No man is an iland

January 31, 2008

I'm abroad but it seems foolish to deny you some fabulous new article links until my return on Monday. So have a peek at these:

A while back I argued about the need to stay creative and not get caught in the rut of email mediocrity. Easier said than done.

But you may find inspiration from Chad White's 2007 Design Hall of Fame. He introduces some standout examples of calls to action, animated gifs, send-to-a-friend functionality and images.

Talking about calls to action, one point I forgot to mention yesterday is that it helps to have one. Dylan takes Ben and Jerry's to task for missing this point.

But let's focus on getting it right. Mathew Patterson has a long article outlining the principles of beautiful HTML email design. As well as the words of advice, note the many screenshots of good design in action.

Then MarketingSherpa report on a somewhat complicated study of email newsletter design.

I'll admit it left me a little confused. But the takeaway seems to be that it's very definitely worth testing different design approaches to find the right fit for your audience and goals.

(And by design approach I mean the layout and structure as a whole, rather than just tweaking individual elements within that design.)

And talking of design approaches, just how many email templates does a business need? MailChimp say seven and describe each for us.

Finally, I remain a commited fan of the Email Standards Project for HTML email. They are a touch frustrated at their inability to get through to the nice folk at Gmail in their pursuit of email client rendering standards. So they hit on a rather fun idea to help with their communication efforts. Take a peek and join in.

Tags: email marketing, email design, html email

January 30, 2008

The email call to action (CTA) gets astonishingly little attention compared to the craft and care that goes into subject lines. Yet the CTA also plays an important role in persuading people to take the next step in the chain of events leading to an eventual sale / download / registration / ad impresssion, etc.

Here's a quick call to action overview, followed by a few pointers to more in-depth articles:

Give them a reason to click

"Click here" leaves a lot to the imagination. Take away the uncertainty by explaining what a click really does. And remind them of the benefits of doing so.

For example...

• "click to register for your free report"
• "review colors and styles"
• "click to learn more"

You can have more than one link

There are obvious places for a formal call to action, such as adjacent to the relevant text. But there's no rule that says you can only have one link.

You might have a link and call to action at the very top of your email to catch those with low attention spans. One at the end of the relevant copy and images, for those who viewed everything. And/or others at natural breaks in the email copy or close to response-oriented text and images.

Also consider making images and text snippets clickable to satisfy users' natural curiosity. Studies show people will try and click on various elements within an email or on a webpage, such as images, headlines, product names etc.

Make it stand out but avoid the spam trap

Links need to be clearly clickable. So the text or image needs to stand out. But don't be seduced into anything that might look like the kind of CTA you find in a spam email. So no punctuation overload, for example.

And be aware that image-based calls to action may get blocked. You should have a text alternative somewhere to deal with that eventuality.

For more details, try these articles:
8 Tips for a Stronger Call to Action
Pay attention to your call-to-action
Call to Action: good practices (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
Image links versus text links
Simple Word Change in Email Hyperlink Raises Clicks 8.53%
Email marketing: call-to-action tips

January 29, 2008

With design and deliverability issues grabbing the headlines, email copywriting remains a much undervalued skill and underreported topic. So let's redress the balance today.

I first "discovered" the power of bullet points in a book by Marcia Yudkin, which has almost 40 pages on the topic.

They have a special place in marketing emails, since they reflect the email users' predilection for concise, precise, scannable information.

In a blog post yesterday, the great Anne Holland makes two important points about the order of your bullet points and the words within them. A few simple changes could find your important messages far better exposed to willing eyeballs.

And for more on bullets in emails, try these articles:

Writing bullet points:
Little Known Ways to Write Fascinating Bullet Points

Problems with bullets in emails:
How not to do bullets in HTML Email
Creative Alternative to Bullet Images

More on copywriting | Tags: email copywriting, bullet points

January 28, 2008

If a preview pane enjoyed a romantic night with some snippet text, the outcome would be the email equivalent of the Johnson Box.

Forget the jargon and dive into this case study by Jeanne Jennings. She reveals how the email application of the Johnson Box direct mail concept produced astonishing improvements to results.

Like all the best ideas, it's elegant, simple and has you wondering why you never thought of it yourself.

Tags: email marketing, johnson box, email copywriting

It was Bob Marley who once noted...


In the email world, it's the spammers and phishers trying to make the world worse. And legitimate email marketers carry a responsibility to fight the good fight against them.

If you want to take a peek into the dark crevices inhabited by, for example, the phishing community, see this interview with two security researchers.

