No man is an iland

November 30, 2007

I keep a permanent list of questions about email marketing for which I have no easy answers.

I thought it might be fun to publish the list and see if you can come up with anything.

So here you go...

• If your "from" or "sender" line is a brand, business or name that recipients will easily recognize, do you need to mention your brand/business/name again in the subject line?

• If you embed images directly in your email, are they blocked the same way as hosted images or are they more likely to display? And are there any other issues here (such as reduced deliverability?)

• (Non-statisticians look away!) Hotmail and other services block your email when you exceed a certain percentage of spam complaints. Given that statistical anomalies are more likely with smaller lists, is that percentage number the same regardless of how many emails you send? Or is there also a minimum absolute number of spam reports required as well?
  

• Which is more important (now and in the future): your IP sender reputation or your domain sender reputation?

• Say you send a series of emails that form a whole (like a one-email-a-week teaser campaign building to a big special offer.) What do you do when one week you have a delivery problem at certain address domains, but not the next week? In other words, how do you cope with the scenario where some people missed one of the series?
  

• It is claimed that just a handful of US-based spammers are responsible for most of the spam we get. Why don't Microsoft, Yahoo and Google throw $100 million into an anti-spam pot and do all the groundwork needed for the US authorities to close down these spam operations?
  

• How will email habits and attitudes change over the next 12 months?

Use the comments, contact me directly or put a post up on your blog if you have one or more answers! Enlighten me!

A recent survey of marketing and sales executives put email marketing at the top of the tree when it comes to sales and lead generation.

Another point the survey highlights is the value of targeting, with the best results coming from 1-to-1 email or emails to small targeted groups (a result bizarrely described as "surprising" by the study authors.)

Truly surprising is that targeting by region and demographics seemed to do worse than untargeted blasts, suggesting there may be some sample bias in the survey methods?

Anyway, targeting is by definition a good thing. But there are hurdles to successful targeting efforts...both real and psychological.

Which is why Matthew Finch's post is a worthwhile read. He points out that you don't need complex database integration to start benefiting from segmentation etc. Your email metrics reports and email software functionality give you enough tools and data to start targeting your efforts right now.

This is a topic close to my heart, and I've mentioned other "simple" targeting approaches in earlier posts. See, for example, Targeting too difficult? Start simple - it works

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

I enjoyed a recent post from Justin Premick on why it's not a great idea to send a standalone seasonal email greeting to your subscribers.

Justin's argument is that they get lost among the end-of-year flood of messages and since they offer little of value might be the straw that breaks the email user's back. Which means spam reports and subsequent delivery problems.

This takes us back to the idea of value. It's not the seasonal greeting per se that's the problem, but the lack of value in the message.

So you can turn that around by "adding value" to the greeting. By including a bonus of some kind, such as a coupon, special offer, free download, etc.

Or simply make the greeting more entertaining than a few lines of generic text. Personalized images, games, video and audio all could potentially play a role.

Even with "added value," it's still hard to carve out attention at a busy time of year in the inbox.

So those of us with no seasonal element to our business might want to step aside at the end of the year and leave the inbox to the retailers...?

More holiday email tips | Tags: email marketing, holiday marketing

November 29, 2007

Technical standards in car manufacture are vital. But they won't keep your vehicle on the road if you decide to drive it into the nearest tree.

So while the new project pursuing standards for HTML email is also vital, it won't help your bottom line if you decide to drive your message into the electronic equivalent of a Californian Redwood.

Kimberly Snyder and Brett Gilbertson highlight some particularly crass examples of marketing emails that forgot about blocked images and preview panes.

Kimberly picks out Target's efforts. And Brett has screenshots from three emails that communicate a big fat nothing when victim to the overzealous image blocker.

Fortunately there are plenty of positive examples to draw inspiration from. eROI's Alex, for example, highlights a BuyCostumes.com email that packs a preview pane punch and is dressed up for suppressed images, too.

ore on blocked images in email | Tags: email marketing, image blocking, preview pane design, image suppression

The Email Standards Project got off to a flying start yesterday. But what are their goals? What do they actually do? And can they really influence the big corporate machines behind Outlook, Gmail and other email clients and webmail services?

The answers come from David Greiner, who kindly took time out from the launch to address these issues. David and his colleagues at Freshview are the project's initiators and main evangelists.

What led you to start the initiative?

This is something that's been festering in the back of my mind for a long time now. Not only has the lack of standards support frustrated me on a personal level for years, but I'm constantly seeing the pain that so many other designers go through trying to get their emails to render consistently.

What really tipped me over the edge was the release of Outlook 2007 earlier this year. This saw one of the most popular email clients in the world go from virtually perfect web standards support to almost none. That one really caught me off guard. The web browser world was making leaps and bounds toward better standards support while the email world took a time warp back to 1998.

It wasn't just Microsoft that dropped the ball either, but Google's Gmail and IBM's Lotus Notes also have minimal support for modern web standards.

Today, email designers are forced to build bandwidth hogging, image-heavy emails with tables and hidden spacer images just to get some kind of consistency. This results in a bad experience for those designing, delivering and reading these emails.

Instead of sitting on my hands and complaining about the situation, I realized a much better option is to try and start a dialog with email client developers and work with them in any capacity to ensure we never take a backward step again. So we decided to start the Email Standards Project.

What are your main goals?

