No man is an iland

August 31, 2007

(More cartoons)

The format debate is one of the oldest. What gets the best response? Text? Image-rich emails?

The answer, despite evangelists on either side, remains "it depends."

...on the nature of the email you're sending and the audience getting it.

The Email Experience Council's "Voices of email" have some new thoughts on all this.

My additional "thoughtlet" and an overview of the pros and cons of each (feel free to add yours or comment)...

Debates encourage the taking of sides. And this debate often gets reduced to "text only" versus "image-rich, beautiful HTML."

Important to remember that there are many stages in between, particularly the largely text-based email enhanced with a little color, nice fonts, good layout and small logos for branding/image purposes. For inspiration, try Campaign Monitor's gallery.

HTML email

• lets you measure open rates.
• offers creativity (color, fonts, images, animations, tighter control of layouts, etc.)
• is great if your content is better presented as a picture, chart, or table.
• lets you use logos and colors, and mimic website design, thus ensuring brand consistency and a more seamless transition between email and landing page when people click on your links.
• ...and some folk just like their email to be HTML.
• but then some folk have an intense dislike of HTML emails.
• email software, webmail services and different devices render HTML email in their own unique ways, making HTML email design more of a challenge.
  
• if images are called from a server, the user must be online to see them when looking at the email after the initial download.
  
• HTML emails convey a more commercial impression than text-based ones.
• can pose more problems when it comes to avoiding anti-spam filters

(Many of the disadvantages are avoided simply through good, clean design and appropriate use of HTML code.)

Text email

• simple.
• comes across as more personal because of the association with one-on-one emails.
• some people express a strong preference for them, especially in the tech world and among long-time Internet users who remember the good old days before HTML email and spam.
  
• far fewer issues with rendering and display problems.
• but far less creative flexibility when it comes to design, copywriting, layout, branding etc.
• can't track open rates.
• less challenging when it comes to deliverability hurdles like spam filters.
  

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

...to borrow a phrase.

Anyway, with all the recent reflection on the future and usefulness of email, Simms Jenkins asks an intriguing question at the BrightWave blog.

"What are the top things that email marketing has delivered...in the past decade?"

What were the pivotal moments in email marketing history? The achievements? The advances that made a difference to business success?

I've added my suggestions to his post. See if you can come up with anything better!

More offbeat material | Tags: email marketing history

August 30, 2007

Loren McDonald is leading the charge to get more people clued up on the rights, wrongs and best practices of email marketing.

Now you might wonder why you'd care if other marketers are messing up with email. Why would you want your competitors to learn the kind of skills and success tactics taught by Loren and others in the space?

I'd welcome any comments on that, but here's my argument...

1. It's not just about your competitors. It's also about educating those around you: colleagues, superiors and those holding the purse strings.

The better people understand email marketing and its potential contribution to business success, the more support you get. And the more support you get, the more email's contribution to the business turns from potential to reality.

It's not about making email better than other marketing techniques. It's simply about giving people the information they need to make the best use of that resource.

2. The success of your emails depends a lot on the context they are seen in. The more spam, bacn and rubbish emails filling up inboxes, the more people are turned off using email, or signing up to lists or spending time with commercial messages.

So to keep email attention high, we need to do two things:

1. Support all sensible efforts to get rid of spam
2. Encourage businesses to send engaging, relevant, valuable email

A side benefit is that other players in the email game (ISPs, anti-spam vendors, users) will become implicitly more supportive of legitimate marketing email, if the difference between that email and spam gets stronger and stronger. As it would if more businesses learnt and followed best practices.

This is a tricky one, though. I've argued in the past that the morass of mediocre emails is an opportunity. Quality emails stand out.

But the more quality emails in there, the harder you need to work to stand out from the rest. So encouraging wider use of email best practices could make your job harder.

However, I feel the broader benefits of clean inboxes are greater...provided you accept the challenge of always striving to make your emails among the best.

Convinced?

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

Lyris just put out their latest quarterly delivery report on how different ISPs measure up in terms of delivering (or not) legitimate marketing email.

Media coverage focused on the apparent growing role for email authentication in determining delivery success. But that masks other interesting insights from the report (which you can download via the company's knowledge center.)

An average of around 25% of permission-based email never made it to the inbox at top US and European ISPs and webmail services. But this disguises great variation.

At some services, the problem is email not getting delivered at all. At others, it's email getting rerouted to junk folders. And the services themselves differ greatly in terms of how they perform.

So, for example, Hotmail in the US prevented over 40% of emails reaching the inbox. Such variation is a reminder (again) that it pays to segment your list by address domain and look closer at the results for each of those segments. (Or use a delivery monitor service.)

That will give you a better idea of where the problems really lie and where to focus the solutions. Do you have a widespread deliverability problem, or do you need to tackle one or two specific ISPs or webmail services?

