No man is an iland

June 29, 2007

This week has already shown me assumptions about what works in email marketing don't always hold true.

Just as I was coming to grips with the whole button / text link dilemma, up popped this brief article from EmailCenter UK to further shake my self-belief.

It gives some test results showing open rates increase when a personal name is used in the "from" field (rather than the company name.)

Ah, you say, that's because the recognition factor is at work. But wait...

The open rate lift also occurred when a random personal name was used. If the decision to open is about recognizing the sender, then you would not expect an unknown name to lift opens compared to a recognizable brand name.

The article has no details on test methodology, but still...intriguing...

More on copywriting | Tags: from header, open rates

Here's a screenshot of a message from last night:



Let's ignore those mysterious question marks for the moment. What about that noreply@ return address? What message does that send people?

From the recipient perspective it says, you know, we have no interest in your opinion. We don't want to hear from you. Perish the thought that your opinions and needs might impose on our busy day. Go away. Do not contact us. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Ugh - customers!

Message received.

Related links:
The do-not-reply line

June 28, 2007

If you sell online and have an email list, try this new MarketingSherpa case study for size.

Retailer Karmaloop let customers segment themselves by self-selecting email content preferences. Then they added in a few behavioral triggers (abandoned shopping carts etc.).

Then they imposed an overall frequency cap to avoid potential email overload through the multiple-segment problem.

Then they defined what to send non-responders.

Then they let the system work out what to send each subscriber.

The results are very cool. Sherpa has the details.

Of course, the most impressive thing about it is that their teenage customers use email. I thought teenagers were supposed to be surgically attached to instant messaging, MySpace and cell phones only.

More case studies | Tags: email marketing case studies, segmentation, trigger emails, behavioral targeting

Refreshing article by Nick Usborne here. He picks out three favorite commercial emails and discusses what makes them work so well.

If you want a break from design nitty gritty, image blocking issues, targeting concerns and similar, then kick off your shoes and digest Nick's appraisals.

He focuses on what email, fundamentally, is all about: communication.

How do these three businesses use email to make a connection with the reader and get their core message across?

Here it's not about an immediate sale, or a download, or even a click. But a connection. Which is much more valuable in the long run.

Nice.

More case studies | Tags: email marketing case studies, email copywriting, relationship marketing

Tip 1: I'm grateful to reader Cathy Conk for her comment on my recent post on mobile email displays.

She has a neat tip on how an invisible pixel image and "alt" tag helps your HTML email make a better impact when read on a Blackberry.

Tip 2: In this post, Stefanie Miller reveals that personalization tactics boosted responses to emails to customers, but hurt responses to emails sent to prospects.

The implication is that intimacy only works when someone is familiar with you. Otherwise it can be a turn off (like in the real world.)

So here's an idea. When people give you their first name at sign-up, don't use it immediately unless you know they are a regular customer or visitor to your website.

Use a generic opening salutation in your initial emails to non-regulars or unknowns. Then switch over to using their first name in your salutation once they've "opened" at least 2 or 3 messages.

Anyone ever tested something like that?

More tips on design or tactics | Tags: email marketing tips, email personalization

Following yesterday's post about the relative pulling power of image and text links, here's another article addressing that topic.

Chad White reveals more evidence that a button can out-perform a text link when it comes to the main call-to-action.

To some extent this goes against the traditional presumption that links should not be images because of the detrimental effect image blocking has. Which is yet another justification for always testing our assumptions.

My suspicion is that the response lift through a button, rather than text, link depends on how you implement it.

Who wants to recommend the best way to code button links so that:

1. They make an attractive call to action
2. They work in as many email display environments as possible
3. They still work when images are disabled

Or is it just a question of using button and text links together?

Anyone?

UPDATE: Readers have added some good comments to the post.

More on design | Tags: email marketing, call to action, email design, image blocking

June 27, 2007

A press release from Ipsos Reid on Canadians' attitudes and habits with regard to spam and legitimate email reached me today (via Kelly).

Their survey suggests -- like many before -- that people are still happy to sign up for email, despite the ongoing spam deluge.

What caught my eye more was this though...

"Four-in-five Canadian internet users who have registered at a website to receive e-mail have also deregistered"

Reasons given are...

"a loss of interest (43%); the inability to deal with e-mail volume or no time to read the emails (25%); and, too much junk mail or irrelevant information (22%)"

All of these reasons stem from the same basic problem: poor content value.

The trouble with email relationships is that you need to keep working at them. You have to keep the subscriber engaged over the long-term if you want to do anything more than grab a quick sale.

How do you do that?

Well, there's this approach. But for those with less reading time, here are two new articles that have some ideas.

