No man is an iland

May 30, 2007

One of the curiosities of email marketing is that businesses invest less money in it than the returns would justify. Rarely does an email marketing conference pass without folk bemoaning the "email should be cheap" attitude of those guarding the finances.

That argument is covered elsewhere. But Karen Gedney makes a strong case today for devoting more resources to one of the more underfunded elements of email campaigns: the copywriting.

Her argument is persuasive (she is a copywriter, after all!), making the astute point that low investment in email copywriting is bad for you, bad for the industry.

One copywriter unlikely to be troubled by lack of work is the great Nick Usborne. His latest article at Excess Voice reviews the "hey, we're best buddies" approach to email copy.

Though he says the approach is inappropriate for most email situations, Nick does draw out the important lessons we can learn from the false bonhomie of the out-of-breath writer trying to sell the latest and greatest gimmick to the unsuspecting.

More on copywriting | Tags: email copywriting, copywriting fees

If you've ever signed up for a newsletter and then found yourself presented with additional newsletter offers from related publishers on the thank you page, then you've seen one form of co-registration in action.

Dave Young gets a few experts to chime in on the essentials of setting up a co-registration agreement with other sites and lists. Plenty of good advice in there. A few extra points...

First, the article rightly mentions it, but Dennis Malaspina's blog post drives home the point that your sign-up copy/offer is critical. Your offer is on someone else's site and you only have a few words of space to work with. So you really need to consider just how you're going to persuade someone to part with their precious email address.

Second, it is essential to get your coregistration partners to send you new subscriber details as soon as possible. That way you can send out welcome and/or confirmation emails quickly.

A problem with new subscribers generated through co-registration agreements is that they're not nearly as engaged with your site/brand/products/services as someone who signed up at your own site.

So you need to get them engaged with immediate contact. Otherwise your first email to them might generate a "what the heck is this?" reaction.

Third, the article mentions paying around 5 cents per new subscriber for a paid coregistration service. I'd suggest that the price you're able to pay depends very much on your particular situation.

What is a new subscriber worth to you? Bear in mind that not all new subscribers are alike. As the article points out, you need to track how coreg signups work for you.

Not to mention that you'd be hard pressed to find a quality subscriber generation service with prices as low as that (please tell me about them if you know of any!)

Four, some spam lists masquerade as coregistration services. Stick to quality, reputable services if you are paying for subscribers. Or focus on barter exchanges with sites and lists you know and can trust.

More on coregistration | Tags: email marketing, co-registration, list building

Lyris just put out an interesting report on email delivery trends and issues in Q1, 2007. The thrust of the press release might be open to misinterpretation if reported glibly.

Lyris found that hundreds of email campaigns they analyzed didn't trigger filters looking for spammy content.

That does not mean that content filters are unimportant, as implied by some reports.

It means that those sending out emails have already worked out how not to trigger them. And it means existing delivery problems are therefore due to other things, specifically issues of sender reputation.

That's why Stefan Pollard notes in the press release that... "Changing a few keywords in the hopes of boosting inbox success rates is no substitute for adhering to email marketing best practices."

There are no shortcuts to better deliverability: your whole email marketing house needs to be in order.

The report looks at how top ISPs in the USA, Europe and elsewhere rate when it comes to delivering legitimate marketing emails to end user accounts. And in terms of putting those delivered emails in the right folder (the main inbox as opposed to a junk folder.)

The distinction is important.

For example, Gmail is very good at delivering legitimate marketing email, with less than 5% of emails filtered out en route. But a big chunk of those delivered emails got routed to the junk folder. Over a quarter in fact.

The lessons?

• Delivery issues are still real. Even given that the more popular US ISPs all delivered over 90% of legitimate marketing emails, that's still plenty of potential clicks and sales going missing. And that's even before the issue of inbox/junk folder rerouting.
• These figures are all averages, so presumably those following best practices are getting better results. So no cause for panic!
• ISPs vary quite a big deal in their deliverability success. Hotmail, for example, dumped over 40% of delivered marketing email into the end user's junk folder. So it's important to tackle deliverability issues on a domain-by-domain basis.

Overall delivery numbers might be masking problems at specific ISPs and webmail services. Pull out the most popular address domains in your email list and take a closer look at what's happening there. Use test accounts or one of the delivery monitoring services.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, lyris

May 29, 2007

If you're confused by the term "email deliverability," or need to inform someone else who is, try this simple introduction to the topic.

The article explains the meaning of the term and why it's important to email marketing. Then it describes the basic reasons why some emails don't get delivered and suggests how you can set about addressing delivery problems.

I wrote it assuming zero previous knowledge and avoiding (or explaining) technical jargon and complex concepts. If this is all old hat for you, you might find the article useful for introducing delivery issues to those who think all the email you send out arrives at the end destination unmolested.