Our goal is to help email client developers ensure their applications support a basic level of web standards support. This baseline of standards was developed through feedback from the design community and includes the basic nuts and bolts required to consistently display a standards based HTML email.

Once we established this baseline we created an "acid test", which is a basic HTML email that allows you to easily see if that email client supports these standards. We then documented the results for every popular email client with recommendations on exactly what changes they need to make to embrace web standards.

In the short-term, that means trying to kick-start a conversation with key individuals from Microsoft, Google, IBM and Apple and working with them in any capacity possible to make progress. Once that happens, we'll focus on keeping the design community in the loop and encouraging them to move towards completely standards based HTML emails.

What has response been like from designers?

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. The web site has been live for less than a day and we've already had more than 100,000 page views and some fantastic plugs all over the web. We've also had loads of designers get in touch asking how they can lend a hand in spreading the word. I couldn't have asked for a better response.

Even more importantly, we've already had some contact with a major player in the email client world expressing their interest in the project, which is extremely encouraging.

Is there much awareness of the issues outside the design community?

I doubt there's a great deal of direct awareness about a lack of standards support in email, but there are certainly lots of people who are indirectly impacted.

All of us are sick of receiving garbled email newsletters that we can't read, ISP's are sick of downloading bloated table-based emails instead of lighter standards based ones, and the visually impaired are frustrated by the lack of accessibility afforded by non-standards compliant emails.

Just like the push for standards support in the browser a decade ago, moving towards standards support will provide a better email experience for everyone, not just designers.

Why should the email marketing industry support you?

That one's easy, because it will save them money and free up their time to focus on the content of their emails, not the coding. If those responsible for designing HTML emails could build them knowing they'll display consistently across all major email clients, they can dramatically reduce the development and QA time required.

Using tables for layout (the only way to get consistent rendering right now) is a dying art and something most newer designers aren't familiar with. As the rest of the web moves forward towards standards and away from tables, those designers capable of designing for email will shrink considerably, making email design an even more costly endeavor.

I understand this may make some email designers more money in the short term, but it's bad news for the industry as a whole.

What progress have you already made?

C'mon Mark, the site's only been live for 18 hours ;) Actually, we've already been approached by one of the big guys about this, but unfortunately that's all I can say about it at this stage. Our initial aim was to get the word out when we launched, which we've certainly achieved. It will be very interesting to see what eventuates over the next couple of months.

How realistic is it to expect the likes of MS to listen and act?

I think it's a common misconception that Microsoft doesn't like standards. I've spoken to plenty of Microsoft employees who 100% agree with what we're doing and with standards in general. It's really a matter of making that position filter up the ladder as high as it needs to go.

You've also got to be realistic. These guys have lots of priorities to consider when making these decisions and we're not expecting a service pack supporting web standards to come out next week.

I've seen a lot of Microsoft bashing since Outlook 2007 was released, but I really don't think that gets us anywhere. Instead, we've tried to do all the initial work for Microsoft and present them with a simple list of recommendations across all 4 of their email clients.

Of course, making recommendations is a whole lot easier than implementing them, but we're patient and in this for the long haul.

What are your next steps?

Right now we're seeing what the launch announcement produces and waiting to hear back from contacts at various email client developers. We're also looking to enlist the help from anyone who might have a contact within Gmail, The Windows Live Hotmail team, and any other email client currently sitting in our "Improvement Recommended" category.

Starting a dialog with the right person is the real priority right now, so if that's you, please get in touch.

More on design | Tags: email marketing, html email design, email standards project, david greiner, freshview

November 28, 2007

Today might be the day that email design grew up, left home, and got a room in a shared apartment with the web folk.

The Email Standards Project website just launched. It's a formal effort to get webmail services and email clients to render HTML emails in a more consistent way.

Anybody who has run their email through a design preview tool and felt their jaw drop on seeing the Hotmail or Lotus Notes screenshot will understand the importance of the initiative.

At the moment, the project is largely anchored in the design community, coordinated by the folk at Campaign Monitor. But I would urge all those involved in email marketing to give it support.

(Update: Read my interview with the project's founder)

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

Sometimes, significantly better results come from fairly simple changes to your approach. As two recent examples demonstrate.

MarketingSherpa highlight the case of the New York Academy of Sciences, where a simple rearrangement of their newsletter with some bigger house banners saw clicks, conversions and other important numbers...rocket.

Ken Magill reports on Bare Necessities, who sent selected customers both a direct mail postcard and email with shared messaging. These customers spent 15% more than those who just got the email.

(N.B. The article takes a closer look at this kind of integrated campaign and shows how it's easy to implement for some, but not others. Plus...everyone talks about increased revenues, but there are no numbers on the bottom line profits. Those postcards aren't free to print and send.)

And in a related article, Karen Gedney reminds us that the answers to many questions you might have about what to do differently are easy to find if you just test. And she has some ideas on how those tests might look.

More on design and copywriting | Tags: email marketing, email testing, email copywriting, email design, integrated marketing, direct marketing

Yesterday, I noted that "we've built up a set of best practices that have largely proved their value. But it's the real value you offer to readers that swings the deal for them."

The theme continues today in Grant Keller's article at iMediaConnection, where he stresses the role of respecting the reader in your email efforts.

He describes this in the context of sender reputation, thus acknowledging the new awareness that reputation is not just about your standing with those who manage incoming email, but also about your standing with those who read that email.

