No man is an iland

May 09, 2008

When you understand why people might want to leave your list, you can take steps to keep them on board and content.

Here's a new article from the main site with 14 tips on how to keep people happily married to your email program (and how to make the most of those that do leave).

May 08, 2008

The mediocrity of the masses has a powerful pull. Which is why so much "ordinary" writing or design is excused because "that's what everyone else does."

The problem is compounded in email marketing by the use of the term "safe" as in "safe" design. The sentiments are valid: design your emails so they render properly in a range of display environments.

This is a positive thing. But a side-effect is a drift toward uniformity. And the misapprehension that safe means boring. All emails start to look and sound pretty similar. Eyes may soon begin to glaze over.

So perhaps it's time to get a little edgy again, a sentiment echoed by eROI's Jeff; though for different reasons.

This need not mean "unsafe" design.

In recent articles, both David Baker and Loren McDonald suggest using open rates to identify those customers who will likely see images, allowing you to make more (creative) use of graphic elements when sending to that segment.

It's a concept I raised a few weeks ago, albeit to a mixed response.

David goes on to discuss the role of animated images in email, which are enjoying something of a renaissance. Just about every email client and webmail service supports animated gifs in emails.

Animated images had a bad reputation for a while, largely because marketers traditionally used them simply to attract attention. This quickly became annoying.

Anyone who remembers the ubiquitous punch-the-monkey banner ads of yesteryear will have a pathological hatred of animated gifs.

Since email is about delivering value to the recipient, animated images can work if (and only if) they enhance that value. For example by displaying a product in different colors or configurations.

Suzanne Norman has some advice on how to use them in email. And you'll find some inspiring examples from the retail world at Style Campaign and around the RetailEmail.Blogspot blog.

Tags: email marketing, email design, animated gifs, animation in email

In his crusade to help free us of our unhealthy obsession with open rates, Loren McDonald proposes some alternative approaches.

Among them, the idea that we should call it the "email render rate" to reflect the fact that all the open rate actually measures is whether or not a tracking image in the sent email was displayed.

Neither Loren nor I would expect the wider email marketing industry suddenly to start using the "render rate" term. But there's nothing to stop you from doing so.

Why bother?

Because words have power. Call something an open rate and people assume it indicates someone opened (read) an email. Even if you know better, it introduces subconscious bias into how you interpret open rate numbers.

Think of it as a render rate, and that subconscious bias disappears. This allows you to focus on what the number truly tells you about your email efforts and encourages you to look elsewhere for the numbers you really need to measure success.

Open rates guide | Tags: email marketing, email open rates, email render rates

May 07, 2008

Getting your emails into the inbox is part art, part science, part praying to Collatio, the Roman God of Lost Mail.

As a result, deliverability has become its own specialty, with dedicated services, expertise and jargon. Those who live and breathe delivery rates will welcome the appearance of an excellent new blog over at Deliverability.com, where you'll find various vendor experts at work.

The latest post, for example, warns about the spam complaints that can arise if you send out emails confirming an unsubscribe.

The deliverability.com blog joins a select number of quality deliverability blogs, including Word to the Wise, EmailKarma, Spam Resource and Box of Meat.

Tags: More email marketing blogs | email marketing, email deliverability

Email marketing is like trying to fill a bucket with holes in it. And email marketers fall into two schools of thought on how to do so.

The old school tackles the problem by using more water and pouring faster. It's inefficient and dooms you to a never-ending game of catch-up and costs. (And eventually you run out of water.)

The new school plugs the holes.

This is the first post in a series with the gloriously pretentious title "The new email marketing." Subsequent posts explore the tactics used by enlightened marketers to exploit email successfully, sustainably, ethically and efficiently.

The old email marketing is volume oriented.

At its worst, the old email marketing sees email addresses as a commodity. The thinking behind this quote (heard by me at a recent event):

"I just bought 4 million email addresses. They're not targeted, but...(shrug)"

The old email marketing is short-term.

It sees sending more of the same emails, more often, as the answer to falling response rates. Ken Magill likens it to an addiction: you need to send more and more to get the same buzz. And like any such addiction, the eventual outcome is not pretty.

The old email marketing falls prey to blinkered and narrow interests, letting their email program become hijacked by too many conflicting or inappropriate goals or approaches.

The new email marketing thinks smart email marketing, not bulk email marketing. Look out for part 2 soon...

Tags: email marketing, email strategy

May 06, 2008

You probably get a clickthrough rate of under 10%, which means a lot of people aren't interested enough in your offer or teaser content to investigate further.

In many cases we kind of forget about those non-clickers and hope something grabs their interest next time.

But just because the main content or offer isn't tugging the right strings does not mean those non-clickers aren't ready to respond to the email. The very presence of the email reminds the recipients of your existence and can stimulate the urge to (re)explore your site and offerings.

In fact, some of those clicks are already a result of this. Which is why it pays to look at which individual links people click on, not just the overall CTR for the email.

Jack Felsheim, for example, cites one B2C email campaign where...

"...more users clicked on links directing them to the Web site than clicked on the product links offered in the e-mail...most of the customers simply used the e-mail as a trigger to visit the site."

You can help enhance this positive side-effect by putting secondary links in the email that might catch some attention and traffic if the main links don't.

Dylan Boyd gives us a nice example from an ecommerce site.