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

We rightly worry about how an email might display when viewed in Outlook 2007. Or Gmail. Or on a mobile phone. Or in the bath. That concern leads to a temptation to fall back on dour, "safe" email designs and layouts.

Nothing wrong with that approach...it gets results. But "safe design" and creativity need not be mutually exclusive. And it's always worth testing an idea or two to see if you can lift responses.

That's the message I picked up from this post by Robert Rosenthal. His agency tested a standard email template against a customized design and found the latter generated 41% more unique clickthroughs...

More on design and layouts | Tags: email marketing, email design, email templates

May 25, 2007

A few weeks ago I released a list of 21 people and places I reckoned were the best in the (English-speaking) world in terms of providing valuable, reliable information about email marketing. It's an ongoing project and version 1.1 just came out.

One resource left the list simply because they since moved on to fresh pastures. And two newcomers gained an entry:

...Al Iverson (his comments and blog posts on spam, blacklisting and related issues suggest he's forgotten more than I'll ever know)

...Email Marketing Voodoo (awesome blog posts on the good, bad and ugly of real email campaigns)

See the updated list and links here.

Of course that means there are now 22 resources listed in a top 21 list. I used to be a scientist and a 4-5% error never bothered me then, so it doesn't now. (Come to think of it, maybe that's why I'm no longer a scientist.)

The clever chaps over at MarketingExperiments just launched a new online on-demand training course in Email Marketing. Details are here.

It's a new course so there are no reviews to draw on yet, but the MarketingExperiments reputation justifies good faith.

If you take and pass the exam at the end you get a neat little certification seal to put on your site or resumee, which might help job prospects in a field where salaries appear to be rising.

Topics covered on the course include...growing your list, conversion incentives, subject lines and other headers, copywriting, deliverability, timing and frequency, and trigger emails. (Disclaimer: I'm an affiliate of MarketingExperiments.)

Tags: email marketing, marketingexperiments, email marketing training

The travel industry are often out there setting the pace when it comes to clever email marketing ideas. Ken Magill reports on how Intrawest ski resorts use email in a variety of ways to promote positive relations with customers (existing and prospective) and encourage them to give Intrawest a greater share of their holiday spending budget.

One lovely example is emailing ski lesson attendees a photo of themselves learning to ski, together with the opportunity to book another lesson.

Meanwhile Christopher Marriott discusses some ideas that make sense despite seeming counterintuitive at first glance. He covers a different approach to follow-up emails, the position of the unsubscribe link in your email, and the importance (or not) of list size.

And finally, polls are always a good way to engage your audience. Karen J. Bannan gets Phil Jamieson to suggest five tips on how best to combine emails and polls.

More case studies and tactical tips | Tags: email marketing, intrawest, marketing with polls

May 24, 2007

And another free document to download and peruse over a nice cup of tea and a little biscuit (you can take the Englishman out of England, but...)

E-consultancy hold regular roundtables with UK-based marketers and vendors, and the results of the latest (April) one on email marketing are available here. (You'll need to register at the site -- free -- to access it.)

The summary of discussions is more of a brief on current topics of interest rather than an actionable document. But it's good to know what's troubling or occupying email marketing minds in the UK. And there's also an excellent mini-collection of statistics, white papers and other resources in there.

More on strategy and statistics | Tags: email marketing, e-consultancy, email marketing in the uk

MailChimp's free 50-page introduction to email marketing got a revamp just recently. The new edition includes some fresh material on webmail issues, email "firewalls" and gateways, and the intriguingly titled "Royal Screwups To Avoid."

Author Ben Chestnut tells me the new material reflects changing needs. For example, he suggests webmail interfaces are causing more display ulcers than headline-grabbing desktop software like Outlook 2007.

For other vendors offering reliable, unsalesy (is that a word?) information for marketers, try the top 21 email marketing resources post.

More on email advertising basics | Tags: email marketing, mailchimp

Andrew Seel takes scalpel and microscope to the National Science Learning Centre's newsletter. Although their campaign results were pretty good, he finds plenty of room for improvement...identifying nine weaknesses.

You also get to see his redesigned, rewritten version, with an explanation of the suggested changes. Very insightful, very pragmatic, very worth your reading time.

More case studies | Tags: email marketing, email newsletters

The Pew Internet & American Life Project just released details of their latest report on spam and its impact on consumer perceptions of email.

As always there is good news and bad news.

Less people are bothered by spam, even though they see more of it in their inboxes. The authors explain this paradox by noting that people are seeing less of those kinds of spam emails that tend to offend more. Less porn spam, more stock spam.

People are also more proactive about controlling spam through filters and similar techniques. Good stuff.

As a result, it appears the spam plague has less of a debilitating effect on email habits than in previous years. Fewer respondents claimed spam reduced their email use or made using email annoying or unpleasant.

But "fewer" doesn't mean "few." For example, 55% of respondents still reported that spam made them less trusting of email in general.