Mark Edwards has a few newsletter strategies and ideas that can help ensure relevancy and longevity.

And Karen Gedney reminds us of just why newsletters are a good thing, especially for businesses selling products or services with a long sales cycle. And she has several ideas on the kind of content that keeps reader interest high.

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

(And if you appreciate my sense of humor, otherwise...move on quickly.)

How about this for a car bumper sticker..."I brake for Windows Live Hotmail"

I admit maybe only a very few people will get that one. Sorry.

Two fascinating case studies crossed my inbox today. The first is from MarketingSherpa, describing how changing a text link into an image link (a button) in an email newsletter boosted clickthroughs by 190%.

Wait a second, though. The lesson here is that relatively minor tweaks to your design and wording can have enormous effects on your results.

But before we all rush out and turn our text links into buttons, look at the before and after screenshots (at the end of the article) and then consider these questions...

1. How much of the improvement stems from the text to image change? And how much to simultaneous changes in the wording of the call to action?
2. Could equal improvements have been possible by modifying the format of the original text link, which was a small gray font beforehand?

The answers would be interesting.

Meanwhile, Andrew Seel does another wonderful newsletter makeover, this time evaluating and changing the copy approach of a B2B newsletter seeking to build a company's brand awareness and position.

He explains the shortcomings of the original and the thoughts and principles guiding the new and improved version. I love Andrew's stuff.

More case studies | Tags: email marketing, email copywriting, calls to action

And when I say jail, I mean literally and figuratively.

For the former, Ken Magill highlights the legal risks involved with having your unsubscribe links as pretty images, rather than simple text.

Given the prevalence of image blocking, it makes sense to include text-based links in your emails as well. So when your enormous "Buy Now!" button turns into a blank square and security warning, readers have something visible to click on and spend their money.

You can also build a prison of your own making if you don't include height and width attributes in your image code (been there, got the t-shirt). The good folk at Campaign Monitor explain how a little forgetfulness can kill your design, and have some mugshots to prove the point. (Check the comments there though for an alternative solution.)

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

June 26, 2007

I read this post from eROI, which included a video demonstrating that the text versions of emails are not automatically displayed on your wireless email device.

A picture (a moving one) really is worth a thousand words, showing just how much messy code the recipient needs to scroll past to get to the actual email content.

I wondered if anyone else had thought to video the mobile email experience. So the rest of us can understand how inboxes, previews and emails look on these things.

An hour or two on YouTube later...voila:

Nokia 770
Another Nokia 770
Mobile Gmail on a cell phone
More mobile Gmail
iPhone (at Apple)
Samsung D600E
Motorola Q
LG enV
Misc cell phone
Blackberry Pearl
Blackberry 8700g

In fact, search for a device name plus review or demo and you'll find dozens more!

More on rendering issues | Tags: mobile email, wireless email, email design

This week is frequency week in the email marketing world. After posts yesterday on caps and chains, other bloggers chime in with valuable insights.

Tom O'Leary, for example, highlights a website that sends several emails a day to subscribers, and the latter seem to like it. He wonders if email can work as a "continuous conversation platform."

And over at Return Path, Margaret Farmakis cautions against trying to match the emailing frequency of your peers, as reported in benchmarking studies.

Instead, she recommends developing your own frequency strategy, based on an understanding of what consumers want, their purchase and browsing behaviors, and what you can deliver in terms of compelling content.

More on frequency | Tags: email marketing, email frequency

June 25, 2007

The frequency of your emails is not just about how many you send out, but at what intervals.

To some extent we're still struggling to throw off the chains imposed by growing up with print media models. Daily newspapers, weeklies, monthly magazines.

The "regular publication" works well for those thoughtful, content-rich email newsletters seeking to build long-term relationships. But as email marketing evolves, there is a growing realization that frequency needs to be flexible.

We see it at a banal level when we increase promotional messages before and during holiday shopping periods.

That intrinsic recognition that the timing of a series of emails needs to match the habits of the recipient could bring more benefits if applied more widely.

That's the message I'm getting from Jeanniey Mullen's new article at ClickZ. She has a range of thoughts on integrating email with the product marketing lifecycle.

I don't pretend to understand all of the more sophisticated approaches to email marketing. (Not sure if one is supposed to make such an admission.) But it's exciting to see that even as many still struggle with the basics, the cutting edge continues to move forward.

More on frequency | Tags: email marketing, email frequency, product marketing lifecycle

Douglas Karr has a nice overview of the indicators you need to follow to gauge the success of your email marketing efforts (and how you might calculate them.)

Douglas's post is complemented by an article by Spencer Kollas in today's iMedia Connection. Spencer tackles similar issues, and also explains how you might use the information you get from your email marketing reports.