Unfortunately, it's not just the criminal element undermining email. Deirdre Cook writes today about our desire for instant gratification and how this jars with the true path to email marketing success, which requires patient application of best practices.

This post by Tom O'Leary echoes the theme. Tom tells of recent encounters with would-be senders of bulk email who just weren't prepared to make the necessary investment that good email marketing demands. As he so wisely notes:


Not that the patient application of best practices has to be boring. Deirdre's article includes a few tips on how to make the long journey to success shorter and more fun.

After all, Bob Marley also said:

January 25, 2008

Email is not just a sales flyer in electronic form. Emails impact the way recipients think about you, your business or your brand. Each and every message influences the image and impression people have.

Once you accept this, you must also accept that every email (and every element of each email) contributes to this experiential effect.

In this sense, every email becomes a marketing one.

That has many consequences. For example, it suggests there should be marketing input to all outgoing email from your business, whoever sends it.

Consider one of last year's hot trends: adding marketing elements to transactional email.

This happened partly because people spotted the selling opportunity (think of Amazon's "recommendations" built into order confirmations.)

But it also happened because of a recognition that transactional emails have a marketing impact. So they need care and attention in terms of tone, style, branding as well.

Equally, if you accept the "brand experience" role of email, then every element in your email and every interaction with your email system has a potential impact on this experience.

Which is why oft-forgotten aspects of email life, like administrative headers and footers deserve more marketer love than they get.

Two weeks ago, for example, Stefan Pollard wrote about the snippet text. And just yesterday Lisa Harmon pulled out a few examples to illustrate some possible approaches for the little lines of text that top your email (check the comments on her post, too.)

Perhaps the most ignored aspect of email is the unsubscribe mechanism. Chad White just released the "Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study," which demonstrates how leading retailers are handling (or not) this email marketing orphan.

Chad shows there is much room for improvement.

When people leave your list, they are not necessarily ending their relationship with your business as a whole. They are just choosing to no longer hear from you through the medium of your email newsletter or sales list.

That's an important point. When they leave your list, you must leave them with a positive impression. Because they are still customers or prospects. Still, perhaps, interacting with you in other ways or through other channels.

Consider also that people trying to unsubscribe aren't necessarily saying they want to leave your list. What they are really saying is "I'm not interested in your content" or "you send me too many emails."

So the unsubscribe process is also an opportunity. To make a positive impact. To learn where you are going wrong with your emails. To present would-be unsubscribes with alternatives that address their needs and keep them on board.

That means:

• intuitive, user-friendly unsubscribe mechanisms
• ...with instructions or content written with as much copywriting care as you'd give to the rest of your email
• ...with opportunities to solicit feedback
• ...and presenting alternatives: let users change content or frequency preferences, or point them to other ways of getting info from you, such as RSS feeds.

Unfortunately, most of us are stuck with preset unsubscribe mechanisms and templates with little opportunity for customization. So listen up ESPs! Help us make the right impression...

Tags: email marketing, list management, email unsubscribes

January 24, 2008

In our happiest dreams, recipients get emails when they have the time, inclination and need to read and act on the contents.

Problem is, we don't know when this is. Nor is it the same time of day for everybody.

So, how do we make the best of the timing situation? One way is simply to find the sending time in the day that gets the best response across your email list.

Which means testing.

MarketingSherpa, for example, recently reported on one retailer who found changing the send time from late afternoon to early morning could produce lifts in clickthrough rates of over 15 percentage points.

Another way is to allow the recipient to determine when they should get emails. This concept is not a new one and is behind the success of autoresponders and the current interest in triggered emails.

But it can apply equally to broadcast, generic email, too. A recent article at ITWales suggests sending out emails at the time of day when each subscriber opted-in or last opened your email.

Back in 2006, Bill Nussey reported on how eBags took exactly this "individual send time" approach and saw success metrics (opens, clicks, revenue) rise dramatically.

If you know when people spend time at your website, you can use that to time your emails too. "Evening browsers" get your newsletter in the late afternoon, lunchtime browsers late morning, weekend browsers...at the weekend?

Any other ideas or examples?

More on timing and frequency | Tags: email marketing, best time to send email

The process of getting your email in front of the would-be recipient is a lot like snakes and ladders. As your email travels across the ether, it can get help from ladders (such as certification programs) and hindrance from snakes (such as anti-spam filters.)

Unfortunately, unlike in the board game, your email won't necessarily "get there eventually." Some of those deliverability snakes have tails that end in electronic shredders.

