No man is an iland

March 28, 2005

RSS' Effect on E-Mail Marketing
David Daniels suggests it's "not a lot." The article also includes some interesting information on RSS spam (!). Seems like the golden promise of a spam-free delivery mechanism isn't necessarily going to be fulfilled.

Time to go Back to Basics
Lee-Ann Vermaak of vendor Acceleration has a checklist of basic (sometimes very) issues and activities you may forget about as you get embroiled in the wonders of modern email marketing technology.

March 25, 2005

Co-Marketing via E-Mail Brings BTB Profits
The article cites Elaine O'Gorman of vendor Silverpop, who discusses the various pros, cons and practical issues associated with "renting" email lists from other companies in your market. There are, inevitably, permission issues involved, but much benefit to be had from "exploiting" the trust a company has with its own client or customer base.

Clear and Conspicuous Opt Outs
In the follow-up to his previous article, Derek Harding outlines how to make your "remove my address" system user-friendly.

March 24, 2005

New vendor white paper
Through DMNews you can access this 11-page document from ExactTarget entitled, "How permission-based email drives sales, leverages customer relationships and creates powerful brand loyalty." (All while fixing your car and taking your kids to school for you).

Seriously, it's a well-written exposition of how email fits into a broader multi-channel marketing strategy, including a case study of Sherwin-Williams and "10 Rules for Successful Permission-Based Email Marketing."

Maximize Your Trade Show Investment With E-Mail
Karen Gedney has a series of tips on how best to integrate email into your pre- and post-tradeshow lead generation and marketing endeavors.

March 23, 2005

Yahoo bolsters e-mail storage to 1GB
In a new round of storage wars, users of Yahoo's free email services will get four times the current space in their inboxes.

March 22, 2005

Headaches in Fine Print
Tom Spring writes from the consumer perspective and highlights some of the reasons why people are wary of giving out their email these days. Always interesting to hear the view from the other side of the inbox. And always revealing to read such comments as "...because opting out often doesn't stop the e-mail onslaught, I rely on the blacklist filter on my e-mail client to stop any messages from an entire domain."

March 21, 2005

Email Deliverability Data
Matt Blumberg of Return Path introduces their 2004 deliverability report. He has good news and bad news. The bad news is that there are more false positives than before. The good news is that you can do something about it.

Phishing concerns taint legitimate email
The phishing problem is getting worse because, as Chris Jablonski reports, now people increasingly think legitimate transactional emails are fraudulent...

E-Mails Lift Customer Service for Aspen Reservations Firm
A few good ideas in there about moving away from the broadcast email model, and generating automatic emails on the fly in response to predefined triggers (date of visit etc.) Sort of an auto-responder model for a new century, and echoing the suggestions made recently by Jim Nail.

JupiterResearch: RSS Adoption Not Really Simple
Overview of the results of a study on the value and penetration of RSS for marketing purposes; the author does an exellent job of highlighting all the issues that surround the RSS vs email marketing debate. The study's conclusions are a question of interpretation though. One man's half-empty glass is another man's half-full one.

March 18, 2005

Double Campaign Results
..."by Sending Emails to At-Work & At-Home Email Addresses on Different Days" says this case study from EmailSherpa. The statistics are not conclusive, since there was no control, but they're certainly suggestive. One of those excellent ideas where you just go, "yeah, that's obvious, so why didn't I think of it before?"

March 17, 2005

How HTML Code Affects E-Mail Deliverability
As if you didn't have enough to worry about, this article reveals lots of things in your html code that could see you filtered at some of the major email services. And all because of those nice spammers.

Do you really know what spam is?
This survey of people's understanding of what is spam is another reminder about separating permission issues as defined by law from permission issues as defined by recipients. For example, 7.7% of those surveyed define spam as any email they don't want. There's a challenge to be relevant if ever there was one.

March 16, 2005

Email Marketing Resources for Small Business
A new resource site co-sponsored by the US's Small Business Administration and vendor Constant Contact. It serves as a useful introduction for SMEs looking to get into email marketing, and is full of articles and on-demand webinars.

DoubleClick
The DoubleClick Q4 2004 Email Trend Report is out, for those interested in trend data. You can access it off the company's homepage. There are various small fluctuations in typical metrics, but the bottom line is things are better - with revenue per delivered email rising.

I'd pitch things as "the battle continues." It seems that the continual progress made in best practices and email marketing applications more or less counterbalances the "losses" due to the problems associated with email security, spam, inbox overload etc.

We're running hard to keep still or make slow forward progress. And that's not bad given the general pessimism you used to hear about the industry.