Use their suggestions as a starting point for getting to grips with the numbers side of your work. But don't forget the context in which all these numbers operate.

For example, "deliverability" is calculated as the percentage of emails that were sent out that did not bounce. That doesn't mean that all the emails that don't bounce get delivered to the recipient unharmed, though.

Some get blocked or filtered out en route. And even those that get delivered to the end user might end up in their spam/junk folder, rather than the main inbox.

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

When different parts of the business are sending out email, there's a danger that a customer can get driven to email fatigue by repeated communications from your company.

So your carefully planned schedule of marketing emails is thrown out of kilter by the zealous sales rep or the exuberant order fulfillment folk.

That's why centralization is a hot topic.

A recent Email Marketing Voodoo post reminds us that the same problem can arise if you split your list into lots of segments. If someone falls into too many of those segments, they end up getting too much email from you.

The Voodoo solution is to prioritize and rotate your emails on a regular basis.

Other alternative solutions I've seen are:

1. Space out emails so that three weekly emails each arrive two days apart rather than all on the same day.

The problem there is that there may be times of the week that really rock in terms of response, and you don't want to miss the window of opportunity just to space out your emails. Plus it's still a pretty intensive emailing regime for the recipient.

2.Amalgamate emails into one, with the priority segment as the main message and the other segments as cross-selling messages.

So if someone signs up for deals on garden tools, kitchenware and toys, they get a garden tools email with promotions for kitchenware and toys in a sidebar.

More on targeting and frequency | Tags: email marketing, segmentation, email frequency

You may have heard about Vonage's email marketing misjudgments. It seems they broke a few unspoken rules about how to treat addresses submitted through "refer-a-friend" programs.

Both CNet and Andy Sernovitz broke original stories on the subject. And various bloggers have picked up the "Vonage" thread.

There are two lessons here.

The first is a permission one. If I give you my friend's email address, the tacit assumption is that it's used once. You don't have permission from the address owner to add their address to any lists. Nor from the address submitter to use their name again much later.

But the intricacies of refer-a-friend aside, perhaps a more salient lesson is this...

Previously, errors of marketing judgment were punished by poor results for that particular marketing effort. But that was all.

Today, such errors can see your whole brand punished. The Internet gave "victims" a voice. And influence. The price for failure is much higher. The margin for error much tighter.

No more so than in the world of email marketing, where there's a fine line between legitimate email and spam. And a big image problem for those who find themselves accused of standing on the wrong side of it.

Better to learn that lesson through the experience of others, rather than your own.

More on permission | Tags: email marketing, tell-a-friend, spam

June 22, 2007

Earlier this week, we had a trio of excellent blog posts from Return Path on permission. These became a quartet, thanks to a nice summary of the different types of permission from Matt Blumberg.

Matt and Return Path's message gets to the core of what "opt-in" is all about. It's an initial agreement to receive specific material from you in the short term. To keep that agreement and interest, you need to renew this permission.

You do this by respecting the terms of the initial agreement. You send what they wanted and you send regular high-value emails worth reading and/or responding too.

By coincidence, that's the theme behind a new article from Lena Waters in today's iMedia Connection.

She reviews this understanding of permission-based email marketing, and then shows you ways you can market more to your existing subscribers, but without breaking that permission agreement.

More on permission | Tags: email marketing, permission marketing

Karen J. Bannan gets a couple of experts to suggest two more ways to ensure you avoid any nasty blacklists.

The first concerns limiting your delivery speed (emails per unit time) to a level that respects the limits defined by ISPs and specific corporate address domains.

She outlines what some of those limits are and how you might manage your list delivery appropriately.

The second concerns monitoring that delivery process so you can jump in and correct things if there are too many bad addresses at any particular ISP/domain.

The latter advice seems fine as a cure for a symptom, but a cure for the underlying cause would seem better in the long-run: which means keeping your list free of bad addresses.

More on blacklists | Tags: email deliverability, blacklists

If you've enjoyed Chad White's recent article (here) on subject lines, you might want to take a look at the corresponding 10-page reportlet on the topic.

According to Chad, the new report includes a detailed ranking of over 90 major retailers in terms of how often they use different subject line language and approaches, specifically:

• promotionality
• combination of promotional and non-promotional language
• use of "free shipping"
• communication of urgency

More on subject lines | Tags: email subject lines, retail marketing, email marketing

June 21, 2007

Dear asdf,

You might be a little surprised to hear from us after so many months. That's because we just installed a new email database system that lets us send automatic emails based on your past purchase behavior. It's pretty cool.