There are four approaches currently favored by marketers when tackling the deliverability challenge:

1. Remain in blissful ignorance. (If you don't understand why some emails fail to reach their destination, click here for an explanation.)

2. Work hard on basic email marketing best practices and rely on this to keep delivery rates high. Hope that sending relevant email to people who asked for it will keep you out of trouble.

3. Become expert in the intricacies of blacklists, whitelists, etc. and proactively optimize your deliverability yourself.

4. Pay an email marketing service or delivery specialist to do the job for you.

The resource-rich few and big emailers take Approaches 3 or 4. The enlightened, yet resource-constrained, marketers take Approach 2. And the (I suspect) majority take Approach 1.

The problem is the growing complexity of delivery issues. Read any overview of how to improve your delivery rates (like this recent one from Silverpop) and you'll see that the theory is fine, but it's quite a technical business putting that theory into practice.

Just yesterday, Return Path and others reported that AOL was making changes to their whitelisting program and using Domain Keys Identified Mail to authenticate incoming email. Key intelligence for marketers but probably confusing to most mortals not steeped in deliverability issues and jargon.

If buying in email deliverability expertise is not an option for you, there is still much mileage to be got out of Approach 2 and sticking to principled email marketing.

And just as value-priced email marketing services gave small business access to professional email marketing, my hope is that value-priced tools and services will soon appear to do something similar for deliverability. So hang on in there.

Related post:
Yahoo, deliverability, the little guy and ESPs

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, aol email, Domain Keys Identified Mail, DKIM

January 23, 2008

A common problem for informational newsletters is the value challenge. How do you keep coming up with content that keeps subscribers opening your emails again and again?

Indeed, it's this challenge that often stops businesses from taking the e-newsletter route in the first place.

Although many understand the value of informational newsletters in building long-term customer relationships and loyalty, it seems easier to fall back on a more promotional email approach.

After all, coupons, free shipping offers and a few discount priced items are a handy source of content whenever creative inspiration doesn't strike.

But finding content for newsletters is not as daunting a prospect as many believe.

If you're stuck for ideas, John Arnold has a few here. Denise Cox volunteers some more here. And B2B marketers will appreciate this set of ideas.

At a more general level...

Good content begins with the right frequency

With subscribers ever more keen to consign email to the junk folder, there's no point sending messages unless they have something useful to say. Those pursuing a regular publication schedule must take content production into account when deciding on that schedule. (As well as other issues such as desired contact frequencies etc.)

The trap is to start at a high frequency, because of all the wonderful ideas and material you have on Day 1. But will that get you through to Day 1095, three years later?

Better to publish great material less often than mediocre material frequently.

It's OK to have less content

In a similar vein, if the content box seems a little emptier than usual, it's OK to put less in the next email. In fact, people may thank you for it. Attention spans are shrinking faster than the world's oil reserves.

It's about quality, not quantity. Don't pad out great stuff with filler rubbish.

Good content is a frame of mind

It's hard to be creative about content, let alone produce it if you leave things to the last minute. Obviously. So:

1. Plan. The idea of editorial calendars is not a new one. Recent articles at AWeber and iMediaConnection cover this.

2. Cultivate newsletter awareness. Ensure you and everyone else in the business is aware of the positive role of the newsletter and the need for good content to maintain this role.

Then when you or colleagues stumble across relevant material or ideas for the newsletter, you'll recognize their value and make use of them accordingly. This won't happen if the newsletter is only something you ever think about shortly before publication.

It's a user-driven world, so use it

Ah, Web 2.0 (whatever that means.) Well, it means two things for email content. First, don't assume that content has to be unidirectional...generated by you and sent to the reader. Exploit the content that subscribers can provide (interviews, case studies, survey answers, comments, etc.)

Second, exploit all the clever tools built by vendors to help you learn more about what people want from your emails and deliver content that fits people's individual needs. This new article from Silverpop explains the point.

Finally, if you remain unconvinced of your ability to come up with content, perhaps you don't have to. There are newsletter services out there that can take on the burden for you, for the right price.

Any other tips for content-hungry newsletter publishers?

More on newsletters | Tags: email marketing, email newsletters, e-newsletters, newsletter publishing

Over the next few months, RIM will be phasing in a series of BlackBerry server and device software updates.

Among the enhancements announced in the press release:

"BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting."

Previously, BlackBerry phones were noted for the poor (horrendous) way they displayed HTML email. So this change is great news for marketers and email designers alike.

Official figures from the end of Q3, 2007 cite 12 million BlackBerry subscriber accounts.

