No man is an iland

January 31, 2007

A rare working trip down to the southern hemisphere means this blog is on an enforced sabbatical from February 1st until around Tuesday, February 20th.

To keep up with email marketing life until then, can I recommend these other blogs on the subject. (Particularly Tamara Gielen's B2Bemailmarketing.com which is the only large independent blog left other than this one.)

See you in a week or two!

Mark

Tags: vacation excuses, dolphin watching, New Zealand

Is the glass half full? Or half empty? Stefan Pollard takes the optimistic view of shrinking display areas and image blocking at the important webmail services (and other places people read email.)

Instead of bemoaning the loss of creative flexibility, he suggests how you might use the growth of preview panes to design and write emails that use a combination of subject line and above-the-fold text to grab and hold the prospective reader.

More on copywriting | Tags: email marketing, email copywriting, image blocking, email design

The Email Experience Council's Chad White reports on a couple of series of emails sent out over the 2006 holiday period by retailers.

These are staggered emails that share a common thread or theme. Chad describes the approaches taken, lists the subject lines and provides illustrative screenshots.

Perhaps the concept sparks a few ideas for your own efforts?

More case studies | Tags: email marketing, marketing case studies, online retail

Kai MacMahon tweaks the nose of traditional email marketing a little with a reminder about its potential to make a sale later, rather than sooner.

In other words, he suggests that we might have got too focused on driving direct response and need to think a little more about the long-term benefits of offering real value to the recipient.

It's always good to read this kind of article now and then as we get too engrossed with the report of the last email send. For similar sentiments, check the links and people listed in the Creed for Email Marketing.

More on email marketing strategy | Tags: email marketing, customer retention, branding

Your list management practices are a big factor in deciding whether your outgoing emails get labelled spam and delivered to the online equivalent of a landfill.

Dark Reading -- an IT security media site -- has an interesting article on the key mistakes that lead to permission email becoming perdition email.

Some of their comments will be familiar (practice list hygiene etc.) but others are probably new to many marketers, coming as they do from an IT and security viewpoint.

For example, do you know what all your company's servers are doing while you sleep? Thought not.

Definitely worth a read through.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, anti-spam, permission email, email list management

January 30, 2007

Kudos to the MailChimp blog for pointing me to this report on how your choice of text font impacts how people perceive the emails.

And even more interesting is a reference buried within that article sending you to another report by the same authors.

That second report lists the perceived characteristics of online typefaces and reveals which fonts are deemed most appropriate for different online settings: everything from email to instant messaging to websites to eTextbooks.

The key message for me is one you might have heard before. This kind of analysis lets you eliminate those fonts which definitely won't work. But use your own tests and intuition to gauge which of the remainder will work best for your audience and objectives.

So what do you trust more?

A blog post written like this?

Or one written like this?

Or like this?

More on email design | Tags: email marketing, usability, fonts, typefaces, online copywriting

Bank Technology News may not be on everyone's reading list, but it has an illuminating article on email marketing as its February cover story.

The article has a lot of insight on the thought processes going on at financial institutions as they mull over the pros and cons of switching more and more of their communication over to email.

Among the many tidbits of info are detailed views on the whole issue of certified email (especially Goodmail's version), including cost and fraud concerns, benefits and practical experiences.

More on email certification | Tags: email marketing, email certification, goodmail, financial marketing

January 29, 2007

I guess this kind of counts as an ad? Dunno.

Anyway, the folks at MarketingSherpa have got all warm and friendly and are offering a $50 reduction off the price of entering their annual email marketing awards. And a free massage (no, I made that last bit up.)

That means you pay $100 to submit an entry, not $150. (Use promo code EA33 when you enter customer and billing info at the award nomination site.) The deadline is February 16th.

Why should you nominate your emails for one of the ten categories covered? Apart from ensuring I get roses and chocolates from the folk at Sherpa?

They quote six reasons on the awards page. But I think we all get the kudos aspect of it. MarketingSherpa has a reputation most media companies would kill for, so it will look good on the resume if you're a marketer or your "About us" page if you're an agency or ESP.

Tags: email marketing, MarketingSherpa, marketing awards

"What we see depends mainly on what we look for." According to John Lubbock, a man described as an "English banker, politician, naturalist and archaeologist." He wasn't an email marketer (he died in 1913), but his point holds true for open rates.

If you measure open rates, I'm guessing you compare the rates between different emails, and probably track your average rate over some period of time so you can get a feel for how well (or badly) a particular newsletter or campaign fared.

All well and good, but do you ever measure the open rate for a combination of emails? Do you ever ask "how many members of my list opened at least one of the last four emails?"