We decided to let it go to work without worrying too much about contact strategies and the like. Let's just pretend that the 15-month communication gap never happened. Hopefully you haven't forgotten about us and reported this email as spam.

Anyway, the system noticed you bought a new lawn mower from our store last month. So we thought we'd send you the best deals from the "Home and Garden" section of our website. Good idea, huh?

For example, if you order a new lawn mower by the end of the month, we'll give you 20% off. A whole 20%!

What's that?

Yes, we know you just bought one. Like we said, that's why we're sending you the "Home and Garden" offers...including the great deal on new lawn...oh...um, I see the problem.

Mind you, grass cutting technology ages pretty fast you know. Perhaps a second mower for your spouse?

No?

Not interested?

OK. Well, thanks for your time anyway.


------------------------------------

Dear asdf,

Yes, we know, 15 months with no emails, then two within 10 minutes. Look, that's how the system works. Don't blame us.

So, three years ago you bought this book about teaching your kid the alphabet. Well, here's some good news for you. There's a similar book out this very week! And you can get it with free shipping! How can you say no to that?

Oh.

No, we're not saying your kid is stupid.

Yes, I suppose three years is long enough to learn 26 letters.

Maybe there's another kid on the way? (Note to self: add pregnancy question to registration form.)

Well, never mind.


------------------------------------

Dear asdf,

It's your lucky day! Three emails within 20 minutes! Aren't you glad you shopped with us and forgot to uncheck that little box we placed down near the bottom of the order page so you wouldn't see it.

I know we sort of messed up with the last two emails, but you're going to love this one. You bought "Living with elderly parents" last year. Tomorrow, the follow-up comes out. Ta-da! Home run!

Oh.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Our condolences.

Um, would you mind forwarding this to a friend?

More humor | Tags: email humor, internet humor, personalization

Previously, it was all about choosing between promotional emails and newsletters. Now we understand that various types of email contribute to long-term brand and sales success.

Recent weeks, for example, have seen transactional email become the next big thing. And two articles take this theme further.

First off is Simms Jenkins in iMedia Connection. He lists ten kinds of automated email you might have ignored up to now. Then he outlines 16 actions you can take to make such automated emails work harder for your business success.

As Simms says, "Though system-generated emails often fall to the bottom of a marketer's to-do list, they can have an enormous impact on both response rates and user loyalty."

Over at DM News, John Rizzi makes a plea for "goodwill messages." He suggests a few simple non-promotional emails might not generate an instant sale, but will encourage the kind of loyalty and relationship that means more sales down the road.

Tags: email marketing, transactional emails, relationship marketing

June 20, 2007

Loren McDonald highlights a problem in many large businesses: everybody and his dog is sending out marketing email. Meaning mixed up brand messages, email overkill and other delights.

He explains why you need a centralized email marketing unit, outlines the tasks of this unit, provides successful examples, and then defines steps you can take to set one up.

A while back I wrote a case study of an organization who went through this process very successfully. It's behind a payment barrier now, but you can find it here on the MarketingSherpa site.

More on email and the organization | Tags: email marketing strategy

I saw an ad for the Volkswagon Golf the other day. It went along the lines of "the car that outlived them all."

So it is with the humble email newsletter. Not as cool as podcasts, not as hot as RSS feeds. But reliable as a Golf when it comes to building loyalty, awareness and relationships.

But only good newsletters do the job. And the latest resource on how to make your e-newsletter one of the good ones comes from Nick Usborne in the form of his 17-page "The 6 Elements of a content-rich, money-making e-newsletter" report ($8.95 download fee).

Nick's report describes how building expectations, consistently meeting expectations and engaging readers is the key to long-term success. And the first five of his six elements cover crucial parts of that process.

The sixth element then addresses monetisation, which talks more about key approaches than specific ideas.

In the mad rush to generate sales, the basic principles underpinning a winning newsletter tend to get forgotten, even by those of us with wide experience of newsletter publishing.

So Nick's report is a useful reminder and checklist for building the context and framework in which day-to-day newsletter production needs to operate if it's going to work for both you and your subscribers.

It helps us get away from obsessing with granular design elements and deliverability issues to understand how we build a newsletter that people actually want to receive.

Worth reading in combination with the Keeping the Key report, which is a longer, but less easy read.

More on newsletters | Tags: email newsletters, nick usborne, email marketing

To the newcomer, segmentation sounds like something to do with earthworms. But the ability to split your list up into smaller sublists sharing some common characteristic(s) does wonders for your results.

For those wondering how to do this, Denise Cox has an article with some ideas and examples of how to segment your list. And how to glean and use information on your subscribers.

There's plenty of evidence out there that segmentation works.