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

January 22, 2008

Everyone has those days when, quite frankly, it was a mistake to press the send button. Days when the email Gods decided once again to meddle in the affairs of mortals and, to use the theological term, "screw things up."

If you're having one of those days, despair not. You are not alone. Even some of the biggest brands out there can find a vengeful demigod or two playing havoc with their not-so-carefully-constructed email campaigns.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Chad White's marvelous, majestic "Oopsy Hall of Fame."

If you need statistics and survey results to persuade others (or yourself) of the value of investing resources in email marketing, then try the assembled data here.

The article has just been updated for 2008 to include all the latest anecdotal and formal research on email marketing's performance and role compared to other marketing channels.

Most recently, Datran Media (admittedly a firm with a strong interest in bigging up email marketing) released results from a survey of 2000+ marketers where, for example...

• 80% of respondents "indicated email was the strongest performing media buy ahead of search and display."
• 55% expected "ROI from email to be higher than any other channel"

Tags: email marketing, email marketing roi, email marketing statistics

January 21, 2008

If your brain isn't catching any of the inspiration rays sleeting through the atmosphere, maybe you'll find some help from these fine links:

Email awards seasons has started in earnest, beginning with the Campaign Monitor Xmas email design competition winners. Check their winning layouts here.

The Email Experience Council also announced the shortlist for their inaugural Email Performance Award. You can read the submission notes, with details of objectives, strategy, tactics, results etc. for each contender here.

And moving swiftly from possible role models to some examples you might want to stay clear of, DJ Waldow and Kimberly Snyder highlight some email sign-up forms that could do better. See here for a few tips on that topic.

Tags: email marketing, email marketing awards

That cracking sound could be the thin ice I'm walking on, but let's continue regardless (a good old-fashioned British approach to adversity.)

A few days ago I suggested you could pluck out people who opened previous emails from you and feel relatively safe about sending them image-rich emails.

The post generated some disagreement and a little debate in the comments, given that it goes against accepted best practices related to the growing prevalence of image blocking.

More recently, the mailingmanager blog took up the theme and described another scenario where more images might work better than "safe" design.

Neither blog post should be seen as necessarily recommending the image-rich approach, as its proper application requires certain conditions to be met in terms of the quality and nature of your email program.

But they are an invitation to think harder about why and how people view emails. And to consider how you might exploit that understanding in how you design yours.

(Update: and here's another blog finding value in an all-image email!)

Tags: email marketing, image blocking, image suppression, email design

If you're fed up of me waving the red "mobile email" flag, look away. If not, you'll like two little snippets of info that wandered flirtatiously across my desktop today.

First, a survey of over 1000 cell phone users discovered that email was the mobile service users would want most "if speed & quality weren't an issue."

Second, it seems that IBM are intending to make Lotus Notes available for the iPhone (photo courtesy of Apple), thus opening the popular and HTML email-ready device to a new market of business email users.

Two more bits of news supporting the likely growth of mobile email use.

More on mobile email | Tags: email marketing, mobile email, wireless email, iphone

January 18, 2008

As David Bowie might say, "Everything ch-ch-ch-changes." At the beginning of a newsletter's life, there is a good match between the emails and the recipients. You send what you wanted to send (and promised to send.) They get what they wanted to get (and asked for by signing up.)

Then change rears its ugly head over the email parapet.

Readers change interests or enter different lifestages. Broader email user habits also change, a point made recently by Tom O'Leary, who suggests how you might adapt your email newsletter to cope.

Equally, your newsletter changes as it moves away from the original scope that first attracted those readers.

This change may be inadvertent. Meryl K. Evans writes extensively about how newsletters can become victims of their own success.

Pride and conceit can turn informational emails into (self-)promotional vehicles, contrary to what the readership expects and wants.

The change may be forced upon you. Deadlines interfere with your ability to plan content thoughtfully and thoroughly. Sales targets and impatient bosses force compromises on such things as the balance between promotional and informational content.

This change may also be deliberate. You adjust your newsletter approach to account for wider changes in business or marketing strategy. Or in response to the insight you gain from your email reports and customer analytics.

In the latter case, this change brings you closer to the reader. But there's a danger here. Justin Premick points out in an excellent post on planning that you need, for example, to return to your sign-up copy and ensure it reflects what you now send, rather than what you used to send when that copy was written.

(Indeed, the sign-up process is critical to ensuring the correct reader-newsletter match up in the first place. Simms Jenkins writes about this process in his latest iMediaConnection article.)

