No man is an iland

June 14, 2006

It's the time of year when I put away the PC and make my way back home to visit family, friends and ex-colleagues who'd hoped to see the last of me a decade ago.

Which means this blog takes a break until my return mid-July. A few posts may appear in the meantime, depending on my net access and degree of willingness to take time out from a vacation to do some actual work.

But in the meantime, thank you all for your interest and attention. May the rest of June and early July bring you success in work and play, and a victory for England in the World Cup.

See you soon.

Content maestro and all round good chap Nick Usborne has some fine advice on brushing up your email copywriting style and language.

He warns against the pull of mediocrity, standard phrases and more of the same dull corporate speak. All of which won't penetrate the clouds in the minds of your customers and prospects.

Ken Magill examines what happened when the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society decided to ask current readers of their newsletter to reconfirm their subscription.

Their list shrunk by over 85% as a result. But, as Ken explains, this turned out to be a good thing.

List hygiene is another issue likely to grow in importance. It never used to matter too much if people got your email who'd lost interest since their initial sign-up.

But things are different now. Every subscriber complaint is another nail in your reputation as an email sender. And it's exactly that reputation that more and more inbox guardians are using to decide whether or not to deliver your email at all.

June 13, 2006

Goodness - interesting stuff here in Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox.

He tackles the topic of e-newsletter usability, having just produced a weighty report on the topic (which you can buy at his site).

He reveals several little insights from the report, but the two that stood out for me are...

1. Most people skip the introduction. This is not good, because it's often the friendly little introduction that helps you set yourself apart from the faceless blurb offered by other newsletters.

This means you need to get the human voice into *all* your newsletter content and not just the editorial or introduction. Or find someway of making your intro unmissable, too.

2. Nielsen is very down on the value of RSS as a replacement for newsletters. His conclusion: while RSS has its place with particular audiences, it's nowhere near as good as a newsletter for achieving goals like reader engagement, awareness and brand reinforcement.

Great stuff.

June 12, 2006

Nothing gets the blood pumping better on a Monday morning than getting to grips with the idiosyncrasies of designing HTML emails.

David Greiner has plenty of advice on the use of different design elements and approaches (particularly CSS), and how these match up to the preferences of different display environments.

It's also worth reading through the long collection of comments on the article, many from other design folk. The anti-HTML movement throw in their 2 cents, too.

June 09, 2006

The Eisenberg brothers were one of my first formal business interviewees back in 2000. Since then, they've gone on to justified star status in the field of online marketing. And I'm still doing business interviews (that's OK).

Anyway, go ahead and slap yourself around the face. Twice. Because we're not getting it right. We're just not learning.

In a departure from his normal topic area, Bryan Eisenberg highlights some fundamental mistakes most of us insist on making in regard to web marketing.

His comments are refreshingly forthright and we should all take them to heart. No, it's not specifically about email marketing, but it might as well be.

There are plenty of useful insights in this look at the email sent out by the National Association of Realtors to its members.

The key things to pick up on are how the whole tone and direction of the newsletter is focused on the recipient, not the sender.

And take note of some of the little tricks used when wording titles and newsletter sections to make them more attractive and durable.

The open rates aren't spectacular when compared to industry averages. Which highlights the flaws in benchmarking. The nature of the audience (busy, non-reading real estate agents who get the email as part of their trade association membership) means the results are pretty good actually.

June 08, 2006

Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald tackle the issue of email frequency in their latest column.

They go through a real-life example of what happens in money terms when you go from five emails a month to twelve.

You can argue about the numbers and assumptions used in the example. But the message is clear: there are lots of different things you must take into account before changing frequency.

Key among these are the impacts on sales revenues, costs, and address attrition rates (and the opportunity/replacement costs associated with lost subscribers). All are likely to rise with increased emailing frequency, at least to begin with.

Then there are the indirect costs associated with the likely changes to brand perception, image and reputation. And these also impact deliverability. The authors promise more on all this in later columns.

Just a heads up about some developments at the major email address providers.

It seems the ad clutter around your emails may be increasing, possibly in ways you won't like.

AOL has started inserting banner ads into emails received by its paying subscribers. This represents a break from Internet tradition: normally you get an ad-free experience if you're paying for an upgraded email service.

Elsewhere, MSN just began showing contextual ads in its Live Mail Desktop (beta version).

The MSN experiment matches the Gmail approach, where the ads are automatically targeted to the content of the email.

Or to put it another way...your marketing emails may show up accompanied by ads for your competitors.

This "issue" isn't critical just yet in terms of subscriber numbers affected. But watch this space.

June 07, 2006

Several email service providers produce regular reports collating stats on open rates, clicks generated etc. for the campaigns they send out for their clients.

You can add VerticalResponse to that list now, with their new Trend Watch report. The graphics are better than usual, which makes the whole thing much easier to read than many equivalents.

The report has data on open rates, clickthrough %, bounce rates and unsubscribe rates...broken down by industry and again by list size within each industry.

