No man is an iland

March 31, 2006

Loren McDonald stresses the importance of making it easy for subscribers to take the kind of actions you want them to.

He then goes on to outline a variety of specific changes you can make to your website and emails to simplify action paths and generate better responses.

There are literally dozens of useful tips buried in the article, many of which would only require minor changes to what you're already doing. So take a few minutes out to work through the suggestions.

An enlightening look at the e-newsletter strategies and tactics employed by this insurance giant.

Among the issues addressed are segmenting your lists to improve targeting and changing design and content approaches to match the needs and characteristics of particular audiences.

But perhaps the most important information here concerns the tactics used to ensure that the company's own sales reps are happy with their customers getting email messages from marketing.

HP's Technology at Work is often held up as a role model for B2B e-newsletters. In this article, Karen J. Bannan enlists the help of Forrester's Shar VanBoskirk to draw out lessons to apply to your own equivalent.

These covers topics like user value, testing, innovation and internal company support. For many B2B marketers in corporate situations, it's the latter issue that's critical.

OK, go and find whoever is responsible for designing your marketing emails and send them to this link.

It's a comprehensive guide to CSS in email, detailing the level of CSS support in different email clients and email reading environments.

So if you wanted to know what CSS properties and approaches work in Gmail or AOL or Hotmail or Lotus Notes or Outlook or many others, this is the place to go.

The article also has some recommendations on what the different levels of support mean when it comes to deciding how much (if any) CSS to use in your email design.

March 30, 2006

Tom O'Leary of GroupMail has put together this four-part series for those new to email marketing or who are still at the lower end of the learning curve.

He covers the four elements of a program (the list, the message, delivery and measurement), and then goes on to describe a selection of specific tips, tools and typical mistakes.

The articles are written for those using software to send their emails, rather than a 3rd party hosted solution. But most of the advice and information is applicable to all setting out on the great email marketing adventure.

March 29, 2006

A thoughtful article by Justin Shimoon on the subject of brand management and relationship marketing in the context of email.

He uses an understanding of how customers view different kinds of email to argue that the key touchpoints in the email and brand relationship are those involving transactional and customer service emails.

In other words, it's time to start applying relationship marketing concepts and tactics to those outgoing emails not traditionally thought of as relevant to marketing.

This fits in nicely with the advice espoused by the likes of David Baker and Jeanniey Mullen, who recommend a more holistic approach to your email marketing.

The magazine Direct has a wise piece on how the media often fails to appreciate the difference between spam and legitimate marketing messages.

They cite a Forbes.com article that itself spawned various inaccurate commentaries implying (mistakenly) that the customers of a particular email service provider were spammers.

The inability of journalists to understand the issues is one problem. As is their readiness to say "spam" rather than "permission-based email" simply because it makes for a more exciting article.

But the email marketing industry also needs to realize that where there is smoke, there is fire.

Poor permission practices in the past from ostensibly legitimate companies have blurred distinctions often enough for everyone to get confused about what is and isn't spam.

MarketingSherpa reveal their take on the state of viral marketing in 2006, based on a survey of marketers and discussions with experts.

The article has a bunch of stats on the media (including email) used in B2B and B2C viral campaigns, objectives, measures of success and similar. Plus some tips on how best to approach the whole idea.

March 28, 2006

Lynn Russo draws out a few tidbits from selected experts on such things as the value of testing, new segmentation and content customization approaches, and the problem with preview panes.

It's a bit quiet on the email marketing front right now. So I'll nip off for a cup of tea.

March 27, 2006

Bil Nussey expounds on why he thinks RSS is worth your attention, citing in particular the appearance of tailored RSS feeds allowing you to deliver personalized content and track individual responses.

I'm obviously a fan of RSS. But I have two questions that need answering.

1. How much of the interest in RSS is here to stay, and how much is fad / novelty value?

2. A key problem with customer communication today is that people already get way too much information. An issue email marketers are familiar with. How does RSS solve (rather than add to) that issue? And what happens when RSS inboxes -- for want of a better term -- start to overflow?