So we have a state of flux. Your newsletter is changing and the nature of your audience is changing. The point is to always be aware of this flux so you can act accordingly. So you can be proactive in ensuring the interests of both your business and the people getting your emails continue to be served.

More on e-newsletters | Tags: email marketing, email newsletters

In the last few days, I've been carrying an "Act now! Mobile email is nigh!" message around on the blog equivalent of a sandwich board:

iPhone user habits serve notice to email marketers
One day, only the screen will matter
Mobile email not as great a challenge as first feared?

The rather complex nature of designing an email strategy for the dynamic "mobile revolution" (as no doubt everyone calls it) means the media and vendors have been understandably shy about coming up with helpful resources on the topic.

Slowly but surely, email marketing services are, however, broadening their scope, features and service offerings to account for the mobile menace / opportunity.

For example, we know ExactTarget are following this issue. And ReturnPath expanded their email preview tools last November to include mobile devices. Most recently, Pivotal Veracity announced a suite of mobile email tools for their clients.

I mention these simply as evidence that the service industry obviously believes mobile email is going to be important to email marketers soon. So we should take the hint.

In addition, Pivotal Veracity also put out some public resources for those wanting to learn more. This includes case studies with screenshots, a collection of tips on the topic and a series of webinars entitled "Mobile Email De-Mystified."

Good luck everyone.

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

As always, the work that goes into this blog and site doesn't happen for free. Each hour spent writing here is an hour away from paid contracts.

So it's only through the kindness of the sponsors that I can work so intensively on Email Marketing Reports and continue to bring you reviews, articles and links.

So heartfelt thanks go to these email marketing services for their support of my efforts...

Campaigner, whose dashboard got a recent refit and a new Compare Tool allowing you to benchmark your results.

VerticalResponse, who continue to add sophisticated tools (like segmentation) to their value-priced services.

StreamSend, who also offer a free trial of their award-winning email marketing solution.

January 17, 2008

Ogres, according to the film, are like onions. They have layers. Like email marketing.

Simple on the surface, peel off the skin of many email marketing issues and you'll find increasing layers of complexity beneath.

And the need to understand and adapt to the nuances and complexities of email grows with each passing day. Or as HP's Daryl Nielsen puts it:


Consumer email surveys serve as a useful reminder of this pressure to keep moving forward. We get so wrapped up in the technical marketing perspective, we forget that we're sending email to sentient beings and not email addresses or spreadsheet cells.

According to Return Path's insightful Holiday Email Survey, for example...


And...


Clearly we need to make more effort. And in the past couple of days, I've been reminded that not all email issues are as cut and dried as they used to be. Here are some examples:

1. Sending speeds

Previously, you wanted to get your emails out in as short a time as possible. Now we have speed restrictions imposed by the ISPs (and Steve at Word to the Wise has an excellent explanation of why this is a good thing.)

But it's not just about ISPs and deliverability. Henry Hyder-Smith reminds us of different scenarios where you actually don't want all your emails to go out at once.

2. Dropping unresponsive names

We'd all agree that sending email to people who aren't responding to your emails is a bad thing. Hence the interest in reactivation campaigns.

But consider the difficulties of defining a "non-responding" email address.

In a recent article on integrating email marketing with other channels, Stephanie Miller notes, "don't drop non-Web buyers from your email program if they are buying in the store."

Oops, some of those dead addresses may be reacting to your messages after all, just not in a way captured by traditional measures of email success (opens, clicks, online conversions.)

And David Baker's new article on customer lifecycles suggests you shouldn't necessarily give up on people who apparently lose interest in your emails. Instead, you should understand why their relationship to you has changed and then adapt your communications accordingly.

3. The top line

Finally, even some of the standard elements in email content offer more opportunity than you might think.

If you're like me, you put a line at the top of each email that says something like "Click here to view this email online."

That approach has almost become an email marketing standard. Then Stefan Pollard pops up with an article that explains why this is a cruel misuse of vital space. And he has many suggestions on how to get much more marketing mileage out of that top line.

Layers indeed. Oh yes, and another thing email marketing often has in common with onions; it can make you cry.

Tags: email marketing, email reactivation campaigns, consumer email habits, lifecycle emails, email deliverability

In this MediaPost article, Loren McDonald criticizes those that "cheat" at email marketing in the interests of making better numbers this quarter.

His argument -- which I support -- is that cheating erodes trust in commercial email and is likely to attract the wrong sort of public interest. So he calls for more industry self-regulation.

Email marketers are lucky to have people like Loren looking out for their interests. But I'm not hopeful that his call will be heeded.