I never asked the question. Until today. As part of the process of switching list hosts, I decided to delve deeper into subscriber activities. And here's the interesting factlet...

The average open rate for my newsletter is 41.8%. But 64.9% of recipients registered an open for at least one of the last four newsletter issues.

In other words, we forget that it's not the same bunch of people continuously "opening" your emails. The active section of your list might actually be a lot larger than you think.

And different subject lines, offers or content topics might be catching the interest of different subgroups within that list at different times.

If nothing else, this little mathematical exercise really brings home the need to think about your list not as one homogeneous group, but as a collection of different recipient groups whose interests may overlap.

Even without any clever software, simply looking more closely at who opens the emails and what they click on (and when) can give you a whole heap of insight into the makeup of your list. And thus suggest how you might set about creating more targeted emails by splitting that list into groups.

More on email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, list segmentation, email open rates, email marketing metrics, email marketing statistics

Janine Popick of VerticalResponse was kind enough to talk with me about some of the particular challenges small businesses face when doing email marketing.

She mentions some of the typical issues involved, cites some success stories and also has some advice on business blogging (her own email marketing blog recently won a ClickZ award.)

Catch her thoughts here.

More interviews | Tags: email marketing, small business, verticalresponse, janine popick

All the best practices in the world are just wasted ink if people don't follow them. And many people don't, as demonstrated by Jeanne Jennings in her latest ClickZ article.

She examines a number of marketing emails that landed in her inbox to see how they stand up when images are blocked (as so often happens). She casts a judgmental eye over such things as the effectiveness of headlines, calls to action, and the ability of the email to communicate effectively sans pretty graphics.

Ignoring ums and ahs about causes, effects and other influences, the end conclusion is lots of marketing emails are pre-programmed disasters when displayed without images.

Check out her advice and yours won't be.

By the way, if you're looking for services that help you picture (pun intended) what your email looks like at different webmail services and in different email clients, there's a list here.

More on HTML and email | Tags: email marketing, image blocking, email rendering, email copywriting

David Baker has started up a blog entitled WhiteNoise. You may recognize his name from the regular email marketing columns at MediaPost.

Very few people working in the email marketing vendor space get through my highly-sensitive value test. But David passes with flying colors. Never self-serving, always illuminating. I'm a big and (now) public admirer of his writing.

While the blog mainly repurposes content you can also get at MediaPost and elsewhere, this content comes with extras attached (such as the bits his editors remove). I'm sure it will be a welcome addition to the email marketing blog world.

The latest post there is a look at how to value the email channel and an email address for your business. There is no easy answer, but David raises a lot of the questions and issues you might want to explore.

More email marketing blogs | Tags: email marketing, david baker

Super article this morning from Jim Herbold in iMedia Connection.

He goes through the steps involved in persuading someone to sign-up for your email list and then managing that subscription to mutual advantage. Each step is accompanied by screenshots of sites and publications that do this well.

So the theory is backed up by practical examples and you can see how you might improve your own efforts.

Topics covered include attracting attention, improving the sign-up page, welcome messages, avoiding address churn, keeping your list clean and optimizing the unsubscribe process.

Excellent reading.

More on list management | Tags: email marketing, list management, lead generation, list hygiene

Bill Nussey is a big advocate of more sophisticated and intelligent uses of email as a marketing tool. In this article, he suggests investing more time, energy and/or cash in four particular areas of your program: integration with web analytics, lifecycle automation, internal company support for email, and multi-channel integration.

He explains what he means by each and why these elements are most worthy of your investment.

More on advanced email tactics | Tags: email marketing, multichannel marketing, lifecycle marketing

January 26, 2007

Derek Harding has some bad news in his latest column.

Apparently, many ISPs are blocking email if the sender causes too many bounces. This was always the case, but now these ISPs are being relatively inflexible about it. No second chances allowed.

According to Harding, this is a big problem if you email infrequently, since natural email address churn means inevitable bounces...which means automatic blocking. Even though you've done nothing more than send emails to an opt-in list.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Send too many emails, and recipients may get annoyed. They may even end up reporting you as spam. Send too few and you might trigger a filter because you have too many dead addresses in your list.

None of the solutions I can think of are particularly satisfactory. But I assume anyone sending regular promotions won't get hit by this, as not so many addresses should die between sends.

It's more of an issue where you send out email fairly irregularly, with long breaks between emails.

Whatever, it's certainly a reminder to keep a list clean and remove those hard bounces when they occur.

If anyone has thoughts on this, please do comment.

More on email bounces | Tags: email marketing, list hygiene, bounce management, anti-spam

Karen J. Bannan gets Jamie Schissler to pass on a few tips on loyalty programs in B2B email marketing.