Ultimately, will the content and not the medium decide who gets listened to?

Without knowing more about the survey, it's hard to be definite. But based on what's said in this Internet Retailer news article, it seems that Can-Spam legislation generates blank stares from the majority of those sending bulk email.

I sure hope there's an error in the survey methodology. Because not only is the legislation all about the legal requirements for sending bulk email in the USA, but it generated almost as many column inches as the Michael Jackson trial. So any email marketer unaware of Can-Spam is probably unaware of any of the best practices advice floating around either.

Which is good news and bad news for those taking that advice. Good because it means plenty of lame competition. Bad because lame competition and lame email marketing turns people off all email and keeps the whole spam issue alive.

March 24, 2006

Tom O'Leary just launched The Messaging Times website, covering all things to do with communicating online (largely from a marketing perspective).

The blog part of the site has actually been going a while and I've mentioned it before as a good resource for email marketers.

What has this got to do with asking me a question?

Tom's interviewing me for the new site on such things as the opportunities and threats to email marketing in the context of new communication technologies. So if there's a question you'd like to see my thoughts on, submit them here.

Carol Krol talks with David Daniels of JupiterResearch to gather some insights into why you should base what you send on the click behavior of recipients.

Many marketers are not in a position to apply complex analytics involving integrated web and email click tracking. But it doesn't mean they can't apply behavioral targeting at a basic level.

That's where you simply watch which links are clicked on in your email and adjust content accordingly. Something anyone can do. And even low-cost email service providers let you segment out those individuals that clicked on a particular link.

March 23, 2006

David Baker continues the "email marketing is about more than you might think" theme in this article.

He identifies various issues that arise when you accept that the impression you make on a prospect or customer through your emails comes from the sum total of all emails from your company; including customer service, order confirmations etc.

As well as the obvious implications of needing to optimise the overall outcome produced by these different email contact points, he explores the key question of coordination within the organisation. That might well be the biggest problem.

March 22, 2006

This article by Neil Anuskiewicz explains the role of IP addresses in email deliverability and the related issue of whitelisting.

It's particularly useful if you're not too familiar with these kinds of Internet terms. Neil takes the trouble to explain things in a simplified way that non-techies like me can really understand, rather than just pretend to understand.

Ken Magill picks out some highlights from a survey of marketers conducted by the publications Direct and Multichannel Merchant.

You'll find various statistics on the permission practices used (or not used, as the case may be) and related commentary from marketers and consultants.

Don't blame the traditional spammers for inbox overload and email fatigue. According to the article, about a fifth of the surveyed marketers (B2B and B2C) take an opt-out approach, "...where e-mail addresses are fair game until the inbox owner asks to be removed from the marketer's list."

All the emails sent out by a company have a marketing impact. Not just your campaigns. Not just your e-newsletters.

It's not much good using email to get someone ready to buy your product or service, only to see the conversion lost because, for example, your customer service email system doesn't meet expectations.

And it seems this unfortunate scenario is increasingly likely.

According to this survey, consumers are growing less satisfied with the email responsiveness of customer service online.

Some salient numbers from the survey:

>> Of those offering email for customer support, only 41% automatically acknowledge receipt of the mail.

>> Only 45% "resolved email inquiries within 24 hours"

>> 39% took three days or longer to reply (or didn't reply at all).

March 21, 2006

Melinda Krueger takes a critical look at the email newsletter sent out by Vermont.com.

The suggestions she makes in terms of improving the layout and content are widely applicable. But the best part of her analysis is perhaps the recommendation on how to decide on the right layout and contents in the first place.

Although most email marketers seem to have adopted a pragmatic, "wait and see" approach to the impacts of email certification through Goodmail, the issue continues to rage on elsewhere.

This post at ZDNet, for example, highlights a debate between Esther Dyson (writing in the NY Times) and the coalition at DearAOL.com trying to get AOL to change its mind.

Like many debates, the problem is that whether one side is right or not depends on something we just can't know.