Worst of all, 4% ordered a product or service from a spam mail and a whopping 23% clicked on a spam link to get more information. As long as people keep responding to spam, there is no reason for spammers to stop. There is still a huge education deficit here.

So while the trend is good in terms of restoring trust and usability to the inbox, there is clearly still a long, long way to go to solving the spam problem.

More email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, spam, email statistics

AOL just implemented a new interface for their webmail service. The key change for marketers is that images are now blocked by default. At least some of the time...

The original news doing the rounds of the blogs (including this one, if I hadn't been down with stomach 'flu) was that all AOL webmail accounts are now disabling images by default.

But Return Path did some testing and reckon it's only new users who have images turned off by default.

People with an existing AOL Mail or AIM Mail webmail account apparently retain their original settings. (I checked my old AOL webmail and my original *default* settings included automatic image blocking!)

(Update: Al Iverson has a comprehensive post bringing more light to bear on the matter.)

Whatever the reality, the point is that image blocking got another convert. Which simply adds urgency to the the three associated tasks for email marketers:

1. Ensure your email works when images are blocked. Which means, does it display properly when images fail to show up and does it still convey the right message and allow the required response?

(For tips on this, see the articles here.)

2. Bear image blocking in mind when viewing your open rate statistics.

3. Do what you can to reduce blocking. Depending on the ISP or webmail service, default image blocking can often be overridden if:

• You certify your email


• You are on an appropriate whitelist (the AOL enhanced whitelist gets your images displayed at AOL, for example)


• The recipient has your from address in their address book


• The recipient manually cancels the image block for your email

(The above links and blog posts address these issues, too.)

Tags: email marketing, image blocking, aol mail, aim mail

May 23, 2007

One big skyscraper size message of recent weeks has been the need to ensure your outgoing emails are properly authenticated (see here for a jargon-free overview.)

And three new articles only serve to reinforce the message...

Silverpop report on what AOL, Comcast, MSN, Hotmail and Windows Live Mail have to say in terms of improving your delivery rates to their users.

Spencer Kollas provides answers to those arguments we use to avoid taking the necessary authentication action.

And George Bilbrey suggests authentication should be foremost in your mind, even if you're not into IT stuff.

More on authentication | Tags: email marketing, email authentication

Call it rumormongering, intuition, or plain nonsense, but my money is on the big ISPs changing the rules about who gets their email delivered and who not.

Take this statement from AOL's Charles Stiles, as quoted by DM News from the Direct Marketing Association's E-mail Policy Summit:

"Opt-in means little to a consumer...at the end of the day even if they've opt-ed in they don't necessarily want your messaging"

And this one from Yahoo's Miles Libbey:

"Hopefully, legitimate mailers will sign up for feedback loops and try to understand when consumers do want your mail"

Then combine such sentiments with the possibility that your unsubscribe rates could affect your delivery fate at Windows Live Hotmail.

Reading between the lines, the suggestion is that those who guard your recipients' inboxes are expanding their definition of "permission."

In the future, it won't be just about whether or not someone gave you permission to send them your emails. Instead, it's about whether or not they continue to want you to send them emails.

Smart email marketers understand that permission is temporary. It lasts only as long as you continue to send timely, valuable, relevant emails to recipients. The best email marketing endeavors always respected that concept.

Until now, not respecting that concept merely depressed results (lower open rates, fewer clicks etc.) In the future, it may have a much greater impact if ISPs and webmail services somehow start to treat value and relevancy as a delivery criterion.

More on permission and deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, permission marketing

Given all the problems with getting emails to display properly, this case study on a successful campaign featuring videos in emails left me scratching my head with eyebrows a-furrowed.

If we can't get simple images to display reliably in emails, how on earth can we get videos to work?

It seems some vendors have the answer. A quick dig around Google brought up the following services. Perhaps they have the solution to your multimedia messaging needs?

PixelFish
AVI Mail
Vismail
Streamcity

More on multimedia email design | Tags: email marketing, multimedia emails, video in email

May 21, 2007

Here's a scenario to keep your eye on. Suppose you or your colleagues automatically forward incoming work emails to another email address. Maybe you or they prefer to use Gmail or another webmail service to read email. Or maybe it's just a temporary setup while you're on the road.

Now suppose spam comes to your work address. It gets forwarded automatically to a private webmail account. You see the spam there and report it as such.

Nothing strange going on so far. But wait. That spam came via your workplace's email system. So you just reported that system as a source of spam.

It seems some blacklists can't tell if that source was a real spammer-controlled email sender or just a forwarding service. So those innocent spam reports could put your outgoing email system on one or more of those blacklists.

Ridiculous scenario? Stanford University explains how they get on blacklists through exactly this problem.

Boston College has the same problem. And one web host sees "blacklisted for forwarding messages" as an argument against the use of blacklists.

Something to think about...