The results are also a reminder not to rest on deliverability laurels. Lyris noted, for example, that the percentage of emails diverted to spam folders jumped from 7.6% at European ISPs in Q1, 2007 to over 20% in Q2...

More email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, hotmail, email trends

You may be spared the jingles and annoying shop displays for a month or two, but the onslaught of holiday marketing advice has begun.

And like my grandmother presumably would have said, "Before anything else, preparation is the key to success." (Or was that Alexander Graham Bell?)

First out of the blocks is the man with his finger steadfastly held on the pulse of retail email, Chad White.

Together with the EEC, he's published a 15-page "Guide to Gearing Up for the Holiday Email Season," based on observations from past holiday seasons.

(P.S. I saved up the various holiday email marketing articles produced last year and linked to them all here.)

Tags: holiday marketing, Christmas marketing, email marketing

I am.

There's a lot of buzz about online video as a marketing tool. But...

...when you look at how email software and webmail services display emails, it seems clear that videos will likely not display within the email itself.

So people generally recommend you use email to get people to clickthrough to a website where your video then plays.

But there are various services out there who claim that their technology does indeed allow video to be played within the email itself. Which would save a click and likely mean more views of that video.

So who's right? Anyone have a definitive answer or reference?

And if you're worried about professional video how-tos and costs, try winning a free one.

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

August 29, 2007

Worth revisiting yesterday's post about bacn to take a look at the comments. Simms Jenkins and Justin Premick make some excellent points about the impact of increased volumes of transactional messages on email marketing.

Spam forced legitimate marketing email to raise the quality bar or get buried in the morass.

Will bacn do the same for transactional emails?

As people take more actions online (purchases, registrations, memberships), they generate ever more transactional emails.

Does that put more pressure on you to make those emails engaging, valuable, relevant? Lest you find your messages ignored in the transactional clutter, devoured by another 1763 invitations to "join my network" / "be my friend" / "share my electronic teddy bear"...?

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

Yesterday, I posted about the "dirty words" problem...those lists of words that might cause your email to get blocked or filtered.

The lists in themselves aren't the problem. But the sloppy reporting of those lists might have led some to believe that such words are the main criteria by which email gatekeepers decide whether your email gets delivered or not.

More articles popped out today to correct this misapprehension. Stefan Pollard has a beautifully simple explanation of the precise role of words and phrases when it comes to the dreaded spam filters.

And Jordan Ayan (CEO of SubscriberMail who put out one of the lists) responds to the kerfuffle with a calm and graceful post resolving some of the reported misunderstandings.

Both authors also make a crucial point that I'm ashamed to say I missed first time round. Important as particular words and phrases might or might not be for digital spam filters, there's also the human spam filter to consider.

Recipients use the words, calls to action and phrases in your email to build a perception of that email. If that perception is a spammy one, then you just triggered the human spam filter.

Avoiding "spam" words and phrases is as much about encouraging the right human reaction as bypassing automated spam filters.

More on email deliverability | Tags: email marketing, spam words, deliverability, spam filters, content filters

Email marketing may have its own nuances, but it's still about presenting marketing messages to large numbers of individuals. Not unlike a lot of other forms of marketing.

So we might want to remember what other disciplines can teach us about improving email campaign results. At least that's the message coming out of new articles by Kevin Hillstrom and Ken Magill.

Ken looks at the long-established marketing metric RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value) and how it might apply to your list of email addresses.

In particular, he gets a few experts to explain how an understanding of RFM might help you avoid mailing to exactly the sort of people who are going to label your emails as spam.

Kevin, meanwhile, draws on catalog experience to explain how a drop off in the average return you're getting for each email you send out might be misleading.

Relying on averages means you can miss out on identifying some very enthusiastic and responsive portions of your list.

More on analysis | Tags: email marketing metrics, email campaign analysis, rfm

August 28, 2007

Forget email bankruptcy. I declared RSS bankruptcy today when my feed reader indicated over 500+ posts waiting for my attention.

One that did catch my eye though was Kevin Hillstrom's excellent Customers Who Do "X" Spend More post. It's essentially the old warning not to confuse correlation with causality.

Which means just because two things are associated doesn't mean one caused the other.

For an email example, consider this suggestion that one of the reasons people who get your emails spend more than non-subscribers might be because people who spend more with you are more likely to sign up for your emails.

Anyway, the theme continues in two new articles today. Jeanne Jennings explains why you have to look at all the steps in the chain of events that leads from a sent email to a website sale if you want to find the real cause of poor email marketing results (it may not be the email's fault.)

And Spencer Kollas talks about testing, with the useful reminder that all the copywriting and offer tests in the world won't help, if you don't first test whether or not people are getting your emails and seeing them properly displayed.

While I was away, two vendors (Blue Sky Factory and SubscriberMail) released lists of words that might get your email blocked if they appear in your subject lines.