The main argument against AOL's certification approach is that they have a financial incentive to get progressively worse at delivering non-certified bulk email. Since this will encourage senders to go the paid certified route with its guaranteed delivery.

AOL, of course, deny that the paid certification programme has any impact on how they deliver non-certified email.

Who's right? We can't know and probably never will know.

March 20, 2006

Silverpop devoted some useful time and energy to a study of email marketing practices among numerous retailers.

In the latest results presented in this press release, they offer some insight into how opt-out mechanisms can best be used to retain list members.

That's not a paradox.

By presenting those wishing to opt-out with alternatives that better fit their needs and by reminding them of the value of your emails, you can make them rethink their decision.

And at the very least, it's an opportunity to gain feedback on what you've done to make them wish to opt-out. Useful intelligence you can apply to prevent others going the same route.

Silverpop note that very few of the retailers they evaluated were doing any of the above.

Tony Quin hits the nail on the proverbial head with this commentary.

Like others who I venture to suggest "get it," he argues that a failure to respect the end-recipient means that many house lists have been destroyed from within through inappropriate email practices.

For the recipient, there is little difference between "real" spam and irrelevant opt-in email. Permission is more than just getting a tick in the right checkbox.

That said, he also suggests how those who've overmined their lists can now turn things round as we enter the next phase of customer communication.

More on this whole issue at A creed for email marketing.

March 17, 2006

A short but sweet, caffeine-laced, look at how one company tested different free shipping offers in a single promotional send out (i.e. split-testing).

The trick is ensuring consistency between the email and website. If you have different shipping offers in the email, you want people to find the same free shipping offer if they happen to leave the landing page and browse through other pages at the website.

The article gives details of the approach and creative, and documents the (surprising) results.

Ralph Wilson has been around a looong time on the web, keeping tabs on e-commerce and online marketing, primarily for smaller businesses and those new to the Internet.

In this interview, he discusses a number of email marketing topics, including the issues of certification and deliverability, anti-spam legislation, landing pages, format, sending frequencies and similar.

George Bilbrey introduces us to the concept of ARF or Abuse Reporting Format, which ISPs use (or plan to use) to alert senders to those emails that trigger a spam complaint.

(Blatant Abuse Reporting Format would have made a funnier acronym.)

Armed with specific information about those messages that generate spam reports and the recipients that make them, you can modify your programme appropriately. Fewer spam complaints means better deliverability, for all sorts of reasons.

Bilbrey gives some enlightening examples from one of his company's clients.

March 16, 2006

This research brief from the folks at Marketing Experiments looks primarily at increasing paid content subscriptions. But much of what they cover on that topic can be transferred to email sign-ups.

More importantly, they discuss the details of an intriguing little test where they made three changes to the subscription process for a free email newsletter and observed the impact on the number of daily new subscribers.

It jumped by 711%.

I think that could be described as a useful experiment.

This is one of those articles that jolts you out of your comfort zone and encourages you to take the kind of action that makes a difference.

Karen J. Bannan enlists the help of Morgan Stewart to outline various aspects of your email marketing endeavors that you probably don't think about anymore, but should.

I felt pretty sheepish by the end, because, yep, that's me they're talking about.

March 15, 2006

The deliverability duo that is Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald take us back to basics in this article, outlining the different events, barriers and elements in the chain that carries an email from the sender (marketer) to the recipient (customer / prospect).

Given that they mention over 20 possible links in this chain, the overall message is that things are more complex than they used to be. And deliverability is a topic it would be wise not to ignore.

Email marketing articles tend, correctly, to feature the positive. There are few articles telling us about all the bad email campaigns out there. But one such campaign reached my inbox yesterday...

The email promoted courses from the continuing education department of one of my old universities. I never knowingly signed up for such material, but the opt-in may have slipped through somewhere (let's give them the benefit of the doubt). That aside, here's what they did wrong:

1. The email started like this:

3034045
BrownlowM

Don't you love being addressed as a number?

2. You had to manually send an email to unsubscribe, which is a little outmoded for an email promoting courses in, among other things, software engineering.