More on blacklists | Tags: email marketing, email blacklists, spam

Jeanne Jennings reaches the sixth and final part of her series on strategy today.

The bulk of this final article deals with the mechanics of creating a basic budget (assessing costs for putting together and sending out emails) and projecting the likely return on the cash so invested.

Compiling a detailed strategy is one of the more undervalued aspects of email marketing. Jeanne's six articles should prevent you making the same mistake.

More on strategy | Tags: email marketing, marketing budgets

One of my voluntary tasks is to document the growth of Google's webmail service (Gmail or Google Mail). The point is this: it's not enough to count up the number of gmail.com addresses in your list and then assume there aren't enough to worry about.

By worry, I mean check that your email gets delivered to Gmail addresses, and that it looks and works as intended when displayed by the Gmail interface.

Why is it not enough?

Because the Gmail email system lurks behind various other domain names, not just Gmail ones. So abcd.com addresses might be powered by Gmail. Not so long ago, for example, I wrote about how Gmail was the "hidden" email system behind many college email addresses.

Last week, Google announced the Partner Edition of Google Apps (the suite of products and services which includes Gmail and which is already used by over 100,000 organizations.)

According to Google, this Partner Edition lets "ISPs, portals, and other service providers offer their subscribers powerful Google applications...You can now offer your customers an entire suite of communication and collaboration services on your domain" (my emphasis.)

If the partner edition catches on, another great swathe of email addresses suddenly falls under the Gmail umbrella. So never mind how many gmail.com addresses sit in your database, be sure that you include Gmail in your design and delivery testing.

Because who knows how many of your subscribers use it.

More on Gmail | Tags: email marketing, google, gmail, google apps, email design

May 17, 2007

Jake Matthews of 10e20 has a nice review of the whys and hows of successful email marketing. It's a useful little checklist for those with more experience. And a competent starting point for those setting out on the email marketing adventure.

More email advertising basics | Tags: email marketing

When neanderthals first learnt to use sticks to beat each other over the heads with, they probably did so while arguing about whether short copy was better than long copy.

This brief from MarketingExperiments evaluates email landing pages, with the main focus a search for the best-performing sales copy length.

They cite particular case studies and, most interestingly, outline the various factors that determine which length is better. Because there is no one ideal copy length: it depends on what you're "selling", who's buying and why.

Excellent reading if you're wondering what approach to take in your own emails and web pages.

More on landing pages and copywriting | Tags: email marketing, copywriting, long versus short copy, landing pages

This is too cool for words. Kudos to Dylan at eROI. I always thought email marketing was more art than science.

They should sell this to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for a few hundred thousand dollars and use the proceeds to set up a spammer rehab center in Boca Raton.

Tags: spamtrap, eroi

Back in the late 90s I managed a group of email newsletters for a since defunct company. Here's what we did for deliverability...

Nothing.

We assumed if you sent an email to someone it actually reached them (oh, those days of innocence!) And here are the stats we looked at after each newsletter went out...

None.

Gosh, we were good at our jobs.

Times change and every email marketing software or service now offers users heaps of data to play with. Deliverability is a hot issue. And technical developments across the Internet continue to turn business models and lifestyles on their heads.

However...

Lest we get carried away with own self-satisfied importance and achievement, I find it useful to remind ourselves how much further there is yet to go before we reach any kind of technological perfection online.

So to Exhibit 1 for your amusement. Here are some of the keywords and phrases used to find Email Marketing Reports in the last month...

• Attila the hun


• Slap yourself


• How can you tell if a man is seeing another (my cynical answer: check to see if he has a pulse)


• Destruction of Pompeii


• I need to send some spam (ouch!)


• What if slaves had the internet


• Weakness English football team


• How does bigfoot get along with man


• Crusader crossbows


• Dog personalities versus cat personalities


• All about plumbing in ancient Rome

Search engine technology still has work to do.

And exhibit B...how email news alert services can still improve. Some selected headlines sent to me because they were (apparently) relevant to email marketing or related terms:

• New Pics From 'Alien Vs. Predator 2'


• Glad I wore slippers to the Manitoba Book Awards


• The World's First Steam Engine Railway Journey


• Camille Pissarro


• Furling Genoas


• Being Kimberly Tripp


• May 9th is the deadine for your wolf comments!!


• 9 lb 15 oz grandson born in San Francisco!!


• Indorphine Part Ways with Drummer


• Romance was in air for pandas


• Taxi refund rejected (wow, now that's news...)


• Israeli spends several hours with friendly Iranians


• Vacancies at Caribbean Maritime Institute


• Why have we appointed an Honorary Consul in Jerusalem and not Tel Aviv?

Message to all of us in the online world: Laurels are not for resting on.

Tags: email marketing, news alerts, search engines, internet history

May 16, 2007

MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) issued a set of sender best communication practices yesterday (press release | documents). In other words, how should you send and manage your outgoing emails so you're staying on the right side of the spam line and seeing more emails get through to the recipients?