The lists attracted a lot of interest. But the coverage (no fault of the list originators) carries the danger of overemphasizing the importance of text content in determining whether email gets delivered or not.

Fact is, we like lists and we're desperate for simple answers in the sometimes complicated world of email marketing. So no surprise if some people jump to the conclusion that a changed word or two will mean super delivery rates.

(Especially when many of us carry the collective memory of a time when anti-spam mechanisms really were little more than content filters.)

In recent months, however, it's become clear that the reality is different. Spammy words or phrases are just one element on the checklists that gatekeepers use to define your email as spam (for deletion), spam (for delivery to the junk folder) or legitimate (for delivery to the inbox).

Here it's worth reading Melinda Krueger's article from today's MediaPost and the relevant post at the Email Experience Council blog.

Both get industry heavyweights to explain exactly how important the words you put in your emails are when it comes to clearing the deliverability hurdle.

More on email deliverability | Tags: email marketing, subject lines, deliverability, spam, spam filters

Returned to work to discover various media outlets and blogs talking about Bacn. Defined broadly as email you requested but don't necessarily want to read immediately.

Bacn sits somewhere in the middle between spam and personal email. More legitimate than the former, less interesting than the latter. And thus covers much of what we think of as legitimate commercial email: account notifications, email alerts, e-newsletters...

Others argue about the need for such a term, the motivation behind its use or the ridiculousness of another bit of jargon. But I'd like to take another angle.

The term originated outside the marketing community...among email users. Marketers have long despaired that exactly these users fail to grasp the differences between legitimate commercial email and spam. (Not that the differences are always obvious.)

But the user-created term Bacn is open acknowledgment of exactly that difference. As such, I hope it catches on.

Having your emails described as Bacn is not ideal, since the definition isn't exactly gushing about the email's value. But it's a whole heap better than being treated like spam.

Thoughts?

More offbeat and humor | Tags: email marketing, bacn, spam

It's "butterflies in stomachs" time down in New Zealand, where the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act comes into force next Wednesday, September 5th.

The imminent arrival of this anti-spam legislation has businesses not a little confused at all the nuances and details that necessarily accompany such laws.

You can catch links to relevant sites and documentation at this page.

Two particular resources to note:

1. Marc Krisjanous has compiled lots of information on the practical interpretation of the law for local businesses at the MobilizeMail blog.

2. The enforcement agency (Department of Internal Affairs) has its own support site for consumers and business, with details of anti-spam compliance seminars running through September.

More on spam legislation | Tags: New Zealand Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act, anti-spam, spam laws

A pleasure to be back in the blogging and email saddle. Sure beats sitting on an Italian beach...um...

Anyway, the vacation taught me exactly why there is no hope that spam will die because the lack of response makes it uneconomical to send.

Case 1: We were in a large managed campsite in a pine forest. It has been a long dry summer. All the campsite signs and info folders stress the dangers of open flames and expressly forbid barbecues. And the news is full of Greece and the forest fire problem.

Does that stop people grilling their sausages on an open fire? Nope.

Case 2: Is anyone not aware of the dangers of sunburn? Is there anyone left who thinks they can sit for hours in the blazing sun with no sunscreen and turn a nice gentle brown?

Apparently so, given the vast number of people who ended each day looking like they should be diced, dipped in oregano and olive oil and dished up with mozzarella.

There will always be some unfortunate character, oblivious to every warning and danger sign, ready to buy those Canadian pills or stocks...the spam solution will have to come from elsewhere.

Tags: spam

August 16, 2007

As traditional this time of year, I am leaving the PC alone for a week to spend more time outdoors, scaring people with my pasty white English legs and complete lack of upper body musculature. Vacation is another word for it.

Blog communication will resume again around the 27th. See you then...

Interesting case study over at MarketingSherpa, partly because of the questions it raises.

It describes how a charity used a 4-email campaign to increase ROI on a fundraising promotion by 30%. Great stuff. But it also mentions an average open rate of 6.5% and CTR of 18%.

It's hard to argue with ROI, especially when the beneficiaries are a charity. But the response rate was relatively low (my interpretation of the article is that most names were rented, not from a house list.)

So what are the impacts of all those non-responders? Are there any impacts? (On the brand, on spam complaint levels, on future delivery rates?) Does it matter to the charity involved, since they (I think) didn't use their own lists anyway? Is ROI the only determinant of success?

Does it matter if you get low response rates to a campaign as long as you get a positive return on your investment?

Thoughts?

More case studies | Tags: email marketing, email marketing metrics

The ugly subject of implied or assumed permission got a little coverage today.

That's where senders who obtained your email address legitimately then start using it in unexpected ways. Like sending you newsletter B because you signed up for newsletter A. (See here for more on the concept and why it's generally regarded a bad idea.)