Tags: email marketing, sender reputation

November 27, 2007

I sometimes compare email marketing with forest management. Both, for example, have a dark side: spam...wholesale logging of rainforests. The comparison works well for list building, too.

The commercial forester seeks to plant out an ever-growing (!) acreage of forest with seedlings. But while expanding the size of the forest is a goal, the forester also takes care to ensure the good health of those stands already planted.

So, for example, she will thin out the plantation by taking out the poor performing trees, giving more scope for the remaining forest to thrive, prosper and yield high-quality sustainable timber. Quality counts as much as quantity, a concept familiar to email list owners.

Anyway, list growth needs to come hand-in-hand with list shrinkage. Dead addresses, unresponsive addresses are holding back your yield.

They pull down your stats and likely lead to delivery problems. Unresponsive recipients mark you as spam and email services do the same if you insist on emailing non-existent accounts.

Unlike the forester, however, it pays to give the low quality trees a chance to catch up with their more robust peers. In other words, get those quiet addresses to respond after all.

Megan Ouellet has some ideas on how you might do that in this post.

And in terms of fresh growth, MarketingProfs just released an old, but still relevant, round up of list acquisition approaches.

One recommended technique is encouraging forwards to a friend. Which by coincidence is also the topic of a new article by Adam Covati.

Happy harvesting.

More on list growth | Tags: email marketing, email list growth, building an email list, list hygiene

Last week I discussed the circumstances when image-rich emails might work well, despite image blocking issues.

Anna Billstrom took up the theme yesterday, taking some brand- and image-heavy emails and describing the concrete steps the senders might take to ensure these emails still work when images fail to show.

Or how they might make it more likely readers would want to download those blocked images.

All fascinating stuff, and I think the key lesson is not to take all best practices too literally. You can design for image suppression without sacrificing the visual creativity that can grab attention and encourage an action.

Or to put it another way...take account of blocked images when designing and writing emails, but don't forget to design for when images appear, too! And to design so that people will want to download those images!

P.S. See also the older post, "Innovation and safety in email marketing."

More on image blocking | Tags: email marketing, email design, html email, image blocking, image suppression

Possibly. Possibly not.

A recent post looked at the subject line approaches in fund-raising emails sent by candidates in the US Presidential race.

Others are putting the politicians' email practices under the microscope, too. The general tone of articles at the Washington Post and e.politics is that the campaigns are painting themselves into an email corner.

By repeatedly sending effectively the same message -- "donate now!" -- to the same people and resorting to spam-like subject lines to jump start the reader's interest, these political emails neglect the concept of the long-term email experience.

It's always tempting with email just to send out another promotional blast. But if you have a relatively limited collection of products and services, it's hard to keep interest going over longer periods.

That's where creativity comes in. And a willingness to see email as a series of interactions that build towards some desirable goal. Not just a quick sale (which gets harder and harder to repeat) but long-term loyalty and, yes, sustainable sales.

So perhaps not best to take political campaigns as a role model for how to do email ones.

As if to prove the point, Michael Whitney demonstrates how poorly many political emails rate against an email design checklist.

But check the comments to his article. The writer suggests design standards are all very well, but as a reader he needs the email to meet a whole host of other criteria based around the informational and emotional value of that email.

And that concept is food for thought for everyone. As an industry, we've built up a set of best practices that have largely proved their value. But it's the real value you offer to readers that swings the deal for them.

More on tactics and strategies | Tags: email marketing, campaign emails, email experience

November 26, 2007

Troubled by the jargon insiders throw around wantonly when discussing the ins and outs of getting email delivered? You can get help from a new article I just posted here.

The glossary only assumes your understanding of email extends as far as knowing what an inbox is, and explains the meaning of such concepts as:

• email deliverability
• anti-spam technologies
• spam filters
• spam reports
  
• blacklists
• whitelists
• email certification
• email authentication
• email (sender) reputation

It may not be 100% technically correct, but that isn't the point: there are links in there, too, for those who want to go beyond the basics and grasp all the nuances and shades of gray.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, email authentication, email certification, anti-spam, spam, email blacklists, whitelists

November 23, 2007

The organizers of a recent Belgian email marketing event were kind enough to post all the presentation slides online for us. Don't panic - they are all in English.

The slides contain plenty of worthy information in their own right, and cover various topics:

• Testing
• List growth (NB: under Belgian email laws)
• Deliverability
• Metrics
• General best practices for copywriting, email design and landing pages

Enjoyable reading from real experts. And a reminder that email marketing expertise is not limited to North America...

Tags: email marketing

November 22, 2007

Common practice is to wag a warning finger at any commercial email made up mostly (or even entirely) of images.

The argument is a clear one. Much email software and many webmail services suppress images by default.

If your email lives by its pictures, then your message dies when those pictures don't display. It's also suggested that image-rich emails attract more attention from spam filters.

Good, now Lisa Harmon shows us some beautiful image-rich emails in this post over at the EEC where she talks about product photography.

I can't be certain, but I'm sure all the highlighted emails look pretty uninspiring if images are blocked. Yet...I'm equally sure that the folk behind these campaigns are perfectly aware of image blocking issues.

So, do they know something we don't know?

Are recipients perhaps instructing their webmail service or email client to download the images? More than we might think?

Yes and no. Your chances of getting people to manually want your images displayed probably depends on a number of factors:

Brand and recognition

The more a recipient trusts and values the sender and the emails, the more likely they are to accept images. Trust itself depends on many factors, but chief among these will be your brand and previous experience with your business and email program.