This is important reading because MAAWG's membership represents all the elements in the email delivery chain. Email marketing services and software vendors sit next to ISPs and those selling anti-spam solutions. All are working together to combat messaging abuse. So there's no "them and us." Legitimate email marketers are seen as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

The 10-page document's official aim is to "enhance the transparency of legitimate messages and enable receiving operators to maximize their resources in the fight against messaging abuse." In it you'll find recommended practices on:

• Permission


• Unsubscribe mechanisms


• Authentication and sender records


• Content and coding


• List and bounce management


• Resolution of delivery problems

A lot of the technical details in the main document are translated for marketers in a separate executive summary. The latter also has a set of questions you can ask your email sending service to see if they're doing a good job or not.

Obviously this document is a great checklist for anyone sending out commercial email. My only criticism would be of the relatively brief treatment given to obtaining permission.

While other aspects of sending email are covered in quite some depth, permission and the sign-up process get (relatively) glib treatment. For example, it would have been nice to see guidelines on issues like pre-checked opt-in boxes. But perhaps that was beyond the scope of the document.

Regardless, if you do want to be part of the anti-spam solution and also help get your bulk emails delivered, print out the documents and put them to work.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, maawg, email deliverability, email sender best practices

May 15, 2007

All those different webmail services and email clients continue to throw a spanner of confusion in the email design works.

Here's a lovely example from the excellent MindComet blog. Emails from Xbox (owned by Microsoft) aren't designed for Outlook 2007 (owned by Microsoft).

Continuing the theme, Alex at eROI examines a newsletter that looks grim in Outlook 2007...and explains the HTML/CSS problems behind the glitches.

But it's not all bad news. MailChimp has a post on using background images in HTML emails where Outlook 2007 actually does relatively well.

There are a few useful hints in there on how to ensure you get the right background color appearing in your table cells.

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

MSN Canada took a look at email habits and came up with some intriguing little statlets. A few highlights...

Apparently, 78% of respondents prefer email to snail mail. Well, yes, no shock there.

32% sent or received a love letter online. (And you thought your deliverability issues were important! Is it unrequited love or did your affectionate missive simply land in the junk email folder?)

Just over 75% use their email account as a "virtual shoebox" for storing photos, documents, messages etc. And 58% regard the email account as a "personal information manager and organizer."

Those two stats are interesting, even discounting for survey spin and any potential bias. Why? Because it tells us that email is not going anywhere soon. Other forms of online communication will grow in importance, but folk are clearly too wired into email to relinquish it quickly.

Oh, and according to an article from the folks at the Rafsanjan Industrial Complex Cooperative, over 95% of local Iranians use Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail email services. Make of that what you will...

More email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, consumer email habits, email marketing statistics

May 14, 2007

Over at iMedia Connection, Simms Jenkins encourages email marketers to be proud and loud about their work, offering up evidence of email's success as a marketing vehicle. And pointing you to some excellent resources so you can do even better in future. (Disclaimer: you're reading one of them.)

If you need more hard evidence to wave in front of sceptical superiors, bank managers, ATMs, wives, husbands or others unwilling to loosen the purse strings for your email marketing efforts, then read Why do email marketing?

Tags: email marketing

Anybody looking to do email marketing needs a piece of software or a service to send out the emails, manage the address lists, provide reports on delivery rates etc. etc.

There are fundamentally two choices here.

1. Use an Email Service Provider. That's a third-party who send out the emails on your behalf. They provide the delivery infrastructure and management tools, which you access remotely via your web browser. They usually charge a fee per email sent, though are some are moving to flat-rate pricing.

2. Use a Software Vendor. You pay a one-time fee for a piece of email marketing software you can install locally to manage your email marketing.

I know the ESP model well, but am not familiar with software, so feel unable to offer people a fair assessment of how you might decide which is best for you.

So here's my challenge.

If you are an ESP or you sell email marketing software, would you be willing to present the case for your approach in a feature here at Email Marketing Reports? I'm looking for two to three representatives of each side to step up to the plate.

I'd just want you to lay out the arguments for your approach. And then address some of the criticisms that I might raise based on what the other side says?

Of course if you've used or worked with both software and an ESP, I'd love to hear from you, too.

If you're up for a quick chat or written deposition, please get in touch. Let's see if we can give people the chance to make an enlightened decision on what's best for their situation.

(If nobody steps forward, I will do the research myself anyway, but I'd prefer to have direct input from the frontline.)

Service listings | Tags: email marketing, esp, email list software

Is the dark side calling you? Are you tempted to record the email addresses entered into your forward-to-a-friend forms? So you can send those addresses marketing emails? Before you do, read what the folk at MailChimp have to say about this practice.