Loren uses a baseball metaphor to make his point. Let me use a well-known natural resources one to explain mine.

Fish stocks can only support a certain number of fishing vessels. Beyond that, the stocks diminish too fast and eventually disappear.

If hundreds of fishing companies have access to those stocks, it's in their collective interest as an industry to keep the number of vessels or catches limited...to respect that resource.

But it's in their individual interests to do exactly the opposite. Why?

Because the immediate benefit of sending out another vessel or bringing home a bigger catch goes straight to the fishing company, but the negative impacts of doing so are shared out among all the fishing community.

Collectively, a big price is paid for that vessel's selfishness. But the price that vessel pays is lower than the quick profit gained from exceeding the limits imposed by some kind of industry self-regulation.

You can think of the mentality as "grabbing what you can while the going's good." Because if you play by the rules, your competitors won't.

The trouble is, of course, that it only takes a few to think like that and the resource is ruined. That's why you find governments intervening, setting things like fish quotas to prevent overfishing. In such scenarios, self-regulation rarely works.

You might know this economic phenomenon as the tragedy of the commons. And it applies to email if you think of email addresses or trust in commercial email as a finite, public resource. Too much abuse of those addresses or trust and the resource rapidly loses its value.

But misplaced self-interest inevitably leads to abusive email practices. And that's ignoring the spam fraternity, who are abusing the email resource more than anyone and who are by definition immune to any call for reasonable behavior. Ever tighter regulation and legislation seems almost inevitable.

So call me a misanthrope, but I don't see self-regulation as solving the problems of bad email practices. Though we should still try - the fewer cheaters around the better.

A stronger argument against abusive practices (and one Loren has also made elsewhere) is that cheating doesn't work in the long term.

As with steroid abuse (to borrow the baseball metaphor), short-term gain comes at the expense of long-term health problems. With email, it's the health of your email address list and deliverability reputation that suffers when you, for example, ignore permission marketing principles in the interest of a short-term sales boost.

As those controlling the email infrastructure build more and more accountability into the delivery process, the downsides of trying to game the system get bigger and arrive faster. And therein lies hope for the long-term future of legitimate commercial email. All power to authentication and reputation systems.

Tags: email marketing, tragedy of the commons, permission marketing

Commentators and vendor experts are a super source of advice. But there is, of course, equal value in seeing what other email marketers are succeeding with. Or learning what they've discovered through their own tests and trials.

That's why we love forums and other networking opportunities.

Those with less time on their hands can find more concentrated frontline experience at this B2B Magazine article, where senior marketers at Office Depot, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems discuss practical email marketing issues in some detail.

(Interesting to note that dealing with colleagues and harmonizing business and customer priorities is as much of a challenge as actually creating and sending the emails.)

In a similar vein, MarketingSherpa just released their free annual Wisdom Report, where 101 marketers reveal lessons learnt from 2007.

There's a dedicated email section, but be sure to look at other chapters, too. The chapter on testing, for example, is dominated by email insights.

(The landing page for the report is a little curious. It requires you to submit an email address and telephone number, though the reasons for needing either are not given or obvious...hmmm.)

Finally, I've mentioned the RetailEmail.Blogspot blog before, which tracks retailer email campaigns and presents the highlights. But I must mention the recent Subject Line Hall of Fame post there. A sure source of inspiration.

Tags: email marketing, subject lines

Here's the final version of the ongoing blog post collating all the articles suggesting how you might plan or review your efforts for this year.

A quick scan of each should help you identify areas where your email efforts need attention or where you might invest more energy or resources.

