No man is an iland

September 29, 2006

This press release gives you access to a Lyris report on how different ISPs and webmail services are doing in terms of delivering legitimate permission-based bulk email.

On the whole, things look reasonable, but that masks a few problems you need to know about.

In Q2 2006, 87% of sent mail got through to the recipient's inbox at US ISPs and email providers. Of course, a 13% failure rate is a lot of money left on the table, but not catastrophic. And delivery rates improved compared with the same period last year.

Delivery rates for Europe fell slightly compared to Q2 2005, but 91% still reached inboxes.

Those that don't reach inboxes either hit the junk folder or get filtered out as spam (false positives). On the whole, false positives aren't a huge problem. Lyris say 3.3% of the permission emails were filtered as spam in the US, just 0.075% in Europe.

But these relatively favorable figures mask big differences between ISPs.

If hotmail.com addresses dominate your email list, you may have a problem: the false positive rate is a mammoth 18.2% for that service.

All the more reason to track your delivery statistics by domain, rather than just looking at the overall figure.

Here's a kind blogger who did some spadework so you don't have to. ExactTarget's R.J.Talyor lists some of the important email clients, email-reading devices and webmail services, along with an estimate of how long the subject line displays are in each.

Displayed subject line lengths vary from 10 characters (new Blackberry) to 124 (Outlook bottom preview pane). You'll also find some recommendations on writing those all-important words.

September 28, 2006

The ever-modest text-only email used to linger alone in the form of transactional emails. But difficulties with getting html email delivered and displayed adequately have led to a bit of a renaissance.

Stefan Pollard explains why text-only messages can make a contribution to your marketing endeavors. He has recommendations on how to layout and design text-only emails, and some thoughts on html-text hybrids.

More on formatting text-only emails.

At the end of the working day, email is about communication. And marketing emails are about producing some kind of impact or influence on the reader through that communication. One that leads them to act in a way favorable to the sender.

Like buying your product.

Copywriting is a huge topic, but one that deserves more attention among email marketers. After all, it's the words and images that make up the message that drive responses.

A long-held copywriting truism is a need to highlight benefits rather than features. In this post, Janine Popick explains this concept and throws out a few enlightening examples of emails that do this well. And emails that do it not-so-well (with her suggested improvements).

This week it seems is metrics week. And the humble open rate comes in for some bashing from Loren McDonald in this article.

Despite the tone of the piece, Loren isn't against open rates as a metric per se. Instead, he's concerned that the way we typically look at campaign reports is too superficial. By focusing on a few traditional numbers, we miss the important stuff.

He outlines some examples of how we'd be better served by taking a closer look at those metrics we already use and introducing a few others we perhaps never thought about before.

Should make you rethink your approach to evaluating your email marketing results.

September 27, 2006

Rounding off a few new pages on email marketing legislation...

Anti-spam laws in the UK
Anti-spam laws and the EU

The purpose of each page is to give you a quick overview of the current situation and point you at those websites where you can learn about the practical implications for your own email marketing to or in those countries.

John Rizzi snorts disdainfully in the general direction of email marketing benchmarks in this article by Ken Magill.

Although he whips out a slew of reasons why benchmarks are not useful as a comparison for your own statistics, he hints that they might have other uses in terms of monitoring trends and similar. More on metrics.

September 26, 2006

Jeanne Jennings shares my love of statistics and has a good understanding of the pros and cons of benchmark numbers in email marketing. Here she outlines some of the issues involved with interpreting and using such benchmarks.

You can get my views on their usefulness here.

When you send out emails, you normally get a nice report on the alleged number of messages delivered. A hidden issue is that this number is an aggregate across your whole list and may disguise delivery problems with a particular part of that list.

In this article, Spencer Kollas explains why you need to track deliverability on a recipient domain by recipient domain basis. As well as the theory, he has plenty of practical advice on where to focus your efforts.

Chip House of ExactTarget has some introductory advice on how to acquire new subscribers for your lists.

He has clear words on list rental and a few ideas on tactics you can use to boost your numbers.

According to the campaign report for my last newsletter, it received a spam complaint.

Now the newsletter is double opt-in so it's impossible for me to spam anyone. To get on the list you have to submit your email address and click on a confirmation link in a welcome message before you can ever get an email from me.

Not to mention the fact that the whole purpose of this website is to encourage email marketing best practices, one of which is "do not spam."

So presumably it was one of those "hit the spam button because I can't be bothered to unsubscribe" things.

But gosh it hurts whenever that happens. It's like when you first started school and spent hours on your handwriting homework, only to get the same grade as little Johnny (who finished his homework in two seconds and writes like a confused squirrel monkey).