3. The "from" field was a female name I didn't know, and didn't match the name of the person who "signed" the email.

4. There was a typo in the first line of text. And a complete absence of compelling or engaging copy.

A bit of a weak effort all-in-all.

Now here's the good news...

>> We're not perfect yet. This is still a new medium and we're all still learning. And yet email marketing still produces great bottom line results. Imagine how much more success can come from future improvements to tactics and techniques.

>> The competition is unlikely to be cutting edge. Poorly-done emails are common (not to mention spam). While that can induce email fatigue in recipients, it also makes your star shine all the more brighter if you can deliver timely, relevant, quality communications and promotions to your list.

You can be the oasis in a desert of mediocrity. Go for it.

March 14, 2006

Barry Stamos opens up his big book of tips and describes -- in some detail -- ten things you can do to boost the ROI of your email marketing efforts (with helpful examples and screenshots).

The topics covered are varied, ranging from subscription sign-up practices and email layout to database practices and results audits.

A case study with a difference. Melinda Krueger looks at the site's e-newsletter and suggests an insightful range of improvements to the current content and communication approach.

She also discusses the importance of distinguishing between different types of subscribers in terms of expected responses.

It's a nice assessment of how to improve an e-newsletter programme. And even if you're not a clothes retailer, the principles she expounds are very valuable.

March 13, 2006

Jeanne Jennnings makes the important point that anyone producing an email newsletter is acting as a publisher / editor, whatever their actual job description may be.

The good news is that once you internalize that role, you can more easily make use of the various tools and approaches used by editors and publishers to ease or improve the newsletter production process.

Jeanne outlines four of them, and explains how you can apply each to generate better results for your e-newsletter marketing efforts.

This event is slated for June 21st and 22nd in London, UK. There are various elements with email marketing relevance, with the most obvious ones between two programmes on B2B and B2C email marketing respectively.

In addition, each day features a special debate on the conflicts involved in distinguishing between legitimate email marketing messages and spam.

March 10, 2006

If you get as confused as I do about email authentication, this blog post by Return Path's Tom Bartel might come in handy.

He outlines the steps you need to take to implement authentication. More importantly, perhaps, he lists a number of links and tools you can use to help understand what it's all about and how you set about this implementation process.

If you're too small to have your own IT department and are not a tech guru, then panic. Erm, no...don't panic, but do see if your ESP can help you out with all this stuff.

As things (hopefully) wind down on a Friday, you might take out 30 minutes to listen to this recent audio broadcast from Bronto Software.

Eric Boggs and Jon Norris talk you through various design and coding issues for emails, in the context of driving action, ensuring your email displays properly and improving deliverability.

An automatic slideshow accompanies the audio file with notes and -- most usefully -- screenshots of the good and bad examples discussed.

NB: you'll need to fast forward a little to get to the actual start of the live presentation

I'm considering starting a series of "frontline interviews" with those involved with email marketing, to be published at this site for the benefit of the hundreds of email marketing folk who pass through daily.

The interviews would be done via email or on the phone with some relatively standardized questions and some specific to the interviewee.

The topics covered will be pithy, practical and occasionally a touch offbeat, soliciting your experiences and opinions on email marketing practice and life in that line of work.

Who qualifies? ...anyone involved in email marketing, whether as a service, consultant, marketer or other capacity. You don't have to be a "guru". Big business or small business qualifies equally.

The only condition is that you're a devotee of ethical, legitimate, fully permission-based email marketing and you're prepared to give honest answers free of overt self-promotion and unnecessary jargon.

Why should you do it? ...you mean apart from the warm glow you get from contributing to the world's email marketing knowledge base? I will link to your website from the interview and include a short, factual bio.

If you're interested, contact me (Mark Brownlow) at the address given at the bottom of the about/contact page.

Lots of little insightful delicacies tucked away in this case study of JetBlue's email marketing efforts.

The article focuses on their frequency, segmentation and content strategies, with data on how these work out in terms of success metrics.

Quite apart from the little snippets of practical advice on offer, JetBlue's experiences also illustrate a basic email marketing truism. Here it is...