Anyway, Seth Godin references it indirectly in a little dig at Amazon's cross-selling emails.

And Chad White has some advice and a reportlet on how to expand your email efforts to other brands, partners etc. without breaking any permission promises. (Lena Waters also tackled this topic a few weeks ago.)

There will always be the pragmatic who say the additional spam complaints are irrelevant given the benefits of growing your lists by assuming permission. But in an era when sender reputation counts for so much, it could be those extra complaints that send your deliverability down the tubes.

More on permission | Tags: email marketing, permission marketing

August 15, 2007

Let's be honest, it's easy to get distracted from the task in hand. For example, today's blog is repeatedly delayed by live commentary on the Toulouse vs. Liverpool Champions League match.

If you have let things slip on the email front, here are four new articles to get your emails back on track.

First, Stefan Pollard outlines a long list of issues to correct if you're trying to rebuild a defunct or dilapidated program. His email marketing equivalent of a car restoration guide.

Then Adestra has a broad and basic overview of the message body. What goes in there and how should it look? Something you can use quickly to spot any glaring gaps that are dragging down your results.

Kelly Rusk suggests the problem might be too much emphasis on day-to-day survival and not enough on strategy. (A concept applicable to more than just email!)

And finally, Chris Marriott weighs in with 5 email mistakes to avoid. That sounds like something you probably read before, but it isn't. Chris picks out some problems that have had little or no media coverage.

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

More Ken Magill, this time with a brief case study of how Bath and Body Works built a ginormous email list in no time at all. No, they didn't buy one of those CD-ROMs on eBay.

One of the reasons..."when customers began coming into the store asking about specials offered online, store managers immediately saw the benefit of getting customers' e-mail addresses."

This reminds me of conversations I had with a hotel chain, who took a very proactive approach to enlisting the support of front desk staff in their efforts to gather email opt-ins.

Among the highlights:

• The email team visited every hotel and talked with staff to explain the importance of email marketing and the benefits to the hotel itself
• They trained staff to ask for the right email address in the right way, addressing the same concerns and motivations that we talk about for our online sign-up forms
  
• ...and taught them how to correct obvious typos when entering the address given on a written form
• Then they gave regular feedback on how the emails were used, how many were collected, with bonuses for those hotels doing the best job of collection.

The full case study with all the details of these and other tactics is over at MarketingSherpa, and well worth reading if I say so myself.

More on list growth | Tags: email marketing, list building, list acquisition, collecting addresses offline

Sending email to journalist Ken Magill is a great way to get coverage. Unfortunately, not always of the right kind. As Colgate-Palmolive just found out.

Not everybody on your list is a journalist with a pendant for outing mediocre marketing, but it's a further reminder that what you send...matters.

Nobody cares about a boring magazine ad. Send emails that fail to enthuse the receivers and you may not end up lambasted on the pages of Direct Magazine. But you will get slammed with spam reports.

And two new articles reinforce the growing impression that it's these reports that are causing the most deliverability problems out there.

Chad White, for example, reviews a recent deliverability roundtable webinar where the general consensus was that "spam complaints and poor bounce management" were the prime causes of such problems.

And vendor Adestra say the same in this article on deliverability and reputation. They focus on how the mechanics of the sign-up process are a big factor in keeping subsequent complaint rates down.

This in turn reflects another new awareness. That the impact of your stream of email messages is affected greatly by the scene set for these emails...by your sign-up process, welcome messages and headers.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, spam, bounce management

August 14, 2007

Vendor Interspire recently surveyed over 500 (small business) folk on their email marketing practices and attitudes.

Some of the highlights:

• The vast majority see the ROI of email marketing as positive. Over 90% rated this ROI as fair, average, good, excellent or exceptional.
• Deliverability was the biggest concern, but public perceptions of email marketing came a close second.
• Another question revealed that even those using email marketing perceive an association with spam. So the survey is a reminder that there's still much to be done to establish the difference, both in terms of PR and marketing practices.
• Over 25% sent email out less than once a month. Such long gaps between emails might be a problem in terms of people forgetting their opt-in and flagging an email as spam.

The full survey results are available here.

More email marketing statistics | Tags: email marketing survey

There's another kind of spam trap faced by marketers...a subtle one. All the talk about spam and when you can and can't email folk suggests that the biggest hurdle you can ever face is actually getting to the stage where you can send a marketing message to somebody.

Once you've passed that hurdle, there's a temptation to breathe a huge sigh of relief and relax.

Which is perhaps why long-standing best practices like targeting don't get the attention they deserve.

That's a subconscious theme in David Baker's article yesterday about transactional emails. While he applauds a variety of companies for actually recognizing that such emails are also marketing opportunities, he's not over impressed with how most use that opportunity.

I wonder also, how many of us truly understand how untargeted our emails may be. We've grown to accept relatively low open, clickthrough and conversion rates as the norm, without really questioning why the heck they aren't better.