Essentially, he advises getting your best customers onto a "loyalty" email list in addition to your standard email marketing list. That loyalty list is rich in informational value, with less attention paid to short-term sales or marketing goals.

Plenty of fine advice in the article, but I think this is more or less an approach that just parallels the very basic concept of an email newsletter (as opposed to promotional emails.) See here for the distinction and here for a free report on building long-term influence and impact with e-newsletters.

More on email marketing strategy | Tags: B2b loyalty programs, b2b email marketing, email newsletters

January 25, 2007

More fabulous design insights from the hand of Mark Wyner. This time he gives us a thorough review of CSS support in two of the newest kids on the webmail block. Another article you need to show to whoever designs your emails for you.

Mark gives Yahoo's beta service a big email design thumbs up. A nice bit of good news after all the uproar about Outlook 2007. After all, Yahoo! Mail is the most popular webmail service in the world and can plausibly account for a good quarter of your list addresses, especially in the B2C world.

More on CSS in email | Tags: email marketing, email design, yahoo mail, windows live mail

January 24, 2007

For the last few days, I've been tracking where people subscribed to my newsletter. The early results are surprising to say the least.

I assumed people were reluctant to submit their email address without seeing more detailed info about what they're getting. But I was wrong (not for the first time!)

So far, only a fifth of new sign-ups originate from the detailed newsletter sign-up page.

Just under 80% of people are signing up from some other page, based -- presumebly -- on the information given in the sign-up form (which you can see at the top right of this page.)

What conclusions do I draw?

1. Sign-up forms scattered throughout the site do work. Don't leave them out on the assumption that nobody would ever use them.

2. Given that likely potential, pay closer attention to the design and wording of that form (See these tips)

3. The willingness to use an isolated sign-up form is no doubt connected to your ability to demonstrate trust, expertise, value etc. through your website. The subscription form's success depends in part on what your website communicates about you and the emails you're likely to send.

More testing is required...watch this space!

More on list growth | Tags: email marketing, building an email list, subscription form design

ReturnPath just released the results of their third annual survey into consumer holiday email habits.

Bear in mind that the survey reports on what people say they do, rather than observed behavior (the two are rarely the same*). But the insights make fascinating reading.

I'd urge you to read the 9 page report in its entirety, especially the analysis. Consumers basically rate the marketing community in terms of how well we're doing at sending relevant emails.

There's also material in there on what gets attention, how people react to "bad" email practices and similar.

A couple of key stats that jumped out at me:

1. The two biggest influencers behind the decision to read an email are trust/awareness and previous experience with the sender's emails.

This gets to the core of permission email marketing: building trust and delivering consistent value. You need to think in terms of providing regular value from the recipient's perspective and not in terms of short-term boosts to sales.

2. 44% of respondents considered "a high volume of what they receive to be 'junk from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me'."

On the surface that seems a little worrying.

But think of it like this...email marketing works. And yet the above stat suggests there is clear room for improvement in terms of engaging recipients. So there are still plenty of gains to be made. That's good news.

[*This is where testing becomes so important. Using consumer opinion and your own experience and intuition to come up with plausible alternatives for, say, a subject line or an email frequency. Then testing to see which one works best.]

More on email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, holiday emails, consumer email habits

January 23, 2007

Spencer Kollas runs through the best ways to approach the whole sign-up process for your lists.

Lots of good advice in there on the best strategy to take in terms of what information you collect, preference centers, building expectations and ensuring you get accurate inputs to your forms.

More on growing your list

Here's a short, sweet little interview with the owner of a small restaurant in New York. In it, she describes how she uses email to send coupons to customers. Nothing dramatic, but this is what it's all about, because...

1. She admits herself, she knows just enough to have an ESP take care of the list management and she fills out a template, uploads a photo and hits send once a month

2. 18% of the recipients redeem the coupons. That amounts to about 10 extra customers a day in the restaurant. And compares with her direct mail response rate of 0.5%.

You can't argue with that.

More B2C case studies | Tags: email marketing, restaurant marketing, online coupons, small business marketing

I subscribe to a couple of marketing newsletters from an online publisher with a focus on marketing (the irony!). Today they decided to sign me up to another one. On a completely different subject.

Did permission email suddenly go out of fashion?

I don't get it. Why did they do this? Because I'm sure that the outcome is a bunch of people like me, who are now plainly irritated with them. And another bunch who don't bother to unsubscribe, but just filter out, delete or "this is spam" the new newsletter. With all the list quality and deliverability problems associated with that.

How is that better than announcing the new email to subscribers and asking people to sign-up if they are interested?

