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February 28, 2005

An E-Mail Marketer's Guide to Deliverability, Part 3: DomainKeys
Jeanne Jennings continues her look at the technology behind measures to protect inboxes from unwanted email. If you missed them, here are parts 1 and 2.

February 24, 2005

Opting-Out Gracefully
Derek Harding identifies how some unsubscribe instructions might not be working properly by the time they reach the recipient, and has some suggestions on how to best comply with opt-out requirements in Can-Spam legislation.

February 23, 2005

Review of "Sign Me Up"
An excellent and thoughtful review by G. Simms Jenkins of a new email marketing book by the folks at Return Path. So good, I shan't bother to write a review myself but will just send people to this one.

E-Mail Quality Assurance -- Without Investing in Your Own Lab
Karen Gedney picks the brains of a Q&A vendor and client to make a few suggestions on ensuring your emails look good across various browser /service combinations.

Simple Syndication (RSS) -- where's the payoff?
Scott Frangos explores some of the business benefits of putting your content into an RSS feed, including a couple of useful links on RSS and marketing. Also read through the comments section - some more useful discussion in there.

Five Simple Steps to Increase Sales with E-Newsletters
OK, it's a press release, and I *dislike* linking to press releases as they're usually either totally self-serving or totally empty of anything interesting. But this one actually has some basic reminders for those who may be new to the idea of e-newsletters as a retention tool.

February 22, 2005

Landing Page Handbook: How to Raise Conversions
Just finished looking over this MarketingSherpa tome and reworked this website as a result! It's a fairly weighty 190 pages that takes you through the basics of landing page design, letting case studies and marketer's own experience demonstrate the value of different approaches to various elements of page layout and content.

If you've conducted your own extensive tests on landing pages, much will be familiar to you. If not, then this book will shoot you up the learning curve. It also includes a dedicated section on landing pages for email campaigns.

February 18, 2005

How to Reduce Email Unsubscribes by 35% & Boost Holiday Sales
A brief case study from the folks at EmailSherpa. It reports the gains made by changing the style of an e-newsletter and offering a "reduce mailing frequency" option.

February 17, 2005

How Geeks Can Increase E-Mail Delivery
An article for your tech people to review - includes a summary of those actions they can take (or areas they should investigate) to improve deliverability.

Spam Deluge Continues - Will Technology Succeed Where Law Failed?
The Center for Democracy and Technology produced a report entitled "Spam 2005: Technology, Law and Policy" which you can access from the summary published at the above link. It includes contributions on European legislation, anti-spam measures and other issues which impact directly (or indirectly) on legitimate email marketing, too.

Bye Bye Email?
This article reporting on a Blog Business Summit comes close to actually making me angry. It begins with the suggestion that "Blog feeds are rapidly replacing email as a form of proactive marketing communications". Erm...no they're not. Nor can they really be considered proactive.

Chris Pirillo is quoted as saying that "email marketing is dead", a line he's been using for quite a long time now. Presumebly all the case study successes I still keep coming across are figments of my imagination, then.

I like blogs (obviously - I'm writing this one), but it disappoints me that we still get locked into an either/or mentality when it comes to strategies and tactics.

Done right, email works brilliantly for marketers *and* customers. Done right, blogs/RSS work brilliantly for marketers and customers. And they're not mutually exclusive.

February 16, 2005

Email Marketing: The First 48 Hours Are Critical
Raj Khera offers a summary of the findings from vendor MailerMailer's "Email Marketing Use and Trends Report: H1 2004". It basically contains industry by industry comparisons of core metrics like open rate and CTR. Not sure how useful that is given all the statistical ifs and buts that go with such figures, but all data is interesting.

February 15, 2005

List host suggestions?
Since I'm considering releasing a compilation of "the latest email marketing resource reviews" in a free biweekly newsletter, does anyone have any recommendations as to a suitable third-party list host?

Price is important, as well as reliability, clean and quick subscription management, deliverability and a whiter than the whitest of whites record when it comes to spam issues.