For tips on changing that state of affairs, try today's blog post from Kevin Hillstrom. He explains how different types of customer data might be used to build better targeted emails. And lists the other folk in your organization who can help you with this.

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

The F word might be killing two traditional ways of coping with the problem that each webmail service has its own way of interpreting and displaying HTML emails. (That's F for forwarding.)

The first way was to look at your email list and check the domain names (the bit after the @.) If you had a mere handful of names with @gmail.com addresses, you wouldn't lose sleep trying to get your email template to display perfectly at the Gmail webmail service.

Or those with more resources might split their list by domain and send different designs to each. So @gmail.com addresses would get an email specifically designed to display beautifully when viewed in the Gmail interface.

Unfortunately, it's no longer that simple. The domain name is no guarantee that this is where the email is going to be read. Increasingly, the domain names in your email list are irrelevant to your design.

Instead, you have to assume that your emails might be read anywhere, at any webmail service or on any desktop software, and design accordingly. (Not to mention the growth of mobile email.)

A message to johndoe@gmail.com might end up read on Outlook 2007. Or one to johndoe@mypersonaldomain.com might be read at Windows Live Hotmail.

Here's why...

1. Among the top webmail services, the following all allow you to automatically have your email forwarded to another address or to check email using a suitable desktop client like Outlook:

• Gmail
• Windows Live Hotmail (just announced for premium accounts)
• The premium version of Yahoo! Mail

(AOL/AIM Mail also lets you use desktop clients like Outlook to read your email.)

2. Then there is the problem that all four big webmail services allow users to have custom domains and/or provide business email hosting services for organizations.

In other words, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL might be behind any innocuous email address on your list.

In summary...forwarding, remote account access and hosted custom email services mean you can no longer assume that an address's domain name tells you how and where email to that address will be seen.

More on design | Tags: email marketing, email design, hotmail, gmail, aol mail, yahoo mail, webmail

August 13, 2007

Timing is about getting the right message in front of the right recipient when they're in the right frame of mind to respond.

So target tired parents in the middle of the night, when they're snatching a bit of quality Internet shopping time once the kids are sleeping, clothes are washed and the table laid for tomorrow's breakfast.

Not the stuff of fantasy, but a promising strategy pursued by various retailers mentioned in this article at the Chicago Tribune (found via the Emma blog.)

And in a related article, Bob Bly ponders how often you can send out promotional emails in addition to your high-value content newsletters.

He gathers thoughts on the topic from various sources and suggests how it's the high value newsletter that to some extent determines how often you can do the solo emails.

More on timing and frequency | Tags: email frequency, direct email, promotional email

Last week ended with the acknowledgment that your reputation with each recipient was ever more important to your overall sender reputation and thus your ability to get emails delivered.

The need to stand out from the dross (real spam and unwanted email) in the inbox is still acute: people are overwhelmed by email.

Two new articles from today come in handy in this context...

The first covers the need to ensure your emails are recognized. Jeanne Jennings addresses the topic of sender names, highlighting some horrible examples and going over the pros and cons of using a person's name in the "from" line.

It's a subject which attracts a lot of debate and interesting insight.

Simms Jenkins mentions from lines, too, in a feature article highlighting the ways you can avoid being perceived as a spammer. He also covers content, frequency, the professionalism of your admin procedures, relevancy and other issues.

More on email deliverability | Tags: email marketing, recognition, relevancy, spam

Not so long ago, blogs (through their association with RSS feeds) were touted by some as spelling the death of email. Now blogging finds its own death predicted. The executioners are allegedly the social networks and similar technologies.

As B.L.Ochman points out, such reports carry little credibility. But perhaps it's reassuring to note that email isn't alone when it comes to predictions of mortality.

In fact, a brief minute or three at Google reveals that the following are all apparently "dead."

• Marketing
• Mass marketing
• Traditional marketing
• Internet marketing
  
• Advertising
• Direct mail
  
• SEO
• Web analytics
• Guerrilla marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• PR
• The agency model
• CRM
  
• CPM
• RSS
• Web 2.0
  
• Google
• Yahoo
  
• Microsoft
• The Internet

Oh well.

August 10, 2007

A couple of weeks ago I quoted the ISPs and their new attitudes to what constituted spam. That theme has spread around the blogs and vendor newsletters of late and become a real complacency killer.

We now have two types of reputation to worry about. Your overall sender reputation in the eyes of email's gatekeepers. And your reputation with each and every one of the people getting your email.

The "this is spam" button is the link between the two of course. Empowered subscribers can make or break your sender reputation with an ISP or webmail service by reporting you as spam.

By way of illustration, check out this tale of woe from one discussion list on their difficulties with AOL subscribers.