The hugely pragmatic among you may argue that it's the only way to start a new list off with a decent number of subscribers. To which I say...flashing light...short-term thinking...get over the list size obsession! And anyway, there are other ways to get current subscribers interested in new email offerings without taking the "opt-out only" route.

Plus I could even kind of reluctantly accept the pragmatic list-building argument if the new newsletter was perfectly relevant (though how can you ever know that to be true?)

But just because I like articles on email marketing, I don't see how that qualifies me to want to read about "Jason's love affair with his Apple iBook G4."

Others may play the "but you have a long-term relationship with the publisher that is deep enough to make such opt-out approaches acceptable" card.

No I don't. We don't send each other Valentine cards. We don't go for a beer together at the weekend. They didn't give me a call when my cat died. Just because we use the word relationship doesn't make it a real one.

The only thing keeping me in the flock is that I love (in the platonic sense) two of their email marketing columnists, and I don't want to do without them.

This "assumed permission" approach is a hair's breadth away from what many people would call spam. I've written on it before, as have others in the blogosphere (Tom O'Leary, Hendry Lee.)

I cordially invite anyone to use the comments to present a cogent argument in favor of this approach to email marketing. I am quite willing to change my opinion if the facts demand it. But right now, I don't get it.

More on permission | Tags: email marketing, assumed permission, spam

January 22, 2007

If you're looking for a quick introduction to open rates, then Mathew Patterson has a nice overview. The chart of "typical" open rates for different kinds of sender ought to give you a rough and ready appreciation of what to expect from your own efforts.

For those interested in more detail, there's the Email Open Rates Guide, which has a lot of info and references on what you can do to actually improve your numbers.

One important point that tends to get lost in open rate discussions is that you need to keep running to stay in one place. The natural tendency is for them to fall through time.

That comes from increasing use of...

1. Email software that blocks images from displaying in an email (which makes it impossible to measure an open) and...

2. List fatigue, where people tend *on average* to gradually lose interest, the longer they've been on your list.

More on email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, email open rates, email marketing metrics, open rates

January 21, 2007

Not literally of course. I mean the text-only component of those emails that go out in two versions: HTML and text.

The assumption has always been that HTML emails should go out accompanied by a text-only alternative. The latter hides behind-the-scenes and only gets displayed if the receiving software finds itself unable or unwilling to display the HTML version. (See here for an explanation of how this all works.)

But research by Listrak suggests that this scenario is getting rarer by the day. They make the guarded suggestion that the text version is increasingly less important, presumably as the use of HTML-unfriendly email software declines.

Does this mean it's time to give the text version the old heave ho?

No. As long as some people can't read HTML emails, it's worth doing. But you certainly might reconsider how much time and effort you put into that text alternative...

More on format | Tags: email marketing, mime, html email, email format

January 19, 2007

A quick note to alert you to three new sections at Email Marketing Reports.

An email certification section lists those companies and organisations that certify your email for whitelisting at participating ISPs. There you'll find information and links for the likes of Goodmail, Sender Score Certified etc.

A new transactional emails category in the article directory collates the various references I've come across showing you how to get more marketing benefits out of those order confirmations and similar emails.

The deliverability and reputation services page gives a brief overview of the main services out there that will help you get your emails into your subscriber's inbox.

Do comment if you have any additions to all three lists.

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, transactional emails, email certification, email reputation

Henry Hyder-Smith has an experienced finger on the accelerating pulse of the email marketing world.

Disappointed to find that not a lot has changed in 2007, he has a few quick tips on how to improve personalisation, how to respond to what recipients are telling you about your emails (through their action...or lack of it), and whether you should change your timing and frequency.

More on tactics | Tags: email marketing, personalization, email frequency

If you're beating your head against the keyboard trying to come up with a new design for your emails, gather inspiration from this gallery of beautiful real-world examples.

Note their presence in the gallery is largely based on aesthetics and a subjective evaluation of how well they implement the likely objectives of the sender. But it's not a results-based choice.

I mentioned this gallery once before, but it's now got a new layout allowing you to search by format (1 column, 2 columns and 3 columns) and email type (announcement / invitation / newsletter). Very nice.

More on email design | Tags: email marketing, email design, html email

January 18, 2007

As the dust settles on the big bust up over Outlook 2007 and how it displays emails, I thought I'd sum up the arguments, issues and implications. Here goes...

The story so far

Microsoft's new version of Outlook, the email client included within their forthcoming Office 2007 software, features an important change in how it displays emails.

Previously, Outlook relied on the technology behind its sibling web browser (Internet Explorer) to interpret the underlying code and instructions that HTML emails use to tell Outlook where and how to display all those images, colors etc.

The new Outlook 2007 now uses Word to do that job instead.