I don't require any fancy features, nor do I anticipate ever mailing to more than a couple of thousand marketers. The ability to allow recipients to tick off content categories and receive email which reflects those specifications would be nice, but not compulsory (especially if it involves a more expensive solution).

I have my own thoughts (unsurprisingly, given this site is about email marketing), but would be interested in anyone's practical experiences and recommendations. Cheers!

Contact
P.S. Anyone else notice the irony of a popular site about email marketing not yet having an email list?

February 14, 2005

An E-Mail Marketer's Guide to Deliverability, Part 2: Sender ID
After tackling SPF previously, Jeanne Jennings explains the concept of Sender ID for email authentication in words of one syllable.

E-mail vs. Email: Pesky Or Crucial Hyphen?
Forget conversion rates, deliverability and landing page design, the critical issue concerning marketers today is whether they are e-mail or email marketers. I vote for email.

Behavioral Marketing's Email Application
Michael Mayor of vendor NetCreations explains one particular way behavioral targeting can be applied to email marketing, and with resounding success (he has the test results to prove it).

February 11, 2005

When Push Turns to Shove: E-Mail Relevancy and Frequency
Jack Aaronson makes a point worth repeating to yourself every night before you go to bed; relevancy is critical to email marketing success.

He also cites two examples of email marketing efforts that aren't working as well as they could because of this very lack of relevancy.

As he says himself, succintly, "an abundance of professional e-mail isn't technically spam but is annoying. These companies aren't trying to spam me. They just don't know when to shut up."

This also relates to a favorite topic of mine, namely that the obsession with complying with the legal requirements imposed on email means people forget that the recipients themselves have their own requirements and expectations.

February 10, 2005

Back to E-Mail Basics
Al DiGuido identifies a few basic email areas where even the ecommerce giants aren't doing all they should be doing to improve customer loyalty and response rates.

Email Marketing in the UK - Tips & Data
EmailSherpa.com presents a potpourri of data snippets and practical insights, including advice on the differences between the UK and the USA in terms of recipient behavior and preferences.

February 09, 2005

Proofreading Isn't Enough: The E-Mail QA Lab
David Baker of vendor agency.com gets the floor at ClickZ to espouse the importance of quality assurance with regard to outgoing email campaigns. Among other things, he talks about the various types of QA and the value of an email testing lab.

Larry Chase's Search Engine for Marketers -Email Marketing Resource Center
Larry Chase has been reviewing useful sites for marketers for a long time now, and there's a whole subsection of his directory devoted to email marketing. Lots of interesting sites for you to browse and consume at your leisure.

E-mail is the new database
An overview of how people are using their web-based (free) email accounts. Hidden in the article are statistics on how the different services shape up in terms of popularity and use. Good background material on user trends, with a UK focus.

February 07, 2005

Use E-Mail to Boost Offline Retail Sales
In his regular column, Paul Soltoff tries to persuade readers of the benefit of using email to drive traffic to offline stores, and then has a number of suggestions as how best to do it. He's always got some good ideas up his sleeve, though his statement on email appending is a little disingenuous; "this is an approved and compliant tactic under the CAN-SPAM legislation" Approved by...customers? Grey area in my book.

February 04, 2005

How to Get (And Track) a High Volume of New Opt-Ins
EmailSherpa gets an inside look into how USAToday.com grow their house list through co-registration and sweepstakes. The article also touches on the growth of RSS and the importance of tracking new subscribers by source of the opt-in.

February 03, 2005

Email Deliverability Tips
Tom Kulzer of vendor AWeber has outlined a series of tips and issues you need to consider or tackle to improve your delivery rates.

February 02, 2005

Blog Analysis Reveals Email Marketing Trends
Looking at all the 2004 entries for this blog, some clear patterns emerged in terms of what marketers were interested in. So I summarized them and dumped them in this press release.

Must-Have Terms for Co-registration Insertion Orders
Stephan Pretorius has some words of legal advice for those building their house list through commercial co-registration networks and similar.

Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead
The New York Times weighs in with a balanced review of the current position in the spam wars. It even touches on one of my pet topics, which is that the measure of anti-spam success shouldn't just be how much gets *sent*, but also how much gets *through*.

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