.

The total response you get depends on how much email actually landed where people can see them.

Bounce rates

Anything unusual happening with bounces? A jump in soft bounces, for example, might be a sign that your mail was triggering spam filters. An example from my own reports:

That harmless soft bounce is actually mail rejected as spam.

Inbox deliverability

Low bounce rates translate to a high delivery rate in a typical campaign report. But, as this article explains, this delivery rate only tells you that email didn’t come back as undeliverable. It does not tell you if the email was deleted before delivery or redirected into a junk/spam folder.

Getting a handle on true inbox deliverability is tricky, as most ESPs or email marketing software simply can’t deliver the information.

One possibility is to segment your list by address domain and compare responses across the major domains and across emails.

If you notice that, for example, hotmail.com addresses produce an unusually low response compared to other domains and previous emails, then you likely had delivery problems there. If the response is unusually high, perhaps a delivery block was lifted.

Another method is to use an email analytics tool, like Litmus or MailboxIQ.

And another is to set up accounts at common ISPs and webmail services, add them to your list and then monitor what arrived and what didn’t.

This kind of “seed list monitoring” is also offered by a number of services, including Return Path, Pivotal Veracity, EmailReach and Delivery Watch. These companies also offer other diagnostic tools to identify the cause of any delivery issues.

Delivery delays

Delivery is also about when email arrives and not just whether email arrives. Sending delays (which some of the services mentioned above can also monitor) can throw out campaign timing and make a hot offer meaningless.

A Friday afternoon email advertising a Saturday morning in-store sale won’t perform well if the emails don’t actually reach inboxes until Saturday lunchtime.

Remedial action

Did you do anything before the send to change your deliverability? For example:

• Did you just finish a dedicated “please whitelist us” email campaign?
• Did you add whitelisting instructions to your welcome messages?
• Did you or your ESP use a different IP address to mail from? One with a better sender reputation? Or a worse one? Or a new one with no reputation?
• Did you start authenticating outgoing messages?
• Did you start certifying your email?

Copywriting

Let’s assume the general quality of the copywriting is the same from email to email. But what seemingly innocent copy elements can throw off results?

Preheader

If you’re using snippet text to promote the email’s content, like this…

…then that snippet is like a mini subject line itself. Not nearly as powerful, but still capable of drawing people deeper into that message. if you’re not using and optimizing that piece of text, perhaps it’s time to rethink the preheader.

The call-to-action

Many a good piece of copy is ruined by a weak call-to-action. Even small changes in wording and placement can affect CTR dramatically. Factors worth considering are:

• Wording and length (what words did you use?)
• Position in the email (was the CTA at the top of the email only? Bottom only? Did you move it closer to (or further away from) related copy and images?)
• Repetition (how often did you repeat the CTA for a particular landing page? Did you use a dedicated CTA only, or also link images and headlines?)
• Competition (how many different actions were competing for attention in the email? Were there too many distractions from the main CTA?)
• Design (did you change the color, size, shape or font? Did you change to an image-based CTA? Or to a text one?)

Link robustness

In an ideal world, you tested all links before sending out your email. Even so, things can still go wrong. For example:

…if you set up the campaign well in advance of the send date, one or more links may have broken in the meantime.

…the landing page link may work, but maybe the tracking link broke because of maintenance work at your ESP.

…the link “worked”, but it was the wrong link.

[I once got a surprisingly large number of clicks to an article featured briefly right down the bottom of my newsletter. Turned out the main article link at the top of the email was pointing to that minor article, rather than the intended one. Ouch.]

Timing

When we talk of timing in email, we tend to think of the best day and the best time of day to send out a message. So, yes, the time, day and date all impact results. But timing goes beyond that…

Weather

Pure360 found that responses to certain kinds of offers and content were closely correlated to the prevailing weather.

Intuitively we know that clicks on an email promoting sunscreen are likely higher when the sun is shining. But there are less obvious connections, too. For example, the study revealed that CTR on emails…

“…promoting business related events and products increased from 12% when it was raining to 27% in the sunshine”

..but that…

“Campaigns promoting restaurants are twice as effective in bad weather”

Other things going on

It’s hard to believe, but subscribers have a life beyond email. What else is going on that might distract them from checking their messages?