So, for example, you can see average open rates for emails from political candidates sent to between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

It's another benchmarking source to consider. As always be careful about using industry-wide stats to judge your own success (a point the report writers stress themselves). Like I always say, the average person has less than two legs.

June 06, 2006

BrightWave Marketing's founder Simms Jenkins has a lot of wise things to say about priorities, processes and personnel in this second of my occasional series of interviews with email marketing folk.

His advice is especially useful if you're immersed in email production deadlines and need to take a step back to move your campaigns forward. Plenty of useful thoughts in there, however big or small your company may be.

Those fearful of dipping a toe in the murky waters of testing can breathe easier. Wendy Roth has some basic advice on how and what to test when it comes to email marketing.

Should get you started on your path to statistical enlightenment and result heaven.

June 05, 2006

We all kind of know we could make better marketing use of transactional emails, like order confirmations and customer service replies.

But how do we do it? In particular, how do we do it without turning them into commercial emails, subject to stricter legal requirements?

Jeanne Jennings explores some of the answers in this article.

After putting the case for transactional emails as marketing opportunities, she outlines some very specific advice on what is and isn't acceptable in terms of commercial messaging within such emails.

The focus is on legal compliance and the article carries the rider that you need to check the details with your own lawyers of course

June 04, 2006

If your email template happily bumps along without much attention, you're probably one of the majority who whacked up a design and then forgot about it.

Who has time and energy to face the scary redesign process? (Believe me, I know how that feels).

Gail Goodman outlines five steps you can take to master a basic design makeover.

She covers the basic look and feel, visual elements, branding, calls to action and the importance of a proper preview.

June 02, 2006

Fascinating. If you're looking for a dose of inspiration to see out the end of the week, try this case study of Cirque du Soleil's email efforts.

I swear it will make you raise your eyebrows at least once and think, "now that's an interesting idea."

If nothing else, it will make you challenge your assumptions about how email campaigns should look and feel.

Like I said, fascinating.

This blog's title No man is an iland was written to express a life philosophy* rather than something specifically email marketing related.

But as fate would have it, it fits nicely with the concept of holistic email marketing. Where we accept that the impact our emails have on customers, prospects and other recipients is the result of their interaction with all the emails sent by an organisation.

Not just the email campaigns, but the service emails, the notes from a rep, the order confirmations etc.

This leads to a new task. That of coordinating email contact programs across the whole organisation. In this article, Chip House has some tips on how to tackle this integrated approach, with some specific thoughts on brand management, subscriber management and enterprise governance.

*though I'm always reminded of this quote by Hugh Grant's character in the movie About a Boy: "Some men are islands. I'm a bloody island! I'm bloody Ibiza!"

June 01, 2006

Hmmm. And double hmmm. And another hmmm for good measure.

Al DiGuido makes a plea for more common sense in the relationship between ISPs, marketers and the people getting the emails.

Specifically, he asks why reputable marketers are held to such unrealistic standards when it comes to the level of spam complaints allowed before ISPs start reaching for their blacklists.

In summary: if you're a big reputable company, you should get cut some slack.

I'd broadly support the tenor of his thoughts. But...

Reputation is already becoming an increasingly important element in determining whether your emails get through. But that reputation is earned, not implied by the size of your stock exchange valuation or the length of your company history.

Let me explain.

There is a streak of arrogance that runs through some big companies when it comes to email marketing (note I say some), and it manifests itself in two forms.

First, there is the assumption that other players in the email chain should be making an effort to protect the marketing emails sent by big companies. That assumes an importance in the eyes of both ISPs and recipients that, frankly, is not there.

Yes, people would like to get their monthly promotional offers. But the vast majority will not be manning the barricades if they don't. Few email marketers have that loyal an audience. It's a goal, but not one that's often reached.

A little realism is required.

Second, there is the assumption that big companies are by default following legitimate email marketing practices. Just because they're big.

Not so.

In fact, I find big companies are often quicker to abuse permission than their smaller counterparts. Not in blatant spammy ways. But by, for example, adding you to a second newsletter after you signed up for one newsletter.

They do it because they can. Because they're a big company: "We can't be spammers, we're a proper, big company" (and who's going to throw us off the net anyway).

So I'm all for reputation counting for something when it comes to spam filters and other mechanisms employed to control the flow of email. But reputation in email marketing should be based primarily on your actual email marketing practices.

Danielle Hickey makes a strong case for using more BT in your EM.

She outlines the benefits of using an individual's observed online behavior to determine what email they get sent.

Hickey - like me and just about everybody else -- is very good on the whys, but not so hot on the details of the hows (which is impossible in an article, frankly).

How you do all this is the big challenge, and that's where the onus falls on your email service provider, database rep, IT folk, consultants or your own self-initiative to convert the potential into pounds (or dollars).

If you stick any part of your site behind a barrier, so people are forced to submit an email address to get access, read this post from Nick Usborne.

There are many good reasons for this tactic, but Nick outlines a couple of downsides you may not have considered.

Chief among those: branding and image implications in a surfing world dominated by privacy fears.

You'll need to register before you can read Nick's post (just kidding).

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