This is further support for the idea that you need to write/design your sender line, subject line and the top of your email body (which is most likely to show up in preview panes) to ensure people are clear on where the email is coming from and what it's all about.

The nature of the experience

Both the basic nature of an email and the specific way you design and copywrite it impact the decision to download images or not.

For the first, think emails where the reader actually wants or needs to see images as part of the fundamental experience. Consider an email promotion selling modern art. Or an email newsletter with a travel report on the Rio carnival.

For the second, think a business report on sales trends. Written well, it should intice people to download images so they can see that nice chart of sales through time.

Alt tags are critical here. Where they are used (and a recent Bronto survey suggests they're not used as much as they should be,) it's mostly in a descriptive sense:


But alt tags could and should be treated as another part of your copy. So they engender the desire to see the image or take the action called for in the image.


In the light of the above, we note that all Lisa's image-rich examples are big brands -- Macy's, J.Crew, Williams-Sonoma etc. -- involving very visual shopping experiences. (You don't buy clothes or fashion accessories based on a technical description of the materials used to make them.)

So perhaps folk really are activating those blocked images. What do you think?

More on image blocking | Tags: email marketing, image blocking, image suppression

November 21, 2007

While spammers may have the ethics of a starvation-crazed hyena, they have rather more brains.

In a seems-simple-but-why-didn't-I-think-of-that? article today, Stefan Pollard reminds us that said spammers are also using seasonal subject lines to trick their way to an open or two.

One of the basic rules of subject line writing is not to sound like a spammer. So what's an email marketer to do when it comes to holiday offers and content?

Stefan has some suggestions in his article.

If you're looking for examples of promising subject approaches, then Lisa Harmon highlights the efforts of Crate & Barrel and Chef. They use a Thanksgiving theme, but also illustrate the concept of running a series of related emails with a common thread, rather than a series of disconnected one-off messages.

And adding the third leg to our subject line stool, Bronto videoed two of their experts debating head-to-head on the good, the bad and the "best left for the cat" of various retail email subject headers.

The perfect subject line is like the search for the perfect pizza. You can get close, but however well you do, you're always left wondering if an extra pinch of oregano might have made all the difference.

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

Thanksgiving makes a great (though perhaps overused) topic for email editorial and content right now. But what about all those on your list who are neither American nor living in the USA?

If you do have a global list and can't segment by region, a simple workaround is to do what AWeber did in a recent blog post:

"If you're in the U.S. like we are, more than likely this Thursday you will be celebrating Thanksgiving, and..."

The "if" and "more than likely" bits are enough to ensure nobody need feel alienated by the topic.

Anyway, since we're in a holiday mood, here are a few more articles to add to the existing collection of holiday email marketing advice.

Two articles take Thanksgiving as a cue to sit back and reflect on your email program and how you treat subscribers and customers in general.

Al DiGuido suggests a thank-you email is in order. And Jordan Ayan squeezes way too much out of the turkey metaphor with a reminder of some of the basic concepts worth revisiting in evaluating your efforts.

Email Karma has some more suggestions on getting ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping sprees in the US. And AWeber wade in again with five tips on how to exploit (or not) the holiday season with your emails.

Tags: email marketing, holiday email marketing

November 20, 2007

A few days ago, MailChimp alerted us to the possibility that certain anti-spam technologies might be following links in emails, including unsubscribe links that take the recipient off your address list.

Which raises the ugly prospect of innocent and unwanted unsubscribes happening.

Fortunately, the problem seems minor at the moment. Not least because many unsubscribe links require a second action to take effect. Simply following the link does not take you off the list right away, but sends you to a preference page where you confirm your wish.

BUT...

A comment on my report asked about the possible impacts given the growing prevalence of the list-unsubscribe header.

This is an email header which includes a one-click unsubscribe link. See this website for an explanation of what it is and why more and more senders are using this header.

Anyway, if senders start putting the list-unsubscribe header in their outgoing emails, then all their emails to every receiving domain contain a one-click unsubscribe link in the header information.

So if rogue anti-spam technology clicks on the link in the header, the recipient is unsubscribed. An unsubscribe link in your actual message that uses a two-step process won't protect you.

That's all theory, so I asked the MailChimp folk for their thoughts.

Chad Morris was able to put us at ease...

"I haven't heard anything about spam filters clicking on the List-Unsubscribe link, and I would be very surprised if any did."

"When the unsubscribe link is in the body of the email message, it's possible that the spam filter just doesn't realize that the link is an unsubscribe link."

"However, the List-Unsubscribe header doesn't appear in the message body, and it is explicitly marked as an unsubscribe link according to a published standard."

"The only way a spam filter would click on it is if they clicked on anything that looked like a URL in the entire raw message, without decoding it first. Basically, only if they wrote an email spam filter without understanding how email works."

Thanks Chad!

Tags: email marketing, list-unsubscribe header, anti-spam

November 19, 2007

The web is awash with great email marketing advice right now. Too much for one blog to cover unfortunately.

But I was drawn to a few articles and posts where practitioners pass on solid advice based on what they're doing or have learnt in the course of their job.

Paul Briggs, for example, is Director of Customer Marketing and Loyalty at Travelocity.

His interview with EyeforTravel offers fascinating insights into how a large company makes diverse use of email to drives sales and loyalty.