The big deal is that Word is not nearly as good as Internet Explorer at understanding HTML elements and style properties (CSS). Microsoft themselves published an article describing the various things that Outlook 2007 will not be able to cope with. These include:

• Forms


• Background images


• Animated GIFs


• Flash


• Float or position commands


• Alt tags in images

In a nutshell, this places a lot of restrictions on email design. Needless to say, email designers are not happy.

The fires of protest first sparked into flame via an article in Sitepoint's newsletter. This led to a now-famous blog post by David Greiner, with the memorable title "Microsoft takes email design back 5 years."

David's post in turn led to a slew of similar posts from outraged designers, who like him were upset at the limitations imposed on their work by Outlook. The story even made it to the front page of ClickZ and Digg.

Is this bad for email marketing?

The general consensus is that the implications for email marketing are not huge. This is because Outlook is predominately used by the business community.

Other email clients typically used by business folk aren't particular good with HTML and CSS either. So most B2B email marketers are already sending out Outlook 2007-friendly HTML emails.

For example, the folk at MailChimp point out that much of the "lost" functionality was never standard in HTML email design anyway. In other words, we're losing a lot of functionality that wasn't particularly valuable in the first place.

That opinion is echoed by Bill Nussey of Silverpop, who notes, "Bottom line, Outlook 2007's rendering engine is not a game-changing event for email marketers."

The counterargument is that these other email clients never had enough market share to make it compulsory to send out "watered down" HTML emails.

So some people will inevitably have to go back to their email template and redesign them again, on the assumption that Outlook 2007 will likely become the most popular email software among business people.

Even then, say experts, there's no reason why simpler HTML has to mean poorer response rates.

Some suggest that the negative reaction is more to do with the creative restrictions it imposes on designers rather than any likely marketing problems.

In other words, yes, design needs to take account of Outlook 2007's relatively poor rendering capabilities, but you can still send decent looking, effective email to people using it.

That argument is exemplified by Greg Cangialosi, who writes on the Blue Sky Factory blog, "This is a small blow to email marketers, but certainly not the biggest deal. What this really does is make all of that great creative talent we have out there revert back to nascent HTML email design"

So why the fuss?

To some extent the uproar comes from a reopening of two traditional divisions in email marketing.

The first is between the creative folk and the marketing folk.

Some marketers have made relatively offhand comments along the lines, of "tough, get over it," which is a touch disrespectful to the trade and art of email design.

If you took away the color green from an artist's palette, she could still paint great works of art. But you wouldn't expect her to be happy about it.

The second division is between the email marketing community and a section of the anti-spam community...those who believe marketing email in general and HTML marketing email in particular is an abomination. See, for example, this article by Jack Schofield.

The anti-HTML-in-email brigade have welcomed the move, though it's a pyrrhic victory: it won't change the number of HTML emails around, it will just make them less creative.

So are there any practical implications?

Yes. If you are tackling a business audience with your list and never bothered to consider problems with how your emails display, then this is a necessary wake-up call. Various versions of Outlook have a market share among business users of over 50%. So expect Outlook 2007 to be widely used.

The change should be seen as a further reminder that how your emails display is a critical part of email marketing.

The more complex the email and the more fancy the coding within it, the less likely it is to be seen as you intended. It doesn't mean the end of email design creativity, but it certainly means you need to take a more circumspect approach to the whole topic.

People view your emails using different software. Some use a desktop email client, others use webmail. There are different webmail services. Some people read emails on their mobile device. This diversity needs accommodating in your email design.

Equally, the less creative flexibility you have in terms of layout, images and colors, the more thought needs to go into other aspects of the email, such as the words you use and the offer you present.

So while Outlook 2007 may not prove to be the disaster some have called it, it's certainly another good reason to take a longer deeper look at the email we send.

More on email design | Tags: email marketing, email design, outlook 2007, html email

January 16, 2007

You can never have too much inspiration for newsletter content and you might find an idea or three in this article at MailerMailer. Combine them with these newsletter content tips and ideas, and your editorial calendar for 2007 should be bursting with bright ideas.

More on publishing e-newsletters | Tags: email newsletters, ezines, content development

In a recent commentary, David Baker has a little dig at email marketing best practices.

His basic argument is an indirect appeal for more innovation, creativity and independent thought when it comes to your own email marketing program.

It is implicit recognition that the uniqueness of your list and business means that not every general lesson applies to your situation.

There's a danger, though, that this laudable stance gets interpreted wrongly as rejecting best practices per se. An interpretation that plays well with the more elitist among us.

Creativity and innovation are all well and good once you have the basics of email marketing sorted. But the reality is that outside of the email marketing "insider community," very few people do have a full grasp of the basics.