• Public holidays: maybe B2B emails won’t work on a holiday? Maybe consumers have more time to read? Are they outside enjoying the extra freetime, checking the latest DVDs or catching up on mail?
• Seasonal influences: a super subject line won’t help response much if you’re selling BBQ equipment in the fall (unless it’s a clearance sale?!)
• High-attention events: events make great themes to build campaigns around, but the events themselves draw attention away from email. Was everybody watching the Superbowl? The World Cup final? The Olympics opening ceremony? The Presidential inauguration?
• High-attention news: did your email go out just as the Berlin Wall was coming down…as the war in Iraq started…as the Prime Minister resigned?

Your wider email context

The focus on time and day also reflects a focus on each email as a standalone message. But each email is also one of a stream of past and future messages that may run into the hundreds or thousands.

So the position of that one email in that stream also affects response.

What kind of emails (and how many) did that list or segment get before this one? How might that impact responses to the current email? Is the content/offer fresh or a repeat of the last five messages, sent in the last 10 days?

Previous experience with your emails also drives future attention.

If the last email was high value, then recipients are more likely to give the current one more time and attention. If the last email was rubbish, they’re less likely to give the current one a fair chance.

Other marketing influences

Email does not operate in a parallel world untroubled by outside influences. Other marketing activities impact email’s success as a marketing channel.

Your other marketing

One of the big challenges in online marketing is attribution. If someone interacts with you online through different channels, which channel gets the credit when they eventually convert?

The fact that it’s not automatically the last channel of contact reflects our intrinsic understanding that every touchpoint with a potential customer has an impact on the eventual conversion.

Did you triple your PPC search engine spend the week before the email went out? What other marketing was your company doing as you sent out your emails?

Did the email send follow an intensive direct mail and TV campaign for the very product advertised in the email? If so, some of the conversion work was already done before the email arrived.

Spam

Spam levels vary day by day. If a botnet comes online or gets shutdown, your list might get a shortlived increase or decrease in the amount of spam that clutters up their email accounts.

A bad spam day might drown out your message. A good spam day will give it more prominence in the inbox.

Competitors

And what about your competitors?

Maybe they’ve done lots of advertising for the kind of product/service you promoted in the last email? Or maybe they sent an email with the same offer just before you did…or maybe they had a 30% off everything sale and yours was only 20% off.

Your list isn’t unique to you: if they signed up for your SEO newsletter, maybe they signed up for someone else’s, too.

Competitor influence is particularly likely during seasonal hotspots (like pre-Christmas or the start of a new semester) when everyone is pushing their 20% off seasonal sale.

List changes: same list, but…

You may be sending to the same list or list segment, but a list is an organic beast. It grows, it shrinks, it changes.

New subscribers

Did a major address acquisition effort boost the proportion of new subscribers on your list? On the whole, fresh sign-ups tend to respond more than long-timers.

Where did those new subscribers come from?

Did you just dump thousands of sweepstake participants into your list and see them drag down responses?

Or did you add those few hundred tradeshow visitors who want your newsletter, doubling your little B2B distribution list overnight and lifting responses temporarily?

Did you change the copy on your sign-up forms to better explain the kind of emails you send? New subscribers are now better matched to your content and offers: response rises.

Old subscribers

Did you launch a subscriber preference center and highlight it in the last email? Maybe your segment got a few fresh faces as a result.

Did you just finish a major subscriber reactivation campaign, with the new actives now helping lift your results?

Did you undergo a major list hygiene project, removing all those bounces and eliminating lots of unresponsive addresses? Total responses won’t change, but response rates will rise: when you take out the deadwood, total responses are divided by fewer addresses to calculate percentages, so those percentages go up.

Email software changes

Things may not have changed at all at your end, but what about at the subscriber’s end?

Migration to alternative viewing devices, software or webmail services doesn’t happen overnight, but software and service upgrades do. These can change the way your emails are displayed or processed by a significant chunk of your list.

On January 12th this year, for example, Google began switching Gmail users over to a more secure https interface setting. The result was that emails with images not hosted on a secure server triggered security warnings when users tried to open them at Gmail. I discovered a resultant dip in opens and clicks on my own list.

Did any of the big webmail services upgrade their interface, features or settings prior to your last email?

Reverse engineer

Of course, once you become aware of the various factors that might impact your results, you can plan for them…and exploit them.

If TV campaigns boost email results, then time the latter to follow the former. If a national election keeps people off email, don’t send email during a national election. If the weather plays a role, put out your umbrella promotion just as torrential rain hits the country…forewarned is forearmed.

So…any more additions for the list?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email analysis