He also reveals how they measure and evaluate email performance.

Karen Gedney is an email copywriter with numerous campaigns to her credit. In this article, she lets us look at her own starter checklist of things to review before you send out that email.

Stephanie Miller often passes on tips and tricks gleaned from helping and observing numerous marketing clients at work. She has fresh advice on the best email marketing approach to take as we near some of the hottest on- and offline shopping days.

Tags: email marketing

Your goal is physical fitness. So you take up jogging. You're likely to jog further wearing a pair of expensive running shoes rather than woolen slippers.

But the Nikes won't get you out of bed in the morning. Nor will they lift your legs up and down for you. You have to run the mile yourself.

Ditto getting emails delivered. Today in ClickZ, Jeanne Jennings points out the delivery improvements that come from switching to a professional email service provider.

But that only gets you so far. Because as Ken Takahashi also notes, the service provider has no influence on various factors that determine your delivery success rate.

You have to run the deliverability mile yourself. Or as I put it in an earlier post, sometimes the deliverability problem is you.

Service listings and more on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, deliverability, esp, email marketing service

Four short months ago, cries of "email is dead!" rang round the halls of the Internet, with social networks widely labeled the cause of death. It prompted mild mannered email marketers to come out and vigorously defend the medium.

A month ago, suggestions emerged that far from killing email, "social networks are set to breathe new life into the medium."

In the last few days, the "email is dead" theme has returned. Except this time, it's not just email marketers refuting that prediction.

Instead, mainstream media and technology commentators are coming out in support of email, and suggesting the big webmail providers could beat the social networks at their own game.

It seems email marketers were right. (So far.)

Saul Hansell set the ball rolling, revealing Google and Yahoo's "social email" plans in this New York Times piece. That prompted much (largely positive) discussion from other heavyweights, such as Mashable and Business Week.

A day later, the "but email is dead" backlash began, prompted in part by a contribution in Slate suggesting communication habits among youths might (not would) force oldies to change their email ways.

This time, though, there was more public argument about this possibility, with the likes of Publisher 2.0 claiming email's ubiquity is a USP that guarantees survival.

Of course, the long-term survival of email is all very well. That does not mean email infrastructure, services and habits stay the same.

Email is not dead, but it is changing. So marketers cannot expect to keep using it the same way and see the same results.

The question is not "is there a future for email?" but "how will email look in the future?" and "how does that change my approach to email marketing?"

The challenge to email evangelists I issued a while back remains valid today.

(For those interested, the blog world is full of contributions on these two subjects: email and social networks and the future of email. Use Technorati to follow the debate.)

*Shakespeare's Henry VI. Part III

Tags: email marketing, email is dead, social networks, future of email

November 16, 2007

Domestic preparations for tonight's Austria vs England football match prevent me from blogging extensively today, so let's end the week with a pervasive myth.

I have lost count of the number of experienced experts and professionals who tell people that sending commercial email in the USA without getting the permission of the recipient violates federal Can-Spam law.

It comes as a shock, but Can-Spam does not require an opt-in. Check the FTC's website if you don't believe it.

Permission is necessary because it makes marketing sense, not because it's a legal requirement.

The danger here is that US marketers who forget the above point may assume wrongly that compliance with Can-Spam means they're likely compliant with other countries' anti-spam laws.

Laws in Europe and elsewhere tend to be much tougher about permission. Which is a good thing for email marketing, but that's another story. For info on the different laws out there, check these pages.

Tags: email marketing, can-spam, anti-spam, spam laws

November 15, 2007

More tears were shed in 2007 over rendering problems than perhaps any other email marketing issue. Outlook 2007 broke some designer hearts and much ink has gone into suggesting ways to ensure your design works well wherever people look at it.

Not much actually gets said, though, about the consequences of emails that look ugly in particular clients or webmail services.

We kind of assume it hurts response rates, but is the reaction more extreme than just a missed click?

Buried deep within a small survey by StoneShot of the email habits of independent financial advisers (see press release) is this little gem...

When asked "What would cause you to unsubscribe from an email?", 73% said irrelevant content. (Another vote for relevancy and targeting there). But 8% said "Email does not display properly."

Leaving aside the statistical significance of that result, it's certainly a warning to those (ahem...like me) who thought a few ugly emails can't do too much harm.

Email has this nasty habit of inviting negative responses rather than just an absence of positive ones. A critical point.

Write a bad newspaper ad, people ignore it. Write a bad email, people report you as spam or unsubscribe from all future emails from you. Nobody can unsubscribe from your newspaper ads.

Just another reason to keep on chasing those best practices.

Talking of design and best practices...a couple of new links to help...

Mark Wyner tested various clients and webmail services to see how they handled image maps. Here are the results.

And Anna Billstrom has added another example to her one-woman crusade to bring home the importance of image blocking to email design.

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

(Borrow sounds so much nicer than steal, doesn't it?)

In the light of the Email Experience Council's launch of a new award for email marketing campaigns (details and nomination forms here), it's time to revisit all those places you can get inspiration and ideas from.

Until the EEC award is announced in February 2008, this means...