Previously, a solid permission-based sign-up process was widely regarded as a sure bet for ensuring a safe sender reputation. But as Stefan Pollard notes, permission is now just the start. A concept echoed earlier by the folk at ReturnPath.

Issues like targeting and relevance used to be ways of "just" improving your results. But as ISPs expand the definition of spam to "anything people don't want," then these concepts become "must haves" rather than "could haves."

Stefan's article goes on to talk about the role of relevancy and recognition in this new deliverability context, suggesting some strategies you might use to boost the latter.

Email Karma also addresses the theme, with some tips on securing your reputation and avoiding spam reports.

Email used to be famous for being the form of marketing you could do badly and still make money from. I'm not sure how much longer that is going to be the case.

More on deliverability and reputation | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, spam reports, AOL, spam

August 09, 2007

Chad White has been addressing the topic of welcome messages, recently, through his work monitoring retailer emails. His newest article at MediaPost looks at the timing of the first email.

That's a follow-up to his onboarding article about the first email messages a new subscriber sees. And his EEC colleagues addressed the topic recently, as mentioned yesterday.

Why is this subject important?

After someone adds their name to your list, there are various things you can do. In the bad old days, we just did nothing. The newcomer got the next email scheduled to go out.

Then we learnt about the value of a suitable welcome message, sent immediately after sign-up.

The next level up is to go beyond the single welcome email and map out a series of initial emails specifically designed to address new subscribers before they get thrown in with the rest.

So why make the effort?

1. New subscribers are not familiar with your standard emails, so you can educate them on what to expect
2. By definition, they just had a positive interaction with your business (which is why they signed up.) So you already won part of the attention battle, and they're in a better frame of mind to respond to your messages than your average subscriber. Now might be the time to bring out your best offers.
   
3. People open emails for many reasons, but one biggie is their previous experience with the sender. Because of 2. above, your first emails are more likely to get opened than is normally the case. Give them a great initial experience with your emails and they'll remember that when scrolling down their inbox in future months.
   
4. The next standard email might be a while off and you need to keep them engaged until they enter the normal message flow.

That's why.

P.S. Looking through the archives, Anna Billstrom wrote a nice piece with an example email marketing starter package here. And Whitney Hutchinson also addressed the topic in the context of a wider contact plan.

More on welcome messages | Tags: email marketing, list welcome messages, subscriber management

One issue that crops up in larger organizations is the issue of email frequency. Not how often you or your group sends out emails, but how often your customers or prospects get email from your business.

That's not the same, because on top of your messages, they might be getting any number of emails from other parts of the business, too.

Sending too much email is a surefire way to kill responses and annoy subscribers. But there's a second issue here, too.

Is each email pulling on the same brand string? Is the tone, style, imagery, branding, colors, messaging projected by each source of email appropriate?

That's where the email gatekeeper role comes in. But what do they do and how do they keep both subscribers and colleagues happy?

Since the subject pops up at regular intervals, here are a few articles that will help:

• Lauran Skena describes her gatekeeper role at National Geographic within this piece at the EEC.
• Loren McDonald talks about centralizing email marketing at MarketingProfs.
• A case study of how CoreNet Global solved the problem (behind a membership barrier but well worth reading)
• MindComet on prioritizing (with additional suggestions here)
  
• Jeanne Jennings describes the process a business should go through to ensure the email list is protected from overuse.

The first step, of course, is to find someone to take responsibility and to get all parts of the business aware of the problem...

More on frequency | Tags: email marketing, email frequency

August 08, 2007

Enamored as we are with all the wonderful flashing lights and buttons offered by advanced systems and software, a dominant theme of late is to get the basics right first.

After all, building an email relationship takes time and care. Destroying one takes one stupid error. An error that is normally avoidable if you take the trouble to read up on best practices.

That's a theme hammered home cogently by Loren McDonald in today's MediaPost. And Loren lists a few such errors, too.

On other blogs and websites, numerous clever people offer the kind of info that helps keep your email marketing on the straight and profitable track.

For example, Justin Premick tackles the use of urgency in subject lines, a topic addressed recently by Chad White, too. Take particular note of Justin's advice in the comments section, where he talks about making urgent offers unique and credible.

Then we have MarketingSherpa reporting in detail on how A&E Television Networks revised their emails to account for image suppression and saw results rocket as a result.

The changes they made are not hugely innovative. Which is not meant to be a negative statement; it's further evidence that applying the basics can bring immediate and significant rewards.

Let us move to Canada, where ESP ThinData's newest email newsletter provides a nice overview of four critical email marketing elements (data collection, delivery, consumer action and reporting), with some recommendations on how to best approach each.

Then we have two blog posts warning against sending too much email. Email Karma and Freaking Marketing suggest how you might combat the problem or at least better determine what the optimal contact frequency might be.