But the lesson is, no matter how much you try, someone, somewhere still thinks you're spamming. There's no room for complacency in this game.

September 25, 2006

As promised, a summary of anti-spam legislation in Canada and New Zealand.

Both pages include an overview of the current standpoint, with links to sources of detailed info. Canada is notable, of course, for not actually having any specific anti-spam laws.

Those involved in legitimate email marketing often need information on spam, because the latter impacts so much on how permission-based emails are received and perceived.

An excellent starting point for all things to do with unsolicited commercial email is the Spam Links anti-spam portal. There's a mountain of links there to numerous helpful sites covering such things as legislation, technological issues, blacklists, anti-spam resources and much (much) more.

A little audio entertainment for your car or extended coffee break. DM News hosted a high-powered discussion featuring some clever folk involved in email marketing. You can download the results here.

The AOL Postmaster was among the participants, along with a marketer, an analyst and two email marketing vendors.

A lot of topics get discussed, including various deliverability issues such as reputation and authentication.

Sometimes it pays to go against the grain, as this case study confirms.

It looks at the content (and thoughts behind) an email newsletter for financial advisers. One that gets clicks and open rates most of us can only imagine when drunk.

Their approach is certainly one worth considering for your own efforts.

September 22, 2006

Sean O'Neal reviews the position of email as part of the media mix and argues that it's a win-win for interactive marketers.

Email marketing (done properly) brings both a performance ROI through direct response. And it also has benefits in terms of brand awareness and consumer behavior.

The implicit suggestion, then, is that email advocates need to be a little less circumspect about staking a claim for email in the marketing budget.

Given the close alliance* between PPC ads and email, you might find this new Search Marketing Benchmark Guide of great value.

As well as benchmark and planning figures, there's a heap of insight on what to test, how people read pages of search results, shopping behavior and other stuff you'll find in the sales blurb.

*the visitors you pull in from PPC search engine clicks should get a chance to opt-in to your emails, so you can remarket to them without paying Google or Yahoo another big wad of cash.

For those working in or emailing Australia, here's a quick summary of the local anti-spam laws, including links to relevant government authorities, documents, codes and reviews.

I'll add a couple of more countries and regions next week.

September 20, 2006

Vendor Adestra has some tips on how to decide when to actually send out your emails.

The gist of the message is that there is no universal right time. But they list various criteria worth considering when determining what should or might work for your list and audience.

Two more tips:

1. You can always test to discover the right time of day and week to send, just like you might test subject lines.

2. It's worth revisiting the topic every now and then if you think a shift in timing might improve things. Consider a change carefully, though, if you've conditioned people to expect your email at certain times and on certain days.

A long feature article which uses Publishers Clearing House as a focus for a discussion on the importance of reputation in email marketing success.

Tanya Candia examines the role played by users and senders in determining that reputation, chats to a reputation services provider and reveals some email best practices (so you can keep your own reputation as pristine as possible in the online world.)

September 19, 2006

I tend to ignore vendor-generated documents because they're often superficial and, well, you know...

But there are some good vendor-authored email design guides out there. The latest is the EmailLabs "Complete Guide for Creating HTML Emails." It's a 17-page set of technical and design best practices you can access once you fill out the form here.

It covers various HTML coding and design issues, including designing for preview panes and disabled images. Although focused on HTML email, there's also some bits of advice on text-only messages, email preference centers, testing approaches and other related topics.

Rather than use simple opt-in or unsubscribe forms, many companies now let readers manage their subscriptions through an email preference center. These are almost like a membership page for each subscriber.

Subscribers can login with their email address and, for example, see what emails they currently get from you (and change the selection), modify their preferred email format or change their email address.

They let you do a better job of communicating with your subscribers, such that the latter are more likely to stay subscribed, sign-up for new emails and submit and update information about themselves. All of which means more email marketing success.

So what are the fundamentals that need to go in such a center? Simms Jenkins has the answer.

September 15, 2006

A very simple list building technique gets a bit of deserved publicity in this article by Lena Waters.

She explains why and how you should add an email opt-in to the landing pages you use as part of your PPC search marketing.

The logic is simple. You paid for them to visit once. Now make sure you get them to opt-in to your emails so you can target them again once that first visit is over.

September 14, 2006

A study reported in DM News asked email users about whether they've encountered image suppression in incoming emails and what they do about it (if anything.)

Since there's no details on the survey's methodology or sample size, I can't comment on the numbers, but the gist is clear...