Not because they're dumb. But because they have other priorities. These folk -- the vast majority -- need a set of basic and timeless best practices so that they can quickly set up an email marketing program that works.

But what they also need is a dose of critical thought.

Ron Shevlin gives some examples of "the unintended consequences of email best practices" in this blog post. As Ron himself states, "It's not that the firms shouldn't have used these tactics, it's that they didn't implement them correctly."

That's the point. Best practices are a great and necessary guide, but the onus is on the marketer to think critically and intelligently when it comes to their application.

Bringing us full circle to David's original argument about simply treating best practices with a little more circumspection.

In the end, it's about taking your marketing off auto pilot and putting it back under manual control.

More on tactics and strategy | Tags: email marketing best practices, email marketing strategy

January 15, 2007

When I was a student, one summer job was stacking cardboard boxes as they came off the machine that made them*.

I remember one glorious day when it was only after 200,000 fruit boxes had winged their merry way across my table that I realized the writing down the side said "banannas." Mistakes...they sure do happen.

And if you ever doubted the ability of even the cream of online marketing to screw up now and then, take a look at Chad White's collection of retailer bloopers collected over 2006.

If you -- like me -- ever find yourself eligible for the Email Hall of Shame, take heart from this article by Karen J. Bannan. She gets useful advice from Morgan Stewart on the right course of action to take once you realize you hit the send button a tad too early.

*I learnt two things from that job. First, carrying a document in your hands while walking briskly around the factory floor lets you avoid work until lunch. Second, never headbutt a sheet of reinforced double wall corrugated board.

Tags: email marketing, email mistakes

Using transactional emails for marketing is one of those sensible ideas that's been around for a while, but is only just getting traction among the majority of media and marketing folk.

For those wondering what they need to consider when it comes to making better use of those "order confirmations" and "account updates," Dave Lewis has some brief tips.

More on tactics | Tags: email marketing, transactional email

January 14, 2007

You've cleared your desks of greetings cards, party debris and that unidentified metal item you never did find a use for. So it's time to roll up your sleeves and give your email marketing a thorough review.

And to help you, Stefan Pollard has described 10 points you need to go over in anticipation of a winning 2007.

These focus on the design and mechanics of the email itself and the system behind it, but also strategic and tactical aspects like message frequency and subscriber management.

More on email list management and tactics | Tags: email marketing

January 12, 2007

If you use testimonials to push your products, services or sign-ups, you're in for a big surprise.

For if you go down to this blog today, you'll find the results of tests which say...that adding in a testimonial actually decreases sales.

Unfair of me. Not testimonials per se, but a specific testimonial the authors tested on a particular landing page.javascript:void(0)
Publish

The point isn't that testimonials suddenly became bad (they didn't). No, the point is that things aren't always as they seem. That assumptions on what works don't always hold true. And that the only way to be really sure that your approach is the right one is to test. Sometimes even things that seem like a no-brainer.

In the above case, a different testimonial or different positioning might have improved sales.

More on testing | Tags: testimonials, testing, email marketing

On updating the Why do email marketing? article, I discovered a few interesting statistical snippets from a recent survey by Alterian.

According to their press release, 81% of the marketing professionals they spoke to intended to increase email marketing budgets in 2007. So the medium seems to be gaining respect among those with the money.

However, proof that there's still plenty of potential to be exploited in the email marketing pie comes from various numbers suggesting very few fully analyse the results of their campaigns.

A lack of time and the often overwhelming nature of many reports can stand in the way of a proper analysis. But as many other authors have pointed out, there is so much you can learn from these reports that it's well worth our while to bite the bullet and learn how to use them.

More on statistics | Tags: email marketing budgets, email marketing statistics, online marketing metrics

January 11, 2007

Here's a little experiment I did on the worst-day-to-send your email.

My email marketing newsletter goes out every two weeks on a Monday. Has done since I started. The last one was slated for Monday, January 1st.

I can't actually imagine a worse day to send a B2B email on. First, nobody is in the office. Pretty much anywhere: it's like a near-global public holiday.

Second, when people do return to the office, they have to catch up with thousands of other things. No time to immerse themselves in new advice and information.

So I sent it anyway, simply to see just how bad things would work out metrics-wise. (This is the advantage of being a one-man independent operation. You can make stupid business decisions and not have to worry about criticism from above.)

My prediction: open rates about 50% of the usual, plus a slight decrease in CTR.

The actual results?

Well, first of all a whole slew of "Out of Office Replies" came in, which was quite interesting as you can learn a lot about people from those.

Second, very low open rates in the initial 24 hours. But...10 days later and here are the "final" results...