• Melanie Simms has some thoughts on how to integrate email into your marketing plan.
• Stefan Eyram predicts the future for email marketing in Canada (but the concepts apply anywhere)
• Al DiGuido has strategic and technological advice for those looking for long-term success
• Gail Goodman has five email marketing resolutions at TheStreet.com
• Reggie Brady suggests how you might make your email program more effective in 2008
• Check the The Email Wars blog for an ongoing series of predictions for 2008 from guest email marketing experts
• Brent Shroyer has 50 tips for us. Intended for Listrak customers, there's inspiration in there for others, too
• David Baker shares his thoughts on what will make a good email marketing program in 2008, implicitly challenging us to reflect on our strategic and tactical approach
• The Connect Blog has 50 quick tips to get your email year off to a good start
• Look to the Email Days blog for ten online marketing predictions with a strong email flavor
• Matt McNeill provides six email marketing resolutions based around the theme of relationship building
• Several of the industry's leading vendor voices give their thoughts on the likely trends, traps and developments awaiting us in 2008
• Tom O'Leary has three quick tips for improving this year's campaigns
• Stefan Pollard predicts some upcoming changes and challenges in the email sector
• Loren McDonald published his 2008 wishlist for the industry.
• Sundeep Kapur gives us his five email marketing must-dos for the new year
• Elie Ashery identifies five trends for 2008, with a focus on technology changes relevant to how email is used, delivered and displayed
• Al Iverson has one simple prediction for us that affects all we do with email
• Anna Billstrom has some peeves and hopes for 2008, reflecting on what marketers did wrong in the holiday season and where we might focus improvement this year
• EmailCenter UK reviews 2007 and draws out actionable trends, improvements and conclusions
• The Trend Junkie identifies ten areas and issues worthy of your attention
• Jordan Ayan and Joel Book predict some strategic and practical trends for the year
• Marc Kline lays out five achievable practical goals for you to consider
• ThinData take some typical New Year's resolutions and put them in an email marketing context
• Jeanne Bayers summarizes a year's worth of tips in an overview article
• And Melinda Krueger suggests we need to ask the right questions before coming up with answers

Tags: email marketing, marketing planning

January 15, 2008

The iPhone (photo courtesy of Apple) treats web browsing and HTML email pretty much like a Mac would, albeit with a "slightly" smaller screen.

If the "mobile email experience" is more pleasant (i.e. more like the traditional desktop experience), then more people will start using mobile email.

Additionally, the quality bar set by the iPhone means other mobile devices will now have to display HTML email adequately. Which in turn means yet more incentive to use mobile email.

The good news is that since the driver of that growth is better rendering of HTML email on mobile devices, that's a plus for those in a state of panic (or denial) about how to design emails for the small screen. As mentioned a day or two ago.

Some new facts back the theory. According to the New York Times, both Google and Yahoo say the iPhone accounts for a disproportionately large amount of web traffic from mobile devices.

Much, much more than you'd expect from the actual number of iPhones sold. Which explains why Google just announced a new version of Gmail just for iPhone users.

In other words, people like browsing using the iPhone, so they do more of it. Replace the word "browsing" with "emailing" and you see why predictions on mobile email might come true.

Seems like a good time to think about just how to adapt our email efforts to a more mixed bag of users. (And by coincidence, BtoB Magazine had an article on that very subject yesterday.)

Tags: email marketing, mobile email, wireless email, email design, iphone, gmail

January 14, 2008

When people look at open rates, they focus on the unique open rate. We take the number of "delivered" emails and see what proportion of those recipients apparently "opened" that email at least once. (See here for background on open rate measurement and use.)

Whether someone opened an email once or a hundred times is largely ignored. Mostly because if you want to know how engaging your content or offer is, you look at other numbers. Primarily whether people click on the links.

But sometimes unique open rates and click tracking won't tell you the whole story. You may have email content that isn't intended to get a click. In those cases, looking at repeat opens (how often people open the same email) might help.

Think about simple seasonal greetings or informational, relationship-building newsletters with all the content in the actual email. Neither is likely to generate much in the way of clicks.

So how do you know if recipients value the contents? You look at whether they are triggering repeat opens, either by looking at the email again themselves or by forwarding it around to others.

Consider a test to see which holiday message content is best:

Message A:

• Subject line: Happy Holidays from Mark
• Delivered emails: 5000
• Unique opens: 2,500
• Total opens: 2,600
• Total clicks: 27

Message B:

• Subject line: Happy Holidays from Mark
• Delivered emails: 5000
• Unique opens: 2,500
• Total opens: 7,500
• Total clicks: 29

Both messages have a 50% open rate. Both have a comparable clickthrough rate of around 1.1%.

It's only when you look at the difference in the repeat opens, as measured through the "total opens" metric that you see that Message B clearly engaged readers more than Message A. Here's a real world example from a case study.

Of course, you need to take a closer look at the source of those repeat opens, too. For example, individuals can sometimes forward an email to hundreds of others via their own distribution lists.

The resultant flood of opens registered against the original recipient's name can skew the total opens result and mislead.

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

I've mentioned the Email Roundtable and Email Marketer's Club before as two excellent online forums for interacting with other email marketing folk. Both feature in the Top 21 resource list.

They are free, but you can't access them without having an online membership application accepted first. So to help you decide whether either makes sense for you, here some behind-the-scenes details courtesy of the respective founders...