Award galleries

• MarketingSherpa Email Awards. See 39 winning campaigns from the 2007 awards and 38 from 2006.
• ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards. The awards from 2003-2006 include links to winners in email campaign and/or email newsletter categories. The 2007 awards were about defining achievements of the decade. Can-Spam won the email category. An "interesting" choice.
• LISTSERV Choice awards. These ran for two years and you can see case studies of the winners here.
• Internet Advertising Competition produced by the Web Marketing Association. Each year has numerous awards for use of email in different industries. Use the entry search facility at the bottom of this page to find relevant links from 2007 and previous years.
• ad:tech Annual Awards. There's a best email marketing campaign among the many categories. Last year's winners are listed at the awards site.
  

Design galleries and screenshots

• Campaign Monitor's Email Design Gallery, which you can browse by column layout and email type.
• eROI's The Email Wars blog often posts screenshots and analysis of good and bad campaign examples. See the best of email and worst of email categories.
• The Smith-Harmon blog regularly reviews email direct marketing creative.
• The author of the above blog also posts creative reviews in the Make it Pop section of the EEC's site.
• The EEC's Chad White monitors retailer emails and includes numerous screenshots and analysis as part of his RetailEmail.Blogspot blog.

Case study collections

• The biggest collection with screenshots included is at MarketingSherpa, who currently list 181 email marketing case studies. You need to register to access them (there's a free trial, after which you pay a membership fee.)
• Case studies appear irregularly at DMNews and Chief Marketer, but usually with less detail than the Sherpa articles.
• Email marketing case studies from around the web are listed here, with sub-categories for B2B, B2C, travel and non-profit.

Do add your own suggestions in the comments...

Tags: email marketing, email design, email marketing case studies, email marketing awards

November 14, 2007

You might have seen the results of the survey (press release | report) carried out by EmailStatCenter.com, who gathered email marketers' views on metrics and other challenges.

Let's see what we can learn from some of the highlights...

Respondents ranked clickthrough rate as the most important metric worth measuring.

Now, this is the point where hardened direct marketers laugh about clicks being ranked higher than revenue or ROI.

But it's worth remembering that not all emails have a sale as the prime objective. But just about every marketing email would like recipients to click on a link. Hence the ubiquity of the measurement.

Public discussions of metrics and benchmarks tend to ignore the importance of brand and relationship-building newsletters, for example, where measuring success is more art than science.

(Loren McDonald recently invited us to be more expansive in our choice of success measures to follow; read his article on balanced scorecards.)

Deliverability metrics were ranked next after CTR, whereby we might ask how people are actually measuring deliverability. Perhaps a good question for next year's survey?

Many (most?) email marketing services and software report delivery success as the number of emails sent minus the number that bounced.

We know this calculation overestimates the real number of delivered emails (see point 1 in this article for why.) Which explains the growing popularity of independent delivery monitor tools.

Curiously, revenue was ranked lower than ROI, even though you need the former to measure the latter...

In other results, there was general dissatisfaction with the quality of industry benchmarks. This relates to the lack of standards in how different benchmark sources calculate particular metrics.

There is a strong school of thought which says industry benchmarks are a waste of space and marketers should focus on using their own historical results to draw insight and inspiration from.

That's good advice, but surveys like this show that people still want benchmarks.

Your own results can tell you if you're improving. And give clues to how to make further improvements. But they can't tell you if your program as a whole is doing badly compared to your competition.

You can argue about its value all you like, but people still feel a need for reassurance that they really are doing a good job (or not.)

I'm not sure what the solution is there.

Interestingly, marketers said list development and growth was their biggest challenge . Perhaps the solution to that problem is to focus less on getting new subscribers and more on getting more value out of your current ones. Lose our fear of smaller lists.

The survey was the first of an annual series, so it should be interesting to see how the views and perceptions of email marketers change over time.

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

November 13, 2007

One of the long unanswered questions about email marketing is whether you can combine video and email in a way that works.

Like many interactive features, there are question marks over how reliably videos display when viewed within an email.

It now seems some best practices are emerging, given some recent posts and articles that crossed my desktop.

First, news of three separate companies claiming significant success with using videos in email campaigns.

Diana Dilworth reports on the results achieved by the Intercontinental Hotel Group and Wachovia. While MarketingSherpa has a case study on a video email campaign by Brighter Blooms Nursery.

The common factor in all three cases: the emails contain links to videos hosted at a website. Not videos embedded in the email itself.

If the sensible move is to use email to drive people to your video message, how do you best format the call to action?

A best practice might also be emerging here. eROI's Dylan Boyd and the folk at Emma Email Marketing both have blog posts and screenshots praising email which include both text links and image links to the online video.

The clever bit is that the images are snapshots of a video player showing a still from the video. So clicking on the player (as if you wanted to use it) will take you off to the website for online viewing.

Check the comments section on Dylan's post for discussion on the validity of the approach and an alternative.

Video looks to have a bright future among the YouTube generation and in a web world replete with enough high-speed broadband not to care about bandwidth issues anymore.

For more help on your video efforts, try this list of 150+ online video tools and resources from the folk at Mashable.

Packed my first parcel today. So either I'm unusually organized (unlikely) or the holiday buying season is well underway. Time for another roundup of all the advice out there.

Update: See the latest articles for the 2008 season.

The latest...

Henry Hyder-Smith talks about timing, targeting, design and the post-Xmas follow-up.

Julian Scott gives us one of the more comprehensive articles on holiday email strategies, tactics and planning requirements. You're sure to find an idea or three in there.