Average open rate of the newsletter over the last three months: 40.7%
Open rate of the Jan 1st issue: 38.0%

That's a fall of just 2.7 percentage points or 6.6%. Not ideal, but hardly the expected disaster. In fact, totally within the normal range.

Average CTR over the last three months: 39.5%
CTR of the Jan 1st issue: 38.9%

i.e. no significant difference.

So what's going on there? Any ideas? Keep those great comments coming.

More on the best day to send | Tags: b2b email marketing, best day to send

Both DMNews and MarketingSherpa have an eclectic mix of tips and suggestions for you to browse and gain inspiration from.

The former interviewed a few folk from the email marketing service industry to get their thoughts on what to think about in 2007.

And the latter's free report Marketing Wisdom for 2007 includes 21 email marketing lessons submitted by real marketers based on real experiences.

More tips and tricks | Tags: email marketing

The latest Sitepoint newsletter has a long piece on how the new version of Microsoft's main email software is a big heap of trouble for those designing HTML emails.

The article presents a long list of traditional email design features -- like forms or background images -- which break in Outlook 2007. And there are some useful links for you to follow to get further details.

The lack of standards among the software and services used to read email means we're faced with two choices.

Either we have really simple email design that displays adequately everywhere. Or we invest the time and energy in categorizing an address list (where possible) by reading environment and design different emails for each of these categories (segments.)

More on HTML and CSS in emails | Tags: email marketing, html emails, outlook 2007

Spend too long sending marketing emails and it's easy to lose a sense of perspective. Which is why it's useful to occasionally read comments and recommendations from others involved in the email delivery chain.

This extensive feature article at IT Security has a series of detailed recommendations for IT folk on how to protect their own and their users' inboxes from spam.

From an email marketing perspective, it's interesting for two reasons:

1. It offers considerable insight into the methods and approaches used to differentiate email into spam and not-spam. So you can see where you might help "the system" make the right decision when it comes to your permission-based emails (for example by publishing email authentication records.)

2. It's enlightening to see the deep suspicion of bulk email that years of spamming has produced. Suspicion that leads to statements like "Never use your primary email address to sign up for anything." How are you persuading customers and prospects that you really do value their email privacy?

More on anti-spam resources | Tags: email marketing, spam, anti-spam

January 10, 2007

Great emails need words, images, offers, and a context and strategy that touch the recipient in a way that generates a positive response. But how do you pick the right words? Develop the right strategy? Where does the inspiration come from?

These questions have bugged me for a while. Not least because I have no idea how, for example, I write. "The words just come out" doesn't offer much in terms of a technique to apply later, when inspiration is lacking.

But there are ways to build a framework in which creativity and innovation can flourish. In this article, David Baker reveals how he stimulates creativity within an email marketing program by hosting "creative workshops."

He describes the different sessions involved in each workshop and the rules that apply to participants. Worth trying, perhaps, if you or your team are getting stuck in a well-worn rut.

More on copywriting, strategy and tactics | Tags: email marketing, copywriting

Apart from a willingness to work quickly, to a high standard...for the minimum wage. But let's return to Planet Earth, where Karen Gedney is kind enough to outline a series of criteria she uses to pick copywriters for large B2B email projects.

These criteria focus on ensuring you get the right quality for email marketing needs and leave the more typical hiring issues to one side.

So Karen covers such things as the required experience and expertise in various fields, attention to detail, track record, etc.

Definitely worth a read through if you're looking to get some outside help to craft those winning emails.

More on copywriting | Tags: email marketing, freelance copywriting, b2b email marketing

Shocking/amusing (delete according to taste) stuff in this article recounting an email exchange between a job applicant and his potential employer.

The rapid degeneration of the conversation into abuse and expletives is symptomatic of how email has changed how we behave and talk to one another.

The physical distance between sender and recipient, the medium's convenience, and the anonymity that comes with free email addresses lures us all into conversational sloppiness.

And not just in personal emails. As we write marketing emails, it's important to remember just who is sitting at the other end. Not a number or a spreadsheet cell, but a human being.

Tags: email marketing

January 09, 2007

Landing page copy? The offer? The subject line? The color of the footer? The phase of the moon when you send?

What element of your email marketing brings you the best return if you test it? (Hint: it's not the moon phase.) MarketingSherpa has the answer, as provided by a survey of 3500+ marketers.

The company is slowly releasing the odd free snippet of info from their benchmark study on email marketing metrics. So if you didn't buy the guide, and missed the recent webinar, keep a close look on their site for more freebie information.

More on testing | Tags: email marketing, roi of testing

As a timely follow-up to yesterday's note about the popularity of different email address domains, David Rosen explores how each of these domains differs in terms of marketing characteristics.