Here I find the analogy with fishing good. If you plunder the seas too much, you get progressively less and less fish. But regulate your trips, and you guarantee a decent catch long into the future. (See Are You an Email Marketing Miner or Manager? for a similar thesis.)

And finally there are the forgotten emails. Transactional emails are the new black. But there are other email opportunities gathering dust in the cupboard of marketing neglect. Karen Gedney suggests how you might make more use of your "out of the office / on vacation" auto-replies, for example.

All good stuff.

More on email advertising basics | Tags: email marketing, subject lines, image blocking, email frequency

The < p > tag is best practice in web design, but it seems not every webmail service or email software has caught on.

The still-growing comments section in this older sheepish post contains some useful advice on how to best format your text paragraphs so they don't fall foul of email idiosyncrasies.

More on HTML in email | Tags: email design, html email

(Something offbeat to lighten the mood)

The Internet is a modern invention. But history's great leaders and philosophers seemingly anticipated the challenges of SEO, email and online business long before Tim Berners-Lee thought three w's looked good next to each other.

Take search engine marketing, for example.

Shakespeare, despite his wealth of unique content, struggled to get on the first page of the SERPS for some of his key phrases, noting in Hamlet...


His main SEO mistake, according to Immanuel Kant, was to ignore the long tail...


Though commentators argue that Kant was actually referring to segmentation and database marketing.

Other philosophers preferred to focus on landing page copy. Aristotle wrote on the subject...


And Friedrich Nietzsche made it clear which side he was on in the "long copy versus short copy" debate:


The topic of SEO troubled many a presidential mind, too. Theodore Roosevelt knew the value of being on the first page of the search results...


And George Washington feared those Google ranking penalties, wisely advising against participation in questionable link exchange schemes...


The true SEO expert was Calvin Coolidge, though. His main complaint was that people failed to pay attention to incoming links and other basic search marketing techniques...


But few people knew that his AdWords campaigns were outsourced to a specialist agency...


The last word on this matter goes to Sigmund Freud, though, who warned against relying on organic Google SERPS for website traffic...


The world's great minds also concerned themselves with email marketing.

Shakespeare, for example, despaired of his poor anti-spam software, complaining in Hamlet...


His email marketing skills matched his SEO failures. Possibly because he never worried about sender and subject lines, arguing...


Fortunately for Shakespeare, he did realize the value of viral marketing, remarking that...


You may be shocked to learn that Plato was a spammer, replying thus to those who accused him of failing to gain a proper opt-in to his email list...


Which is unfortunate, because he knew his marketing. He was, for example, the first to realize the importance of the welcome message...


..and he never let himself be swayed by misleading industry benchmarks, noting that...


US presidents were also big on email.

Franklin D. Roosevelt urged email marketers to focus on relevancy, but accepted that some people will still hit the "report this as spam" button...


Other presidents had more concrete advice. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against over using discount offers in your emails...


...gaining unexpected support from Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard...


Meanwhile, HTML email design caused George Washington many a sleepless night. He suggested agreeing some kind of common coding approach, but understood the limitations of Outlook 2007...


Others struggled with the problem of image suppression at webmail services. Albert Camus, for example, was a noted fan of images in email...


But Francis Bacon preferred a more text-based approach...


Though Julius Caesar suggested the whole image blocking issue was overrated...


Who then do we turn to for the truth? Well, according to Thomas Jefferson...



More offbeat stuff | Tags: email marketing, seo, search marketing, landing pages, philosophers, presidents, email, spam, google, email design

August 07, 2007

Various voices at the Email Experience Council chip in to suggest how to best engage new subscribers to your email list.

Check out Stephanie Miller's advice in particular. You know what your mother always said about the first impression. Same goes for email.

If you need more info, here are a few related posts and articles:

9 things to go in a list welcome message
Grabbing and nurturing new subscribers
The email experience

More on list messages | Tags: email marketing, list messages, welcome emails

Tamara Gielen picked the brains of a couple of forums and discussion lists to get a grasp on how best to deal with bounced email. When does a bounce message mean it's time to delete the offending email address?

Fortunately for us, she took the time to collate and summarize all the advice she got in this post. Nice!

Bounce management is one of those quiet little topics that gathers importance with each passing day.

Emails sent to addresses that no longer exist or do not accept email smells like spam to those who guard the world's inboxes. So doing exactly that can hurt your sender reputation, which is critical for getting your email delivered.

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

Advertising Age just launched "power" rankings for the world's top English-language marketing and media blogs.

Perhaps worth a browse to find some trustworthy blogs that cover business topics close to your heart and/or bottom line?

And my fellow bloggers and I have another ranking statistic we can obsess about while we avoid real work.

Listings for email marketing blogs | Tags: marketing blogs, media blogs

August 06, 2007

In the beginning anyone could send out a bit of text and an offer and expect results. Then spam got out of hand and like the loudmouthed drunk at the party, it spoiled the fun for everyone.