Stefan Pollard has another comprehensive one for us, too. He notes that it's too late for a pre-holiday season overhaul of your email marketing system, but there are still a lot of quick fixes you can implement in time to boost year-end results.

Lisa Harmon has some tips on how to make your email navigational headers fit a seasonal end-of-year theme. (With examples.)

DJ Waldow has six recommendations for how you might map out the rest of your email marketing in 2007. (Plus answers to the excuses you might use to avoid implementing these recommendations.)

Gail Goodman has 10 succinct ideas on how to do "more than just say, "Happy Holidays" with your e-card."

Jaime Senior turns the concept on its head and describes what we might learn about email from the way people open gifts. The result is some copywriting, design and testing best practices.

From earlier this year...

• Here Come the Holidays! 7 Tips to Get You Ready Now
• GourmetStation.com plans for hearty holiday push
• Using email marketing for the holidays
• Five Holiday E-Mail Marketing Do's and Don'ts
• 3 Ideas to Boost Holiday Email Response
• Holiday preparations
• Gearing up for the holiday season
• Campaign Monitor's best Xmas designs 2005 and 2006

From last year...

Similar articles from 2006.

Tags: email marketing, holiday marketing, Christmas marketing

November 12, 2007

Intriguing article at ECommerce-Guide today on the e-tailing group's 6th Annual Merchant Survey.

Intriguing for two reasons.

First, given all the stick email marketers get for not measuring stuff properly, it's interesting to see that e-commerce folk are just as lax.

Over 25% of merchants surveyed had no idea what their shopping cart abandonment rates were. (That's a pretty important stat for those in the online retail game.)

Second, the article reports on various practices employed to use email to chase up people who put products in their shopping cart but fail to check out. It includes specific examples from the field.

Perhaps some inspiration in there for you?

More advanced tactics | Tags: email marketing, shopping cart abandonment, triggered emails

MailChimp just posted a warning that spam filters may be "clicking" on the links in your emails. They spotted the problem because it meant some folk getting unsubscribed as a result of the filter clicking a one-step unsubscribe link.

I filed this under "mildly concerning" and forgot about it until Laura pointed out that they might equally click on the links in those emails asking folk to confirm their email subscription. Which would throw doubts on the usefulness of double opt-in.

And that led me to wonder about your campaign stats. Are some of those clicks that fail to take any action when they reach your website just spam filters in action?

Email marketing metrics are contentious enough without throwing another measurement issue in there.

And what about the impact on those who advertise in emails, if the reported clicks are overestimating the true results?

What if you're paying on an (albeit rare) per-click basis for those ads?

A lot of this is speculation for now. A look at my own campaign reports finds no individuals seemingly clicking on every link in the email (as you'd expect from a spam filter gone crazy.)

Any email or anti-spam tech gurus out there like to shed light on this issue?

Tags: email marketing, spam filters, email marketing metrics, anti-spam

November 09, 2007

The email focus turns to retail promotions as the holiday spirit enters households and gently teases open purses, wallets and piggy banks.

The top destination for insight into retail email practices is Chad White's RetailEmail.Blogspot site.

But a seasonal traipse around the web reveals a few other recent articles and blog posts that will also help steer your email sales in the right direction.

First up, Linda Bustos offers a long post reviewing the tips, tricks and advice that came out of a recent webinar entitled "12 Can't Miss Email Strategies for Online Retailers." Chad's blog has it covered, too.

Then Glenn Gabe gives a very detailed explanation of how to use Google's Analytics service to track the results of your email promotions after people click through to your website.

Many retailers don't have access to integrated web and email marketing analytics, so the Google workaround is a good (and cheap) alternative.

Glenn's explanation tracks results at a campaign level.

I'm wondering though whether you might use your ESP's or software's merge facility to add the email address to the analytics-friendly links you use in your emails. So you could actually tie subsequent website activity to the individual recipient?

Meanwhile, Jared Reitzin invites us to think of the different ways we can use both email and SMS (text messaging) to get people to purchase a product, complete the transaction successfully and then buy again.

Some good thoughts - particularly if you're new (like me ) to SMS.

Finally, if you've an online store, chances are you're doing PPC search marketing, too. Jamie Schissler explains why you should be capturing email opt-ins from those search visitors and what you should then do with them.

More tactics and strategies | Tags: email marketing, retail emails, web analytics, sms marketing

November 08, 2007

The comments on an earlier post about IP addresses brought up the issue of accountability.

Webster defines it as "an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions."

"Well, yeah," I hear you say..."we've always had to take responsibility for the results of our email efforts." But have we?

It wasn't long ago that email marketing was a slap happy affair. You sent your messages out. And if you didn't get it right, you still got enough of a response to pay the bills. No harm was done.

Today's Internet and today's Internet user give accountability unprecedented weight in email marketing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of deliverability.

Webmail services have long empowered users to determine your delivery success by marking your emails as spam (or not.) Too many spam reports and you're on a blacklist. Users can hold you accountable for your actions.

But it doesn't stop there. Last week we learnt that this concept might extend to desktop email software, now that IMAP functionality is growing.

More importantly, one of the main thrusts of global anti-spam efforts is to develop standards and techniques that allow email services to reliably identify the sender of an email.

The spread of these authentication technologies will eventually mean that your emailing history is (and remains) closely tied to your domain.

There will be no escaping your past and present actions. You will be held increasingly accountable for your email practices.