Most recently, cardcommunications released their Q1 2007 email trends report based on Canadian email marketing efforts. And -- like all such reports -- found that the smaller the list, the better the success metrics...

Small is beautiful...is the new big.

More on targeting and statistics | Tags: email marketing, segmentation, targeting, email marketing statistics

DMNews reports on comments from Matt Blumberg on how to gain and maintain a good sender reputation. His point is that reputation is the key to deliverability, so -- inevitably -- focus your deliverability efforts on all the elements that contribute to that reputation.

Keeping a "clean" list is a priority in this context. For those new to the idea of list maintenance and hygiene, you can listen to a simple introduction from Bill Sweetman in his latest Marketing Martini Podcast.

Bill looks at what you need to do with your addresses before and after sending out an email.

One interesting point he makes is to filter any name fields against a list of inappropriate words. Some people (or their enemies) will submit an email address and enter an offensive first name just to be facetious (or malicious).

You don't want your carefully crafted email to start off "Dear Buttwipe!"

More on reputation and hygiene | Tags: email marketing, sender reputation, email deliverability, list hygiene

June 19, 2007

2007 and we're still debating the importance of permission to email marketing.

Anyway, the topic has created much buzz in the hallowed halls of Return Path, with three consecutive blog posts on the topic.

First Stefanie Miller made some critical points about the temporary nature of permission. Getting people to agree to get your emails is one thing. Keeping them happy is another. She outlines the dangers of forgetting that this permission needs to be nurtured, respected and renewed by sticking to promises and staying relevant.

This prompted Matt Blumberg to ask whether permission is still as relevant as it used to be. Or whether it's actually relevancy that matters. He points out that sender reputation and relevancy are assuming more importance in terms of identifying spam than a formal hard-to-define/measure idea of permission.

A fair point, but I'd argue that both relevancy and reputation ultimately start with permission. The best way to ensure you send people relevant material is to let them self-select by proactively opting in to your emails. Otherwise it's a guessing game. This in turn leads to few spam complaints, itself a major determinant of your sender reputation.

Then today Neil Schwartzman jumped into the conversation to mention how your sign-up practices (permission practices) do have a real impact on your ability to do email business, by providing evidence you can use to clear your names with those controlling the flow of email around the Internet.

And since we're on the topic, MailChimp has some sound practical suggestions on how to clean up the list of email addresses you're intending to mail to for the first time. So you don't end up spamming.

More on permission | Tags: permission email, opt-in email marketing, double opt-in, confirmed opt-in

Silverpop studied the landing pages for email campaigns from 150 companies to draw out weaknesses and best practices. The result is a free 16-page report (you need to register to get it.)

According to the report, the main problem with existing landing pages is a disconnect between the design and promise of the email and what you get when you follow the click.

In other words, the path from the email to the landing page and desired action (sale, download etc.) should be a smooth and continuous one. Instead, existing landing pages spring too many surprises, contain too many diversions and erect too many barriers to further progress down the conversion path.

The report covers fourteen separate elements that go into a successful email/landing page combination, and discusses how each can be optimized and how existing companies perform on each one.

So you'll find notes on URL design, page goals, landing page location, messaging and branding consistency, design elements, calls to action, navigational aids, forms, copy length and more...with screenshots. Good stuff. Well worth reading.

More on landing pages | Tags: landing pages, email campaigns, email marketing

David Baker is a thoughtful fellow and always a provoking read. In this new article, he invites us to step back a little and review our email efforts in the context of the consumer email experience.

Do you understand the chaotic, attention-poor, spam-ridden inbox, and are you managing your emails to ensure they do the right job for your brand and business objectives?

David has five specific points he'd like you to go away and think about.

One of these is the idea of managing the first impression. A concept explored in more depth by Anna Billstrom in this blog post.

She describes an initial email communication package that should "...educate and engender loyalty in the early interactions that the customer has with your site." She goes into some detail, describing each individual email in terms of content, timing, segmentation and required data.

All of which may become redundant if Anne Holland's stepson is to be believed. His online behavior suggests the younger folk are email agnostics and email's popularity may shrink as the growth of alternative online modes of communication grow.

Fortunately for email marketers, an aversion to emails tends to disappear as soon as people get a job ;-) And if one report is to be believed, 50% of 25- to 34-year-olds in Britain feel "they could not carry on" without email.

Though I can't see hordes of despairing youngsters heading for the cliffs of Dover because Gmail is down, it seems email is (so far) (still) pretty indispensable.

More on strategy | Tags: email marketing, email trends

Halfway through the year and maybe you're thinking about tweaking and twiddling your email design or newsletter content. If so, then these two articles might help the process along:

Blue Sky Factory has an extensive checklist of design guidelines to follow, with 31 bullet points covering the overall design, use of HTML, images, text content, best practices, and testing.