The key, of course, is to ensure that these links, their design and their placement don't overwhelm your main focus or call to action.

How do you ensure that?

Well, Chris Lovejoy suggests adding popular links as navigation bars to achieve the desired effect. Marc Kline echoes this advice, and recommends more contextual and image linking to boost CTR.

Of course, in an ideal world, the content/offer you send is so relevant and targeted that incidental clicks are not a big deal. But we don't live in an ideal world...

More on design and copywriting | Tags: email marketing, ctr, call to action, email design

We've all read expert articles bemoaning the fact that so many marketers are doing something wrong with their email marketing. Or highlighting the common lack of appropriate resources and support for email efforts. (Heck, I've written some.)

Most recently, Alterian released research results showing that most of those surveyed were "intermediate" email marketers at best and none could be considered pacesetters.

Instead of galvanizing us all to improve our strategies and tactics or capture more resources for our efforts, are these admonishments having precisely the opposite effect?

Here's a quote from Robert Cialdini, writing in Current Directions in Psychological Science...

"There is an understandable, but misguided, tendency to try to mobilize action against a problem by depicting it as regrettably frequent"

Why misguided?

"Within the statement 'Many people are doing this undesirable thing' lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message 'Many people are doing this.'"

In other words, the message people get is that the "bad" behavior is normal and thus they are more likely to do it.

Cialdini, for example, showed that putting up notices about the regrettably large amount of petrified wood stolen from an Arizona national park actually led to more theft.

(You can read all about this in "Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion")

Perhaps we who write about email marketing need to focus even more on the benefits of doing better email marketing, the spread of good practices and the penalties for poor practices.

(I wonder if the same phenomenon applies to spam. The vast majority of articles on spam simply highlight how prevalent it is. Does this then establish "sending spam" as a social norm, thus subliminally encouraging people to do it?)

Tags: email marketing, spam, social norms, email marketing industry

Many thanks to the dozens of you who helped shape the scope of this blog using the poll. It's not too late to get your voice and vote heard.

Those of you who voted for more posts will be hearing from my wife shortly.

May 05, 2008

Things I learned last week as a first-time exhibitor at a major online marketing show in London:

• Based on the state of our booth on arrival, the people who deliver show fittings and equipment were clearly orphaned young and raised by bears.
• It's best to check-in your soul along with your coat and bags. You don't need it and it's easily lost.
• Beware the parallel economic universe occupied by trade show furniture, where the rental price on a small stool matches the GDP of Iceland.
• It is indeed possible to go for up to eight hours without food, drink or oxygen.
• Double opt-in is great when signing up people to your email program. But it doesn't work at trade shows. Visitors taking brochures from your stand do not expect to be asked "are you sure?"
• On the journey to the restrooms, keep your head down and avoid eye contact with other vendors. The only alternative is diapers.
• The best time for approaching visitors is immediately after a keynote seminar has ended. They are still in PPS (post-powerpoint shock), so you can slip a brochure in their bag without encountering resistance.
• You can never have too many pens, but you can (unfortunately) have too many brochures.
• When leaving, it is quite important not to confuse the rubbish bag full of unused brochures with the plastic bag full of visitor cards.

Any other tips you can pass on to a trade show newbie?

More humor

April 30, 2008

I'm at a tradeshow all week, so the resultant lack of oxygen means no/few blog posts. Today I met my first live spammer. Which prompted me just to quickly highlight this news tidbit:

Response One surveyed over 1000 UK consumers and asked them about the types of advertising that were most effective in inspiring them to visit websites and make purchases.

Most effective?

Customer emails.

Least effective?

Unsolicited mobile text and unsolicited emails.

No further questions...

(For the full details see the R1 in the Press link for 24th April here.)

April 29, 2008

My last newsletter issue added an unsubscribe link to the very top of the email. So it looked like this (the font was bigger in the original):



Early days yet, but here's how doing this changed unsubscribe rates*:

Unsubscribe rate last issue (with unsubscribe link up top): 0.54%

Average unsubscribe rate for the previous five issues (with no unsubscribe link up top): 0.26%

It wasn't an A/B test and it's a small list. So I'm not going to claim statistical validity until the pattern continues (and maybe the last issue was just not up to usual standards). But the anecdotal suggestion is that it caused unsubscribes to rise.

Which is great, if true.

Every unsubscribe is potentially one less spam report.

Every unsubscribe is one less person likely to get annoyed at me and my website when getting another email.

Every unsubscribe is one less unwanted email cluttering up the airwaves and inboxes of this world.

*calculated as the number of reported unsubscribes as a percentage of total emails "received" (sent minus bounces).

Related post: Time to move the unsubscribe link?

(P.S. Please tell me what content you want on this blog - take the poll)

Tags: email marketing, unsubscribe links, list management, email deliverability

Sign-up for the Email Marketing Reports NEWSLETTER
Twice a month, free, packed with email marketing advice and all the posts from this blog.

Email:      First Name:     
    More info and sample | Your privacy is guaranteed

Email marketing search engine
Introduction to email marketing and email advertising basics
Listings for email marketing services
Sources of email marketing statistics
Advice on email design and delivery issues

Top 21 email marketing info sources
Outlook 2007 and HTML design
Events and webinar roundup

Visit the main website for everything email marketing.