"There are relatively small things you can do which have a significant impact on your results."

No resting on laurels - keep on pushing.

An oft-overlooked aspect of email marketing is that it's not just about dedicated campaigns to a list of prospects or customers. It's oh so much more than that.

This article, for example, discusses how you might use an email newsletter to communicate with your own staff. Shay Studley-Toland outlines why his company (Tyco Healthcare) does exactly that and offers a series of tips on how to approach strategy and content.

Interestingly, much of the advice is equally applicable to e-newsletters sent outside of the business.

I suspect the kind of looser, personal tone you might find yourself using internally would transfer very well to the external e-newsletter, where businesses can often get a little too uptight and slip into PR speak.

March 09, 2006

A survey by law firm Osborne Clarke reveals that anti-spam laws in Europe are not yet fully harmonized across all countries.

Nor is the willingness to enforce the laws.

The UK, apparently, has mustered a less-than-impressive grand total of about $470 in fines, from one civil court case. Austria, in contrast, has tackled hundreds of court cases.

The basic message: tread carefully if you're mailing to EU countries and don't assume the laws are the same everywhere.

March 08, 2006

If you're a regular reader, you'll know I point you at articles by Jeanne Jennings a lot. Because she has wise and interesting things to say.

This is a long and information heavy interview with Jeanne, where she talks about a whole host of online topics, as well as personal business development stuff.

Included in the mix are various insights and opinions on issues like spam, deliverability, e-newsletters, metrics, permission, list acquisition and much more. Well worth reading.

eMarketer has a slightly odd article on the potential business uses of RSS as a complement to (rather than replacement for) email marketing.

Tucked in there are some nice examples of how people like eBags use feeds, and some charts to warm the hearts of the stats fans.

I say "odd" because although one of the charts in the article highlights the point, the article text forgets that RSS penetration among users is not about how many people know what RSS is. It's about about how many people use the content feeds based on RSS. The latter number is much higher than the former.

The email marketing world seems divided on the value of appending email addresses (adding an email address to your list by matching it with existing customer data like name and address).

The costs of paying an appending service to find those names for you from their opt-in lists are often attractive given the plausible benefits of a bigger house list afterwards, as explained in this article by Anurag Ahuja.

But there are still permission and quality issues. Such that some experts are more circumspect about appends. Like Melinda Krueger and Jeanne Jennings.

It perhaps boils down to your fundamental philosophy.

If it's the short- and medium-term numbers that drive your marketing endeavors, then you'll probably want to explore appending further.

If you see a need to tread very carefully with email marketing, holding list acquisition efforts to the very highest permission standards so as to preserve the medium for the long-term, then you probably won't.

March 07, 2006

It's the first link in the chain for many an email marketing program. So why are sign-up forms often done so badly?

Here I offer a selection of tips on how to improve the positioning and wording of your standard website sign-up form so it attracts a higher sign-up rate.

Little changes can make a big difference.

March 06, 2006

Loren McDonald and Calvin Wong explain why you should cull your list of those addresses that never respond to (or open) an email.

They then explain how they did it with their own list. First defining and isolating the unresponsive addresses. Then sending these addresses a "please confirm your interest" request. Then unsubscribing anybody who didn't confirm.

It's important to give "dead" addresses a chance to confirm their interest for a couple of reasons...

First, a lack of response may reflect an inability to measure the response, rather than a lack of response per se.

Second, a reconfirmation email is an opportunity to reawaken interest in those who may simply have forgotten about the value you offer in your missives.

If in doubt, test. And if not in doubt, test anyway, because you never know where you're leaving money on the table.

Ah, but what to test, when and how?

Anurag Ahuja supplies some answers to these questions with his guidelines to testing email marketing campaigns.

For each of three metrics (opens, clicks and conversions), he outlines:

1. What you might test
2. Which sample size you might use
3. How often you should test
4. Suggested best practices for the element you're testing

Even if your list size doesn't support his suggested sample sizes, the article should give you an idea of where to focus your marketing energies.