Melinda Krueger has some design advice, too, but precedes it with a few excellent suggestions on what to do and who to speak to when evaluating how you might adjust your content approach.

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

A lot of folk recycle content produced for other media in their email newsletter. I do it (these blog posts get wrapped up together in a biweekly mailout).

But take care. Any content that references a time or date might be out of place by the time the newsletter comes out.

Here's a good example:



A US Open preview mailed out the day after the US Open ended. This problem is particularly acute when turning blog posts into a newsletter. Especially if that conversion takes place using an automated tool.

You need to go through the content and check it's all still relevant. Not just the time references, but other things, too. Blog posts republished a week or two later in a newsletter might, for example:

• Invite people to an event that's already happened
• Mention today, tomorrow, yesterday. Which is now last week, last week and last week from the newsletter reader's perspective.
• Contain errors that were corrected in a later post
• Report an offer which has now expired
• Contain a link which has died
• Urge immediate action which is now too late

You get my point...

The monotony of cut and paste, cut and paste can lead us to skip the all important proofreading stage. I know from bitter first-hand experience.

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

With people mentally attuned to deleting spam from their inbox, it's important to ensure that any personal emails don't look like spam.

This can be hard to do when writing to someone for the first time, since recognition is your biggest ally in keeping people away from the delete button.

The task is made more complex by the fact that each recipient has their own definition of what counts as unsolicited and unwanted spam. Technically, spam is unsolicited email sent in bulk. But recipients don't think like that. Spam is what they call unwanted email.

All of which leads to much wringing of hands when preparing to cold call someone via email. So I thought I'd use a particularly crass example to point out how not to do it. I give you...the link exchange request that failed...

Here are the cropped screenshots of the email's beginning and end (the rest was equally inappropriate):





Here are the numbered comments:

1. I've never heard of the address listed. It would have been better to make a clear reference to my site in the subject line, so I'd consider it relevant and personal to me.

2. The email address and the site mentioned in the subject line do not match. On top of that, the email address is impersonal. I rarely get one-to-one email from people who call themselves "webhosting."

3. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. A personal email requires no such disclaimer. It merely suggests I'm not the first to get this email, and people think it's spam.

4. Typos and bad English everywhere. Since I have no idea who sent the email, I can't make allowances for those without English as their first language. It just reads badly.

5. This "webmaster" chap. Who is he? If the sender had actually looked at my site, they'd know my name and use it.

6. I have no single "active links page" suggesting, again, nobody actually paid any attention to me or my site.

7. A lovingly impersonal signature.

(Note also that in several countries, this email would be illegal under media/anti-spam/data laws.)

All in all, we have an entirely impersonal email, written badly using a form letter and layout (suggesting a bulk mailout using mailmerge), with irrelevant content and no suggestion that the sender had taken a proper look at the website they want to do business with.

Recipient's conclusion: spam. Net effect of cold call attempt: rejected email, possible spam report potentially followed by blacklisting, bad image for the company concerned.

More on permission | Tags: uce, spam, email solicitiations, bad email

June 18, 2007

Since it's the start of another week in email land, perhaps you can find a few minutes to sit back before the rush and ask yourself some questions about your email marketing.

Josh Nason, for example, has a challenging blog post suggesting you take a reflective look at your message, your list, your design and your delivery method.

And over at ClickZ, Jeanne Jennings addresses three questions beginners might ask. She explains the ins and outs of absolute open rates, whether it's worth collecting addresses offline, and the merits (or otherwise) of building a list using the opt-out principle.

More on basics | Tags: email marketing

June 15, 2007

Clint Smith has some suggestions on how you might account for handhelds and mobile devices when putting together your emails.

One idea is to actually get hold of such a device and look at your emails on it. A fine principle. But I seem to remember reading that there are almost as many different display protocols as there are mobile devices and wireless email services.

Not sure if relying on one device/service combination is enough if you have a big mobile readership?

Have to admit I'm out of my depth a little here. I practice the ostrich theory of mobile email. The assumption is that people use wireless devices to keep in touch with individuals. And not as their device of choice for reading newsletters and similar.

So this would mean they save the latter for later. In other words, they'll see it on the PC/laptop anyway, not just the mobile device.

I hope.

Thoughts?

More on email design | Tags: email design, mobile email, wireless email

It's easy to get sucked into thinking email marketing is just about promotions and newsletters. But every email your business sends has some kind of marketing impact.

Nice, then, to see how one forest retreat tourism business has given careful thought to the content of their email signatures.