He draws on his experience to describe how subscribers to the various webmail services, broadband services and dial-up services shape up in terms of likely subscription length, responsiveness, and deliverability.

And he draws out a couple of relevant conclusions for your email marketing practices.

More on email address providers | Tags: email marketing, webmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, aol mail

January 08, 2007

Just updated the factsheet on email and webmail statistics and thought you might want to tuck away this new reference...

The folks at AWeber analysed over 43 million email addresses submitted through their systems in 2006 to come up with a list of the top 20 domains. No surprises for guessing that Yahoo and Hotmail came top, followed by AOL and then Gmail.

But what is surprising is just how much catching up Gmail still has to do to reach Yahoo! Mail's usage level.

Of course you can run a similar analysis of your own list to find your top email domains and thus the places you need to think about most when it comes to getting your emails delivered and displayed properly.

More on email marketing metrics | Tags: email statistics, yahoo mail, hotmail, aol email, gmail

An unwritten rule of online marketing is that people don't like to scroll. So all the important stuff needs to be at the top of each web page and email.

Here's a fascinating study that uses real observed behavior to show that people scroll down web pages much more than we think. Since it's early in the week and my brain is two sandwiches short of a decent-sized picnic, I won't try and explore what that might mean for email. (Note the study refers to web pages only.)

The analysis is not saying that you shouldn't put the key stuff up at the top. But it is saying that you perhaps need to account more for the scrolling crowd than before. Not just by chopping the text up into readable chunks with bullets and headlines (which was always a good idea), but by ensuring you have links and calls to action at the nether ends of your text, too.

More on email copywriting | Tags: email marketing, copywriting, below the fold, email usability

Here's an interesting email marketing dilemma posed by Kevin Hillstrom (found via Tamara Gielen's blog).

His basic question is this: if customers tell you they want less frequent emails, but you make more money from more frequent emails (based on a three-month test), what do you do? Read Kevin's post and contribute to the debate in his comments section!

I can argue both ways.

Perhaps the lower email frequency is more sustainable. The higher frequency may start to get poorer and poorer results as time goes by and people get fatigued, while the lower frequency will hold its performance much better. Three months isn't long enough to test that.

Equally, you could argue that purchases are another indirect form of customer feedback. As such, the higher frequency has also received a "positive vote" from the readership. An argument which might keep those in the "the customer should have control" camp happy.

In practice, of course, there is a middle-way where you give people the choice. Still, a question to get the brain firing at the start of another working week.

More on email frequency | Tags: email marketing, emailing frequency

eROI's Dylan has a concise post with an important reminder: that you should make it clear to readers why they're getting a second copy of an email, if you're doing a resend to correct a mess-up with the first. And he has a real-world example to illustrate his points.

Guerrilla marketers might argue there's room in a promotional plan for the odd deliberate mistake or two, as long as this doesn't effect the basic message and the email's functionality. Then you have an excuse to send a second email to the list containing the correction and some more promotional copy fine-tuned to account for what you learnt from the results of the first email.

And if you think I'm being cynical, I'm pretty sure it's been done.

More on copywriting | Tags: email marketing, resends

This anonymous little article has some nice points about writing marketing emails.

It's a brief overview of some of the key points to consider, covering such things as the call to action, structure, subject lines, and similar.

More on the basics of email advertising | Tags: email marketing, copywriting

January 05, 2007

Round off a fine Friday's reading with a glass of port or coffee and this wishlist from Simms Jenkins.

He has 15 wishes for the email marketing industry, many of which are -- of course -- hints as to where to invest more time and effort this coming year.

May I cross my fingers particularly tightly for wishes 1, 7, 9 and 15.

And add (again) a 16th: the death of spam.

Tags: email marketing

Just in case the last post was too long for you, I wanted to make sure you saw the link at the end to this article by Bryan Eisenberg.

He explains how you should think differently about your address list.

He's more famous for conversion marketing than email marketing. But I reckon that article is already a contender for the "best of 2007" award.

More on building an email list | Tags: email marketing, list management

So what's holding your marketing efforts back? Lack of resources? Time? Support from others? Not quite enough info to make the decision and take things up a level?

Or is it fear?

There's a problem with email marketing. One I discovered today, though it's been staring me in the face for months.

Two problems really. The first is the obsession with numbers. Or rather a single number. There's a lot of talk about email marketing metrics and what you should measure. Open rates, click through rates, conversions and newer more mysterious concerns like "engagement."

But I suspect (correct me if not) that the main number we focus on emotionally is the simplest one: the size of our address list.

What number do you check up on most often? My money