March 15, 2005

Six Email Marketing Reminders
Article at MarketingProfs.com which offers some suggestions on areas of your email marketing strategy you might review. I'd lavish praise on the eloquence and intelligence of the author, but since I am the author, some might consider me biased.

E-Mail Frequency and List Control
Jeanne Jennings has some practical advice on planning the frequency of mailouts to your house list, and some tips on coping with the various internal constituencies who all want to use that list for their own needs.

March 11, 2005

Bigfoot Interactive Email Summit notes
EmailSherpa provides a quick overview of the issues bothering email marketers at the moment. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly perhaps), they're more to do with issues of office politics than the nitty gritty of marketing.

Inbox nightmare near end?
This article reports on a spam survey in Canada which highlights the importance of distinguishing between tearful missives about increasing volumes of spam and how much spam people actually see.

According to a recent survey by Ipsos-Reid, the amount of spam reaching inboxes in Canada has decreased, while attitudes to email as a communication medium have improved. Good news for legitimate email marketers.

FTC Responds To DMA Request for Clarification on Joint Permission E-Mail Marketing
This announcement by the DMA attempts to shed light on the legal responsibilities involved in, effectively, list rental cases, where you buy an ad to be sent to someone else's list.

Especially interesting is the suggestion that advertisers are considered initiators of the commercial email, even if they're not sending it themselves. Which means they still have a responsibility to ensure that the emails sent by a third party to that third party's list fulfill legal criteria in terms of non-deceptive subject lines, opt-out instructions etc.

March 10, 2005

Forrester's Nail: Current E-Mail Practices Hitting Plateau
Mickey Alam Khan describes a presentation on the state of email marketing by Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Nail's take is a valid twist on the "email marketing is dead" line. He suggests that campaign-based practices are indeed starting to hit upper limits in terms of success, but that there's still huge potential in event and behavior-triggered email. He cites good examples of these "new" opportunities.

Building Permission Lists
Vendor SubscriberMail has some advice on how to present the sign-up offer to prospective subscribers.

Writing E-Mail for C-Level Execs
Karen Gedney has suggestions on how to write marketing emails targeted at top executives and their administrative gatekeepers. The article includes an example she wrote herself.

eMail - a versatile marketing tool
Amazing what little gems turn up if you look for them. For those SMEs not yet tuned into email marketing, this is a delightful little introductory guide from a non-profit business development agency in Wales of all places. It's a little old, but shows a remarkable grasp of the issues and presents it all in a way business people who aren't net-savvy ought to understand.

Interview With Nooked CEO Fergus Burns
This interview is notable because the subject is an RSS proponent who recognizes the new technology as a complement to email, and isn't peddling the usual "email is dead" line. Though he does see RSS replacing email content delivery in the long-term (a lot of technology changes need to happen first - especially as regards the problem of bandwidth).

March 09, 2005

Email Lists -- Like Toothpaste?
Michael Mayor uses a product labelling analogy to suggest some basic usage principles that should be applied to rented opt-in email lists.

ISPs believe email marketers are guilty until proven innocent
The article cites Ben Isaacson of CheetahMail's call-to-arms for marketers to get with it on accountability and identity management issues, or wave bye bye to email and online marketing. Certainly this is one market where you just can't stand still.

March 07, 2005

10 Steps: How to Test without Fear
Jamie Roche paints a nice framework for you to hang your testing policy on. Although it's focused more on websites, the principles apply equally to emails and landing pages.

March 04, 2005

In the dark about solutions for spam?
This article is on the pessimistic side, although like all other pieces in the genre, we have to ask if the problem is the volume of spam sent, or the volume delivered? Most of the depressing stats concern the former.

Anyway, after painting a bleakish picture, there's a useful discussion of some of the issues and alternatives involved in email authentication.

The Great RSS Reader Bandwagon
Pamela Parker investigates the rush by newspapers to get in on RSS publishing as an alternative to other distribution methods. Both in terms of content delivery to readers and through their own branded newsreaders (the software that picks up and displays feeds on your PC).

As she says, nobody's too sure how this will all work out from a publisher or marketer perspective. One danger I can see is that if the branded newsreader is delivering ads, and there are ads in the feeds as well, we could soon be in a bigtime ad overload situation for the recipients...?

So they'll all go back to reading email newsletters...?

March 03, 2005

RSS Ads
One venture capitalist sees a big future for ads in RSS feeds as a way of keeping content free and supporting targeted ad delivery.

Vendors Slowing Flow of Spam
A rare one this one - an article which actually suggests that the tide is turning in the spam wars. It includes detailed figures of spam volumes at AOL.

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