Todd Lucier discusses the "value versus promotion" issues raised yesterday, and then describes how they'll be changing their sigs accordingly. Interesting concepts and also interesting to be able to follow through one active marketer's thought processes.

Signatures are something we tend to write once and then forget about. Like welcome messages. Confirmation emails. Unsubscribe notices. Order confirmations. All worth a revisit to see how they might bring better value to both the business and the recipient.

More tactics | Tags: email signatures

Nick Usborne gets his teeth into an award-winning email welcome message from Dell. And explains why he thinks it's really not so good.

Woven within the critique are tips worth remembering for writing such welcome messages. To which you can add nine more listed here.

Nick's reflections kind of gel with a point he makes in a post yesterday. Namely that those with expertise and experience still don't always get the fundamental stuff right. A reminder that it never hurts to revisit the basics of email marketing.

More on copywriting | Tags: email marketing, list welcome messages, online copywriting

Overstock did some tests to see if having their email certified by Goodmail was worthwhile. The results are reported in DMNews. Certification lifted key metrics and apparently "positively affected Overstock.com's return on investment."

MarketingSherpa report on how one National Public Radio affiliate conducted a one-day donation drive using email as part of the marketing mix.

Nothing dramatic from an email viewpoint, but it's interesting to see the deliberate way they used email to fill a messaging gap enforced by the nature of their main communication medium (people mostly only listen to the radio before and after work in their cars.)

And Sherpa again, with a super little example of how to use email effectively in a non-standard situation.

In this case, how offering a "your free trial expires soon, here's how you can cancel before we charge your credit card" reminder email service actually boosted trial sign-up rates *and* conversions. Fascinating.

More case studies | Tags: email marketing case studies

Obviously I'm convinced about email's marketing value (see "Why do email marketing?" for the reasons.) But just a quick warning about calculations that might see the value of email overestimated.

It's not uncommon to find statements like this:

"We looked at our customers and compared those who get our emails with those who never signed up. The former group had an average order size that was X% higher and their total orders per month were Y% higher, meaning they spent $Z per month more with us than the non-subscribers."

But is all that increase attributable to the emails? Wouldn't your better customers be more likely to sign up for emails in the first place? So did the emails drive purchase interest or did the purchase interest drive the email sign-up?

If those "subscribers" had never seen those emails, might they still have bought more than non-subscribers, simply because they're more engaged with your business anyway?

Nobody will thank me for pointing that out.

No, I'm not saying the emails are a waste of time (see my opening statement). Just that the common "subscriber / not a subscriber" comparison isn't entirely fair and potentially overestimates the positive impact.

A better comparison is to look at the "before subscribing" and "after subscribing" purchase behavior of subscribers. I have some more thoughts on this in a report excerpt on calculating ROI for newsletters.

Tags: email marketing statistics, roi, email newsletters

June 14, 2007

Following the news that the Goodmail certified email program is expanding to cover more ISPs, the protest has been muted compared to when Goodmail first launched the idea.

But here's a long report from one sender of email raising concerns about his own emailing future in a world where you might need to pay a fee to guarantee delivery.

The worry is not that certification exists per se. It's a good thing that people have another tool in their email marketing box.

But people suggest that if those guarding email inboxes are paid to guarantee delivery and ensure images, links etc display properly, then those guardians have an enormous financial incentive to make life more difficult for those not certifying their email.

They may protest otherwise, but human nature and business dynamics tell us that where there is money to be made, it will be made.

Ergo: be prepared for the costs of getting your email delivered to rise.

One thing though: Goodmail and the media world need to do a better job of explaining certification to the masses. An awful lot of people seem to think it's a way for spammers to pay to get delivered.

But certification implies a certification process. And the Goodmail one requires compliance with various best practices. No spammer would get certified. And even if they did, enough spam reports would see the certification revoked.

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

Those wondering what a "transactional email" is and why we'd want to add marketing oomph to it will value Janine Popick's introduction to the topic.

She gives examples of typical transactional emails and has a few suggestions on how you can enhance them to give them more of an impact on sales and customer relationships.

Then when you're happy with the concept, browse this article category for more ideas and tips.

Tags: email marketing, transactional emails

Not who presses the button, but what name should appear in the "from" field displayed in the recipient's inbox?

The "from" or "sender" field is important. Because it's one of the key bits of info people use to decide if an email is legitimate and worth their attention.

Recognition is the hot word here. The from name has to be one the recipient recognizes. Recognition stops them dismissing you as spam. And recognition gets your email opened, provided your name brings the expectation that you have something interesting to say/sell/show.

So common advice is to use the name that is best for recognition. That might be the company name, the brand name, a brand character (Ronald McDonald) or a real person's name.