More on permission issues | Tags: email marketing, forward to a friend, permission marketing

The Email Insider Summit just finished over in Florida. Some of the brightest sparks in the industry were there to mull over the issues of the day. The audience are primarily big-time marketers from the top end of the corporate and business spectrum.

If that fits your job description, or you're just looking to see what the hot email marketing trends and topics are, then the following links and blog posts give us a glimpse of what was discussed:

OnlineMediaDaily reports on a general call for more relevance, measurement and internal coordination, with some good examples of how some companies are at least achieving the former.

The organizers had their own event blog going, with over a dozen posts reviewing particular presentations, repeating useful quotes, and similar.

Stephanie Miller wrote a lot of those event posts. And she also has another post at the Return Path site on giving existing subscribers more valuable and relevant emails using segmentation and clever tactics. This also helps prevent list churn and fatigue, two key issues for you if your list growth is slowing.

Justin Foster reviews the value of the event itself from an attendee's perspective (in case you're thinking of going next year.)

Chad White gives us some insightful quotes and notes covering deliverability, relevancy, segmentation, law, headers, welcome mails and more.

More links to come as I find them...

Tags: email marketing, email insider summit

May 11, 2007

If your campaign reports are the marketing equivalent of a Leonard Cohen song (depressing yet strangely addictive), then perhaps you could use some advice from this article.

Stefan Pollard discusses the email "Call to Action"...the text or image used to encourage people to take the action you want. How can you position and present this call to ensure the best response?

Stefan's tips cover wording, location, prominence, frequency and styling.

More on copywriting | Tags: email marketing, copywriting, call to action

Is it worth using one of the email certification services? In some cases, the answer is very clear.

The Red Cross, for example, are often featured in phishing emails. And they have transactional emails (tax receipts) that absolutely need to get through. So Goodmail certification makes sense for them, as explained in this case study.

They save on the customer service costs otherwise incurred when tax receipts go missing. And the certification icon gives donors reassurance that the email asking for help with the latest disaster relief effort is genuine and not some Chinese scam.

More case studies | Tags: email marketing, red cross, goodmail, email certification

May 10, 2007

...in a most delightful way. (You can't beat Mary Poppins.)

Anyway, back in 2001 I wrote a book on how to give your email newsletters impact and influence. (Read it for free here, it's still relevant.)

Chapter 5 was on Personality. I quote, "Personality builds on professionalism and value, and is the final (and perhaps most important) key to generating enthusiasm, influence and impact."

Most importantly, personality is where the little guys can compensate for the lack of access to the kind of resources and tools the top folk have.

Which doesn't mean that the big corporate email marketers haven't spotted the value of injecting a measured dose of personality into their missives. Chad White has an excellent overview of how some top retailers are doing it. Plus some of his own recommendations on how to do this yourself.

As Ms. Poppins said, "In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and - SNAP - the job's a game!"

More on publishing email newsletters | Tags: email marketing, email newsletters

The good folk at eMarketer dug out some recent surveys suggesting email is a hugely popular online marketing activity (it feels good to be part of the majority, no?)

The first survey they quote (of promotional marketers) puts email marketing and email newsletters as the online tactics used most often. But the number using SEO (13.7%) seems astonishingly low, so I'm wondering just who these promotional marketers are?

Elsewhere, the ever-insightful staff of agency eROI just released the results of a survey of marketer attitudes to designing, coding and testing emails.

Interesting to read what others think is most important (relevant content came out on top). And also interesting to see how many critical issues still don't get the respect they deserve.

For example, 32% of respondents did not describe "email is coded to work across email clients" as "very important". And, inevitably, over half send the same email to all their list with no segmentation (see this post if you do that, too).

There's also eyebrow-raising data on attitudinal and performance differences between marketers who handle everything in-house and those who use an external agency.

Interesting, interesting...

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

Browsing through Microsoft's Whitepaper on "Improving E-mail Deliverability into Windows Live Hotmail" (download here), I found the following innocent footnote:

"In the future Senders who realize an excessive number of unsubscribe requests may have their reputation impacted." (Page 6)

This refers to the Hotmail feature where if you meet certain criteria and your emails are set up appropriately, then recipients see a generic unsubscribe link they can use to leave your list.

This is welcomed by marketers, since it's better for people to use that unsubscribe link than report you as spam. The idea being that spam requests contribute to a bad sender reputation. So the less of those the better.

The footnote suggests however that Microsoft may at some point also monitor unsubscribe requests...and use that data in assigning you a sender reputation, too.

There are a lot of unknowns here. When is "in the future"? What counts as an "excessive" unsubscribe rate? And what exactly might be the impact on your reputation (if any)?

But one interpretation could certainly be that Microsoft might begin determining the value of your email (should we deliver it?)...by the value of your email (do recipients want to read it?).

In other words, deliverability would not just be about whether you obey all the formal and technical rules for getting your email delivered, but whether you also send relevant, valuable emails.