One of the hot trends in email marketing is using data from your website to trigger emails or contribute to segmentation efforts. "So you spent a lot of time with our How to re-tile the bathroom web pages. Maybe we should send you an email with a special offer on bathroom tiles?"

Everyone agrees this is a good idea with proven bottom line benefits. But actually doing it isn't so easy. Key questions are how do you integrate email and website analytics, and how do you use the information you get from the website?

Elaine O'Gorman doesn't answer the first question, but she does offer various ideas on how to use information from website analytics to improve email marketing results.

Even if you can't automate the integration of web stats and email, you can still learn about the needs of your readers from evaluating online behavior.

March 03, 2006

Given that email marketing is a relatively young discipline and the required skills change so fast, few of us have any formal qualifications in the subject.

But we can still take steps to organize skill development.

Karen Bannan draws on expertise from Yesmail and HP to present some ideas on how to ensure you and/or your team can keep learning without having to sit in a lecture hall.

Linking guru Eric Ward recently noted that ads in email newsletters were an underexplored source of website traffic and house list sign-ups. So this article from MarketingSherpa is certainly timely.

It contains detailed tips for optimizing ad campaigns in third-party e-newsletters.

These cover such issues as determining the likely audience engagement with the email and your ad, ad frequency, piggy-backing on other contact points that publisher has with their audience (like welcome messages), positioning (in the email), and creative.

March 02, 2006

Loren McDonald of EmailLabs has put together this list of tips, suggestions and considerations covering the design and layout of your HTML emails.

The topics covered include format (how to ensure your message appears as you intend), usability (how to ensure your message comes across appropriately) and functionality (how to ensure you give users actionable options).

With all the misinformation and misinterpretation floating around with regard to AOL and email, nice to see this fine article from Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald.

First of all they walk you through the numbers you need to dig out and evaluate when deciding on the worth of certification. So you can decide whether paying for Goodmail certification for emails sent to AOL addresses is justified or not.

Then they offer a lengthy checklist of others things you can do to boost your deliverability and response rates at AOL, even without paying for certification.

It's good news and bad news (isn't it always?) on the deliverability front. According to Lyris and their latest report, deliverability rates are broadly high at the major US and European ISPs. But the overall optimistic glow hides one or two problems.

Average gross deliverability across all monitored ISPs rose from Q3 2005 to Q4 2005 by 2 percentage points to 89%. That's a healthy, welcome trend.

Not all ISPs are doing a good job of getting permission-based opt-in mail through to inboxes, though.

Hotmail.com, for example, falsely filtered 15.9% of the opt-in email, almost double its false positive rate in the previous quarter.

So the message is, keep alert and keep watching those domains with strongest representation in your list. An improvement in global deliverability rates doesn't help you if all your customers use hotmail.com.

It always pays to be aware of coming innovations in the email user space. Not that I'm convinced this one is going to catch on.

Microsoft's researchers have developed a "Step User Interface" that allows you to use your feet to go through your inbox...reading, deleting and sorting your emails.

Presumably multi-channel integration will now involve marketing through step dancing lessons.

(Joking aside, this prototype could eventually have serious application for those who lost the use of their hands)

Fact: Affiliate marketing is a great way of driving sales. But when it comes to affiliates doing email marketing there are three key problems.

First, affiliates may be using email poorly or unethically, which reflects badly on those they promote (i.e. you).

Second, there are anti-spam law compliance issues for which you are liable.

Third, what they say about you and your offers isn't always on-message.

In this article, Heather Palmer Goff and Carole Coplan explain the potential pitfalls involved with affiliates using email to promote your products or services.

They then go on to outline various actions you should take to ensure this email marketing is compliant, your risk is minimized, and your brand is protected.

March 01, 2006

A break from the normal just to illustrate another way of using email.

According to this news report, an Australian lady is using "an email blitz" to coordinate a March "six o'clock honk" by motorists in Sydney. This is to express public displeasure at the city's traffic problems.

Presumably she'll need some kind of sound meter to measure the response rate on that campaign.

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