The latter is great, because people like to relate to people. But few of us have enough clout and presence to get recognized. If the recipient doesn't know the name, it casts a spammy taint on your message.

So how can you get the benefits of a real person as sender, but without running into recognition problems? Email Marketing Voodoo has one possible answer.

More on getting people to open your email | Tags: email marketing, email headers, the from line

It's subject line week here at Email Marketing Reports, judging by the number of posts on the topic.

Chad White's latest article uses a review of retailer emails to raise an important issue. Are your subject lines making short-term sales or encouraging long-term relationships? Or both? (Or neither?)

Chad argues that retailer emails focus too much on factors like price that aren't critical to building relationships.

This issue is not just about subject lines. It goes back to the question of strategy. What are you actually trying to achieve with email?

And it reflects the age-old divide between promotional email and e-newsletters.

Anyway, Chad's article helps us think a little bit more about the wider context of our mailing efforts.

More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, subject lines, relationship marketing

June 13, 2007

Earlier this week there was a little bit of pushing and shoving about the pros and cons of HTML and text email formats.

The design guru who lit the initial fire (Jeffrey Zeldman) just posted a follow-up to his earlier anti-HTML post. This time it's a measured and thoughtful treatise on how to make HTML email useful for all concerned.

His "eight points for better e-mail relationships" make interesting reading. His urgings to give more weight to text versions of email also go to the heart of another email marketing issue.

How much control do you give to the recipient?

We hear the message continually - let customers decide what they get and when. An admirable sentiment in general.

But would you give people a choice of HTML and text formats, if you knew that those who chose text would actually respond more often to HTML emails?

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

As we come to accept that it's your sender reputation that is the key to deliverability, a valid question to ask is just what determines that reputation? Is it your image, hairstyle, clickthrough rate, turnover?

Nothing like that. In this article, Ken Magill gets Deirdre Baird to define the physical numbers that are at the core of your reputation as a sender of email. And she has some hints on how to ensure those numbers are the right ones for a good reputation.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, sender reputation

Online copywriting star Nick Usborne sells a mini report on email subject lines which I just bought ($8.95 from FreeIQ).

Subtitled "6 Questions to ask yourself when writing subject lines for your emails and e-newsletters," the 10-page pdf file explains why subject lines are so crucial, and then devotes a page or so to a review of each of Nick's six questions (which I won't list here for obvious reasons!)

I'd venture to suggest that there's little new or unexpected here for those with experience.

The checklist is more for those new to the game/art/science/business of email marketing or who are struggling to make sense of the sometimes conflicting subject line advice floating around out there.

If that's you, then the checklist offers a basic, easy-to-understand set of concepts that will help you both avoid typical subject line mistakes and get your emails recognized and opened more.

More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, subject lines

You could go for the sensationalist method, as MarketingSherpa did with yesterday's "53% of Email Subject Lines Broken" theme.

The headline is annoyingly misleading, since the exclusive research the article reports on suggests nothing of the sort. Yet the research *is* interesting.

How text displays is also subject to the vagaries of the webmail service or software your recipients use to view your email. So if your subject line isn't encoded properly, it can get garbled.

Now the words "character encoding" probably elicit blank looks from most of us. But don't panic (as I did unnecessarily when reading the article headline), since if you're typing your subject line into your email marketing software or service directly, then it's not an issue.

It becomes an issue when copying and pasting from a typical word processor or when using "unusual" text characters, such as accents, umlauts and curly quotes.

Sherpa's article includes an extensive and valuable report from Pivotal Veracity that introduces you to the basics of character encoding, outlines potential problems and identifies easy solutions.

More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, subject lines, character encoding

June 12, 2007

It's not just email marketing experiences that offer insights on email marketing. Reading through a recent study on technology buyers yielded some tidbits of value to the email side of things.

Hundreds of such buyers were asked about their behavior when faced with a registration form that gives them access to content (typically a white paper.)

Two key facts popped out:

1. 43% give a personal -- rather than work -- email address on these forms.

The main reason is to keep their work email free of vendor solicitations. But 37% of those using personal addresses said it was because they use this personal account to organize their research. And 12% did it to ensure they got the emails, as their work account has a spam filter that is too aggressive.

What this means: If you're in B2B, don't reject Gmail, Hotmail and other "consumer" addresses as worthless. The growing sophistication of webmail means such addresses are not as throwaway as they used to be.

2. 74% wanted to see at least a paragraph of overview information about the content before submitting a registration form.

What this means: Is there a parallel to an email subscription, here? Do we make enough information available to prospective subscribers for them to feel comfortable exchanging their email address for email conten