If that's the case, it would be another nail in the coffin of lazy email marketing. A lot of feathers would get ruffled, but smart marketers would benefit.

Anybody heard more about this line of thinking? Or anyone from Hotmail / MS care to comment on the likelihood of such an approach?

More on Hotmail | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, windows live hotmail

May 09, 2007

Transactional email is the new killer app. Well, it seems a no brainer to append appropriate marketing messages and promotions to your order confirmations and similar. But what are the prerequisites for making that work?

Turns out it's not a simple case of changing an email template. Dave Lewis outlines the important factors you need to consider and account for when integrating transactional and marketing emails.

More on transactional emails | Tags: email marketing, transactional emails

We are suckers for new jargon aren't we? MarketingSherpa has a bits and bobs article on how various retailers and publishers are using email to solicit User Generated Content from readers. Or using User Generated Content to fill their emails.

Here it's important not to forget that this isn't just about YouTube, Flickr and other media darlings. Think small, too. Customer questions, reader feedback, reader reviews, customer interviews etc. are all examples of "old-fashioned user generated content" that provide the backbone of many an email newsletter.

More on tactics and newsletter content | Tags: email marketing, email 2.0, Web 2.0, user generated content, ugc

Analysts, experts and others often moan that many marketers still follow the blast approach to email marketing: send the same email to everyone.

The alternative is to get into targeting and segmentation. Where you send different emails to different parts of your list. You segment your list (pick out parts of that list that share some common characteristic) and then target them with a specific email.

So an email promoting a new book by Dan Brown goes to those people on your list who bought a previous book by the same author. Or who bought a book in the same genre.

Sending different messages to different parts of your address list implies you're sending messages that are more appropriate for the recipients. More relevant. And that means more revenue and less complaints.

The "less complaints" part is important. If you sent your Dan Brown promotion to everyone on your list, you might get a few extra sales from people who hadn't bought his books before.

But...

You will also be sending an irrelevant promotion to lots of people. Those who only read romances. Or fantasy. You just made them less likely to open and act on your next email. Maybe you caused some to leave your list. And others to report you as spam. Not a risk worth taking.

All well and good. So why do people still blast? Not (just) because they aren't aware of the dangers or of the benefits of better targeting.

Perhaps it's because a lot of talk about targeting and segmentation uses words like "database marketing science" and "dynamic content".

One might get the impression that segmentation and targeting is just for those with degrees in computer science or a big fat wad of cash to throw at database vendors. I've seen the faces and the questions at workshops: "Ugewh! Sounds great but we don't have the skills or resources to do that kind of thing."

Well yes you do folks. Because any kind of targeting is an improvement, however simple that targeting might be. And even basic email marketing services or software that a one-person business could afford give you the tools to do it.

You can start small. No need to get into 1-to-1 personalized dynamic custom-built on-the-fly stuff immediately, if you're not up to it.

Here are two simple examples requiring no prior customer information or clever tools other than those your basic software or service gives you:

1. Recent subscribers / existing subscribers

People who just signed up with you recently interacted with your business. They're a little bit more expectant and engaged that your average subscriber. So cement their interest with a nice welcome message and perhaps one or more of your "best" emails. Then switch them over to your normal emails. That's targeting.

2. Active / non-active subscribers

The reports you get from any self-respecting email marketing software, system or service always let you look at which email addresses opened your email and/or clicked on a link in one.

Who has never clicked on a link or opened an email? Rekindle their interest with a special offer just for inactive subscribers. That's targeting. (If they remain inactive, kick them off the list.)

Start there, and then climb up the targeting spectrum as your skills and resources allow...you'll find relevant articles in the targeting and segmentation article listings.

Tags: email marketing, targeting, segmentation, database marketing

May 08, 2007

In April we had a new version of Thunderbird, yesterday saw the official launch of Windows Live Hotmail, and two more changes are in the offing.

The first is a successor to Outlook Express and Windows Mail on Vista. Called "Windows Live Mail beta", it has the potential to reach a lot of consumer PCs, especially if included in the automatic operating system updates Microsoft pushes out to people.

All the Microsoft / MSN / Windows / Outlook / Hotmail names can get confusing. Fortunately we have the good folk at Campaign Monitor to bring a pool of light into the jargon darkness. Their blog post has more details and an analysis of how the new software affects email design.

Elsewhere, Comcast (home to millions of highspeed Internet users) announced plans to offer their customers an integrated messaging center which has email, instant messaging, voicemail and address management in one.

The "SmartZone communications center" uses Bizanga and Cloudmark tools to protect inboxes from spam.

More on webmail and email | Tags: email marketing, hotmail, windows live hotmail, windows live mail, outlook express, comcast

May 07, 2007

Those following Jeanne Jennings' detailed series of articles on email marketing strategy can now read Part 5. The latest topics covered are your email template and quantitative goals.