So professional marketers got smarter. People paid attention to a fairly clear set of basic best practices to keep email results buzzing along.

Now email is marching into new territory. I feel like I'm at the top of one of those theme park water slides just as the log boat starts to protrude over the edge. A wild ride awaits...perhaps.

We have the challenge of new technologies that compete with, but also complement, email, and certainly change the way it's used. And we have a second challenge: the rise of mobile email.

Just today, Jeanniey Mullen predicts mobile devices are where future email is most likely to be displayed (and suggests a couple of ways we might cope.)

So how do you prepare for those challenges? Shut your eyes and hope you brought a change of t-shirt?

Well, most of us still need to work on the basics. Here's another relevant article today: Wendy Roth stresses the importance of respecting your subscribers with your opt-in and privacy practices.

But now is also the time for email marketing to emerge from its cave. Experts have always urged marketers to view email in terms of its wider contribution to other marketing and sales channels.

Before it was a mainly a matter of properly valuing email so it gets the right resources. Now it's a matter of good business.

The one constant running through recent changes in technologies and user habits is integration.

New webmail platforms include chat functions and feed readers. New smartphones let you do everything except make the tea (and I daresay the next iPhone will do that.)

So maybe flexibility is the simple answer.

There will long be a place for the traditional standalone email campaign where you ask, "How can I boost my email sales?"

But the future perhaps lies with those who look at the bigger picture and ask, "How can I boost my sales using email?"

It's a subtle, but important difference.

Tags: email marketing, mobile email, wireless email, integrated marketing

There's clever stuff you can do. And there's straightforward stuff. And it pays to ensure the latter is done before getting obsessed by the former.

Last week, Dr Ralph Wilson reminded us of some list building basics. And today it's Gail Goodman on a similar theme, with nine simple techniques to set your subscriber numbers growing.

And once your list is growing at a heady rate, you can start kicking people off it. What? Why would I ever want to do that? Here's a popular old post with the answer.

More on growing your list | Tags: list building, email acquisition

Might as well start the week with something a little different. A lot of spam gets sent from free webmail accounts, with spam software setting up masses of temporary accounts to mail spam from.

At least it used to be like that, until the email address providers started using "Human Interactive Proofs" on their sign-up forms. Those are the crazy letters you have to type in to confirm you are a human being and get the account activated.

Unfortunately, spammers being the devious folk they are, it seems some spam bots can "read" the letters and bypass the check.

One suggested alternative is to show new account signups a picture and ask them to identify the subject before accepting the application. A spam program can't recognize a cat, but a human can. Or so says Microsoft's Kevin Larson.

More on email address providers | Tags: spam, anti-spam

August 03, 2007

Two quick articles skittered across my desktop this morning, both addressing the possibility that people are marking your emails as spam. Even though they gave you permission to send them.

Carolyn Gardner points out that people sometimes switch email marketing services to improve their deliverability.

Yippee: more people get your emails...suddenly, out of the blue, after signing up months or years previously. Carolyn suggests how you might prevent these folk from labeling your emails as spam as a result.

You might also argue that if they haven't seen your emails before, then that initial permission (opt-in) is no longer valid. That's the approach I took when switching list hosts.

What I did was to first identify active subscribers (defined as people who clicked on at least one email in the past 45 days) and transfer them across to the new service.

Then I used the old host to continue mailing inactives for a further six weeks. A few people clicked, and they were then switched across to the new service.

Then I sent a simple text-only email to the remaining inactives inviting them to rekindle their interest and recommit to getting the newsletter.

Anyone who didn't respond never got switched to the new system and I stopped mailing them.

In retrospect, I should have given them more chance to respond. And there are alternative approaches to this whole transfer and re-engagement process (see Carolyn's suggestions, for example.) But I felt this way maintained the highest permission standards.

Meanwhile, Dave Lewis answers the question, "I've been getting spam complaints from customers who have previously opted into receiving my email. Why don't they just opt out?" And includes a few tips on avoiding that particular fate.

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

Yesterday, I asked why we were answering questions about email's mythical death, when a more important question is how should marketers adapt to the very real changes in email habits?

Two articles seem to indicate the debate is now moving in that direction.

First, Tom O'Leary responded directly to my post with a lot of thoughtful suggestions on exactly how you should modify your email practices and approach to account for the changing online landscape.

Second, Tiffany Young writes today on how email still works for reaching the apparently "anti-email" younger generation, if you use it right. And she suggests other non-email ways of reaching the same audience.

Doing the same thing rarely works online. Change is very much part of online marketing life. You adapt, or your profits go the way of our feathered friend from the island of Mauritius.

Tags: email marketing, email is dead

Kelly Mooney points us to a GAP email with a (too?) clever subject line. The latter suggests the email is about mens fashions, but the content is actually