A significant number of people getting your marketing emails will likely not see the images you put in them. Enough people so that you simply cannot afford to discount them from your thinking when it comes to designing those messages.

It's not just sender technology that keeps changing. The software and online services used to read emails changes, too.

In this piece, Stefan Pollard looks at some changes to Windows Live Mail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook, and suggests what you might do to ensure they don't turn your carefully crafted message into a pile of gibberish.

September 12, 2006

Time for me to be the grumpy sod at the back again. (There's always one).

There's a lot of talk about super new targeting techniques based on subscriber behavior. Here's an example: a customer places a product in his shopping cart but fails to complete the transaction. This triggers an email to him which offers 5% off that very product if he returns to complete the purchase.

In other words, sophisticated email marketing tools track behavior online and send out customized emails based on this behavior.

It's great stuff. The more targeted and relevant the email, the more likely you get a response. This kind of on-the-fly customized email program has a big future ahead of it.

But I never read much about the potential issues associated with such approaches. I write this as a recipient of triggered email, not as someone who has done this kind of email marketing (so feel free to jump in if you have and disagree.)

1. Technical complexity

It's very easy to describe the concept of behavior-driven emails, but nobody says much about implementing it. Your web analytics needs to talk with your email system. That sounds like some heavy-duty technology or upgrades. Or are there integrated off-the-shelf systems available that can automate all this for you?

2. Privacy and permission

People care about privacy and preserving their anonymity, as you can tell from the uproar that accompanies any public discussion of cookies, spyware and similar. Is there an issue here? Will some people object to their favorite shopping site so obviously tracking their activities? Or don't they care?

Plus: permission to send these kinds of emails needs to be built into your opt-in process.

3. Conditioning

We already know that discounting practices can condition customers to expect never to pay the full price. Does conditioning matter here? If abandoned shopping carts always lead to an email coupon, will we train shoppers simply to load up their shopping cart, leave the site and wait?

4. Rule-setting complexity

Then there's the time and effort required to set up all the rules that determine when and what emails are triggered. Some examples:

Timing: how long after the trigger behavior do you wait before sending the email? How long do you wait before you assume that shopping cart really is abandoned?

Frequency: how many times do you allow a trigger email to go out. If I browse, but don't buy, get an email, browse again, but still don't buy, what happens? Another email? How many times or for how long do I have to browse before it's worth intervening again?

Priorities: suppose I look at 25 different products, but don't buy. Which of those products gets the focus in the next email you send me?

False interpretations: since the whole process is automated, how many ifs and buts do you have to give the system? What degree of error can you accept in terms of the system interpreting behaviors poorly.

Here are two real-world examples from an online book retailer that likes to send me emails with recommendations based on previous purchases. (Which is great in theory.)

I once bought a book which helps your kid to learn the alphabet. Two years later they tell me since I bought a book about teaching your kids the alphabet, I might like to know there's a new book out on the same subject.

Whoops: are they suggesting my kid needs more than two years to learn the alphabet?

I once bought a book on Buddhism. Some people who bought books by that author apparently also bought books by another author. The recommendation for that second author? "An Introduction to the New Testament for Catholics."

Whoops: I'm not Catholic, not even close (hint: check the first book topic).

I use these examples simply to illustrate how automation can bring about errors. Of course the net effect of their strategy (mostly the system gets it right) is positive. But is there any way to avoid these errors?

I write this not to appear negative about the potential of triggered emails, but because I'm fascinated at how these issues are tackled by practitioners. If you have any opinions, let me know and I'll publish the polite ones.

A nice overview of the core elements of email marketing from Tricia Robinson.

She begins with a summary of the fundamentals, and then presents a side-by-side comparison of B2B and B2C email marketing approaches as regards list selection, list building, content development, timing, response tracking and permission.

As the world discovers the marketing power of transactional email messages (order confirmations etc.), it's interesting to see examples of what people are doing with them.

Jeanne Jennings offers insight into how a car rental firm is using rental confirmations to drive sign-ups.

It's worth mentioning the high open and click-through rates these confirmations are getting. This reinforces the idea that it's exactly these "non-marketing" messages that offer the biggest opportunity to engage the attention of the recipient.

September 11, 2006

After explaining why subject lines are so critical to email marketing, this article provides some tips to bear in mind when researching the topic. The piece ends with links to articles with advice on how to actually craft one.

It's part of my ongoing project to introduce people to key email marketing topics and show them how or where to get further information.

Now I don't want to stop you spending time at this site or any other learning the ins and outs of publishing email newsletters.

But if you do want to save yourself time and money, you could just take two minutes to read this article by Michael Katz.