And if you enjoy reading the thoughts and advice of some of the top agencies and services involved in email marketing, then keep an eye on a new blog launched by the Email Experience Council.

Some well-known names among the bloggers there, so "The voice of email" looks set to be a strong addition to the growing email marketing blog roster (about 60 of them lurk in my RSS reader.)

More on strategy and blogs | Tags: email marketing, marketing blogs, email marketing strategy

For those new to the topic area, Gail Goodman's latest article introduces you to the concept of email marketing as direct marketing, meaning you want someone to actively respond to your email. Which in turn means you need to offer them something.

Gail runs over the kind of things that might count as an offer. Note, though, that not all email marketing is about getting immediate and active responses to your emails.

A lot of email newsletters are there to keep the reader happy and engaged with the content of the newsletter. So engaged that the next time they do want to buy the kind of product or service you offer, it's you they think of first. See Understanding the difference between promotions and newsletters.

See more email advertising basics | Tags: email marketing, direct marketing

The Greek fellow who claimed that everything is "in flux" knew his email marketing. But change doesn't mean unpredictability, and David Baker offers us his vision of the email marketing future.

Always good to be aware of what might be around the corner. For most people, the playing field that is the Internet gets steeper and steeper each passing day. I reckon email marketing might split out into tiers (if it hasn't already)...

The top tier are those with the resources and wherewithal to invest strongly in their email marketing efforts. All the fancy software, tactics and certification programs. High input, high output, modern, and intensive. This is the kind of email marketing that nearly everyone will write about.

But most businesses will be in tiers 2, 3 and 4.

Tier 2 are those who master the basics. Keep a tight ship, respect permission, think through their efforts, but don't have the time, skill and/or resources to do too much of the fancy stuff. They'll be fine.

Tier 3 are the small newsletters where the publisher has a very strong bond with the readership. They'll always do well because email is communication. And the power of personality, content, value and relationships will compensate for a lack of technical skills and/or cash.

Tier 4 (the biggest) is everyone else, stumbling along as best they can. Their results will get progressively worse. The challenge for the industry is to move as many people as possible into tiers 1, 2 and 3.

But then what do I know?

More on strategy | Tags: email marketing

How can we be so lax when it comes to email marketing? Take this survey by Internet Retailer, which questioned various retailers on their email practices and results.

One conclusion that pops out is that people aren't exploiting the full potential of their email lists and yet email marketing still seems to do well for them. This is part of what Loren McDonald talked about so eloquently last week.

Some random stats from the survey:

18% didn't know their open rate
Over 20% didn't know what clickthrough rates they get
About 40% get delivery rates below 80%
About 22% reveal open rates of less than 10%

Doing email marketing and not knowing your open rate is like driving a car blindfold.

Is it a time thing? Do people just not have the time or capacity to spend a few minutes researching the topic before starting their email campaigns? Are vendors failing to educate their clients? Are media sites failing to educate their readers? Am I?

It just seems such a missed opportunity.

More statistics | Tags: email marketing, email marketing statistics, email marketing metrics

May 04, 2007

Did the ball cross the line in the 1966 World Cup final? Intelligent design or evolution? Is light a wave or a particle? Ah...the world is full of questions we seem unable to answer once and for all.

Step forward the email format debate. Should you send text-only emails? Should you send HTML emails? Should you send both? Should you let people choose? Can a brand afford not to use HTML?

Justin Premick has a nice, simple, balanced overview of the issue in his latest blog post.

More on email formats | Tags: email marketing, html email, text email, newsletter format

...that's the message from Loren McDonald at iMedia Connection. His article mirrors the thesis he laid down a few days ago, where he suggests there's a silly imbalance between the value of email marketing and the resources allocated to it.

This time around he presents a five-point action plan your business ought to take to correct that imbalance, give email the love and attention it deserves, and make it work even better for you.

More on email and the organisation | Tags: email marketing, email marketing strategy

Another wonderful analysis and redesign of an email newsletter from the email clinic run by Mark Wyner on the Campaign Monitor blog.

Then if you have time and staying power, work your way through this collection of email evaluations which looks at the effectiveness of various approaches to email copywriting. A bit hard going in places, but plenty of thought fodder in there.

More on design and copywriting | Tags: email marketing, email design, email copywriting

Just a quick thought for the day. One common practice is to put a permission reminder at the top of your marketing emails. "You are receiving this email because you signed up for it at the blah.com website."

There are many who say that's a way to establish trust and recognition. I can see arguments before and against it, but that's not my point.

Question: how many times do you need to put that message in front of people?

Would it not make sense to show that permission reminder initially and then quietly remove it once someone has opened your emails X times? It takes up vital space in preview panes etc, yet the proposed benefits are surely only relevant when mailing new subscribers, not established readers?

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Check the extensive comments for much new insight on this topic.

More on permission | Tags: email marketing, permission reminders