In a recent roundtable on the future of email marketing, Tricia Robinson-Pridemore noted, "vendors can make sure the technology side of it is as optimal as possible, but they can't ensure delivery when you still have the variables the e-mail marketer is responsible for..."

But accountability goes beyond deliverability.

Today's email user is a fickle creature. The tolerance threshold for "poor" emails drops with each passing week. Users have alternatives. Not just your competitors' emails, but all the other choices for receiving offers and information.

Just this week, Hitwise reported how, for example... "for the first time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services."

Fail to meet ever increasing expectations and the user punishes you by ignoring your message. Or hurting your deliverability through spam reports. Or worse.

The Internet has always given customers a voice and an audience, but the reach of the disillusioned subscriber grows ever vaster. Thanks to the growth of blogs, social media and all the other ways individuals can speak to a wider world.

Once you accept the importance of accountability and the shift of power to the recipient, it changes your whole perspective.

Your focus moves away from meeting business needs to understanding how to match those needs with those of the recipient.

Email marketing becomes more relationship-focused. A recent article from ThinData, for example, emphasizes the role of building trust (with tips on how to do that) in driving successful email programs. A topic we've considered before.

You think more in terms of long-term customer experiences, holistic campaigns rather than a series of one-off promotions, targeting, relevancy, dynamic content, personalization, customization, trigger emails and all the other buzzwords that now really do mean something in a brave, new, accountable world.

And when you do that...it works.

Listrak, for example, just released a case study showing how various success metrics improved when email content was based on a recipient's previous purchase history.

The future is bright. But the future is in your hands.

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, email accountability, anti-spam, spam, relationship marketing

Sometimes we make life hard for ourselves. The way we put emails together in practice often means that two things get left to the last minute, both doomed to scant thought and attention:

The subject line, and...

The call to action.

Given we might argue that those are the two most important copywriting elements in your whole email, we ought to lavish more love and attention on them.

Earlier this week, Megan Ouellet came up with some quick tips on how to make that call to action work harder for you.

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

Everybody kind of "knows" that forms don't work or display properly in email. Or do they? Thanks to Mark Wyner on the Campaign Monitor blog, we can now point to some reliable documentation on the matter.

Mark lists how forms display and function in HTML emails processed by 15 common desktop clients and webmail services.

But if forms are pretty much a non-starter, does this mean you can't embed surveys into emails? Must you always link out to a survey on a webpage?

No. You can use a clever workaround that exploits the fact that most ESPs and email marketing software tracks clicks. Adam Covati shows you how to do it.

More on forms in emails | Tags: email marketing, email forms, email surveys, html email

November 06, 2007

The email marketing media can get a little cosy at times (Ken Magill's columns excepted.) Perhaps the words "best practices" are at fault, since they imply there can only be one best practice.

Sometimes that's indeed the case. Nobody will argue that a continuous paragraph of 345 lines of text makes for an engaging email read.

But it's good to shake the bars of the email cage now and then, and recognize that there are sometimes different ways to achieve the same email marketing ends.

Consider these recent blog posts and articles, for example, all of which challenge common assumptions...

Case 1: Josh takes a look at the emails sent out by Borders.

Many folk would argue that the regular delivery time and day ensures the emails are recognized and expected by recipients. Josh suggests that this could actually be the problem with the Borders program, and their marketers might vary things a little...


Case 2: There's a strong argument that says you should centralize email in your business, so you ensure all outgoing marketing (and perhaps other) email is coordinated in terms of message, branding and contact frequencies.

Kevin Hillstrom sees the point, but says it's not always that simple. You also need to leave room for flexibility...


Case 3: Most marketers favor HTML emails enriched with images to get the message across. Anna Billstrom highlights a Barack Obama campaign email which takes a simple text-based approach instead...



As the old saying goes, "there's more than one way to peel a potato."

Tags: email marketing

November 05, 2007

MarketingSherpa just released the new edition of their Landing Pages Handbook. My copy is on its way to me, so a review will come later.

This is not a benchmark book like their email marketing product. While it does contain lots of data, the focus is on how-to information for landing page copy, design and testing. Plus dozens of sample landing pages. And specific advice and sections for email marketers only.

Compared to the long out-of-print first edition, the price has gone up significantly. But so has the number of pages, charts and sample landing pages...more info here.

(Note: I have a financial affiliation with MarketingSherpa so might be biased.)

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

November 04, 2007

Let me make a tenuous connection to my other hobby to make a point about measuring your email marketing success.

Some folk seem to be suggesting that proponents of open rates should have their heads removed and mounted on poles in the lobby. To warn other ignorants not focused enough on the end result of their email campaigns.

The real measure of your campaign's success, they say, is the bottom line result. What did you want to achieve in concrete responses (sales, downloads, visits etc) and what did the email deliver?

Correct I say, but...oops...there goes the baby bawling its way down the hillside with the bathwater.

You measure success by measuring what you're really trying to achieve. But you learn how to improve by measuring everything else, too.

Soccer managers worry about the end result. Success is measured by the final score after 90 minutes.

But when the team turns up to training the next day, it's all the other metrics that help determine what to work on...shots on goal, tackles made, offsides conceded, possession rates, etc. etc.

So it is with email. Open rates etc. are not good absolute measures for telling you if you did a great job or not. But that's not what they're really for...

More information:

How to use email open rates
Email success measures: the good, the bad and the irrelevant

Tags: email marketing, email open rates, email marketing metrics,