Written primarily for small service companies and consultancies, it tells you all you ever really need to know to be able to write a successful customer retention and acquisition newsletter.

Like a lot of things in life, it's a lot quicker and easier to destroy a brand than it is to build one. And one of the aspects of marketing emails that gets little attention is the impact they have on your brand and reputation.

A few email blunders can wreck both.

Stefan Pollard outlines five areas you need to review to ensure they're not dragging your brand down (with your bottom line results following closely behind).

September 08, 2006

This MarketingSherpa alert highlights two problems faced by those placing ads in other people's newsletters. Image blocking and preview panes make it difficult to get those nice banner ads displayed and/or viewed.

It seems a lot of people are in denial about this, though Sherpa do manage to get some suggestions from the field on how to deal with the issue.

One approach is to ask for ad placement up the top of the email, where it's more likely to be seen.

That's great if you're an advertiser. But as a publisher, I don't want that crucial top space "wasted" on an ad, which is unlikely to persuade people to dig deeper into the email.

So there's a balancing act which needs to be resolved there.

This brief look at Accenture's e-newsletter strategy reveals a growing trend.

Instead of offering people a bunch of different newsletters, you offer them one. Then let the reader choose which types of content should go in it.

Instead of 20 newsletters, each on one topic, you have 1 newsletter which can have up to 20 topics in it (depending how many the reader selects).

There are many benefits to this approach. For example, it makes life simpler for the subscriber and gives them more control. Too much email can sour a relationship pretty quickly, so you'll likely keep more subscribers happy for longer. Which is good, obviously.

So it's food for thought if your palette of newsletter choices is outgrowing your readers' willingness to get more email.

(As an aside, the Accenture representative suggests that "...if you only sign up for HR content and there's no HR content that month, you won't get anything from us...we're not marketing just to market."

Actually, you're not marketing at all. That would mean two months between newsletter issues. It's hard to have any influence or impact at that frequency. Relationships die if you send too much email, but they also die if you send too little.)

September 06, 2006

In a forlorn effort to battle our increasing tendency to slip into jargon, here an introductory piece on the concept of landing pages.

Written solely for those who have never encountered the word, offering a definition and an explanation of why they're important in online marketing.

In the rush to get new subscribers, subscriber quantity often counts more than subscriber quality. But as Wendy Roth explains, that focus can come back to haunt you later.

Her article has several tips on how to approach list building so that the people who do sign-up are likely to hang around longer and respond better to your messages.

Wendy has some interesting perspectives on such issues as sign-up incentives and the amount of information you require from prospective subscribers. A recommended read if you're looking for sustainable, long-term success.

September 05, 2006

Forty years the old wizened monk spent on the mountain top. And still he had no answer. Stumped by the question, he turned to an email marketer. (Hey, that rhymes!)

The question? "What is permission?"

The answer? Well, grasshopper, the path to enlightenment might begin with this new article from Simms Jenkins which takes a look at some email contact circumstances and advises the reader on the ins and outs of permission and associated anti-spam legislation.

Simms, like me, is not a friend of assumed permission.

Just wanted to point you at Chad White's RetailEmail.Blogspot site. Chad monitors the email marketing efforts of the top web retailers and pulls out trends and best practices.

For example, he recently put together a 10-page report on sign-up practices which contain insights and tips for your own subscription methods.

September 04, 2006

Intended for those new to the idea of segmentation, this article explains why it's important to split your list into groups, each of which should share similar characteristics. Then you send different emails to each group, using an understanding of those characteristics to make each email more relevant to the recipients.

Rather than assuming you have funky database facilities or email preference centers, the article goes on to describe how you can define your groups simply by observing who clicks on what in previous email messages.

September 03, 2006

It's surprising and alarming how many big websites make it hard to find their email sign-up forms.

Linda Schumacher tackles the problem head on with these eight tips on how to use your website to get more and better quality sign-ups to your list.

September 01, 2006

It's (ahem) not funny and it can happen to us all, but these kind of email disasters do serve a useful purpose. They keep us on our toes and remind us that it pays to take care before hitting the send button. There, but for the grace of etc...

The cutting edge of email marketing keeps moving and doesn't wait for the majority to catch up. But for those looking for the next big thing, this article pretty much has it covered.

The central point is that you can only go so far with bulk email, even when properly targeted. A promising alternative is to take those emails that folk already want to get (like order confirmations) and turn those into vehicles that add value for both the sender and recipient.

And the step beyond that is to set up messaging rules that send single or sequenced emails in direct response to actions or behaviors taken by the potential recipients.

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