The Email Roundtable

This is an email discussion list run by volunteers and founded by Justin Foster of WhatCounts.

There are just under 1000 members, the vast majority of which (>95%) are marketers. The only vendors and agency staff allowed in are those considered industry thought leaders. Sales pitches are expressly forbidden.

Sample discussion topics: Email rendering tools, image maps and AOL addresses, SPF headers, Can-Spam compliance, Yahoo connection limits.

Last year the members averaged around 170 posts per month (you can get these individually or batched as a daily summary.)

Although the discussion list is the focus of the Roundtable, there are occasional offline meetings in US cities, plus a collection of white papers and other documents at the list's homepage.

My comments: Full of experienced folk from the practical end of email marketing, including some big corporates and brands. Best place I've seen for getting help on specific problems, even those of a quite technical nature.

The Email Marketer's Club

An online forum and broader social network site using the Ning platform and founded by Tamara Gielen of OgilvyOne.

Also run by volunteers, the Club has just under 700 members, with a more mixed membership of marketers, vendors and agencies. Sales pitches are also discouraged.

Sample discussion topics: open rate tracking, Road Runner ISP update, using old email lists, text vs HTML readers.

The forum is just one part of the Club's many offerings, which includes a Wiki with links to resources, tools, services etc, a chatroom facility, events calendar, job listings, member profiles etc.

My comment: Pitched at a slightly lower expertise level than the Roundtable, but with a much more dynamic set of tools for those focused on networking as much as information exchange.

Bonus: Facebook groups

• Email Roundtable
• Email Standards Project
• The "unofficial" Email Experience Council Group
• VerticalResponse - Email Marketing for Small Business
• email marketer
• Email marketing professionals

Tags: email marketing, email roundtable, email marketer's club, tamara gielen, justin foster

You probably know that when people use Gmail, Google displays contextual text ads alongside the email they're currently viewing

It's always interesting to see which ads your own marketing emails call up on the screen. Not just interesting, but worth thinking about because you have some control over the ads displayed through the words you use in your email (another topic.)

Anyway, today was the nadir of my email life to date.

A test send of my email marketing newsletter to a Gmail account brought up the usual array of related ads. But the one that stood out urged me to download a flatulent Santa Claus logo for my cell phone.

Not sure what depressed me more:

• That there is presumably a market for flatulent Santa cell phone logos
• The bad targeting
• The fact that the search marketer is still using a holiday ad over two weeks after the holidays actually ended
• The landing page, which urges you to take out a subscription in order to download the logo, but fails to describe clearly what it actually is you're subscribing to

The week can only improve.

January 11, 2008

In a previous post I wondered why some big brands still send out emails made up almost entirely of images. The theory is that many webmail services and email clients block images by default, so an image-rich email would display badly.

After much musing, I suggested that if you had...

• brand pulling-power
• a visual buying experience, and
• clever use of text and alt-tags

...you probably encouraged people to actively download images in large numbers, overriding any default blocking options. Making the image-rich approach a viable option for senders like big fashion brands.

Or maybe it's much, much simpler than that?

Consider the lowly and much-maligned open rate.

One thing it tells us is that anyone who "opened" an email...

• is not using a service or software which blocks images, or
• turned off image suppression for emails with our sender address, or
• is at least willing to download images when our emails turn up

...otherwise the open would not be recorded (see here for an explanation.)

So here's the theory...

Do you need to design your email for image blocking when sending to someone who has opened your emails in the past? No, because they've already demonstrated that they have images enabled.

Anybody wanting to try image-rich emails safely could simply pull out a list of "people who previously opened at least one email from us" and send this group the image-rich mail.

New subscribers and those with no open yet recorded get a "safe" design with a nice balance of text and images, etc.

I can't see a flaw in the logic, but it seems so painfully obvious that I'm sure there must be.

Anyone tried this already? Anyone disagree with the logic?

(Update: be sure to read the comments for counter-arguments to this theory.)

Tags: email marketing, image blocking, image suppression, email design

Here's a cheeky prediction for you. One day, emails will display the same whatever webmail service, email client or mobile email solution people use.

An exaggeration, but consider this...

1. The positive reaction to the work of the Email Standards Project gives hope that the day is not far off when all webmail services and desktop email software follow a standard set of basic rules on how they display HTML email.

OK, but what about mobile email?

2. As both Morgan Stewart and Computerworld UK point out, the iPhone showed that mobile devices could (should) handle HTML email as well as any desktop device. Other mobile device manufacturers are now scrambling to follow suit.

3. Even ignoring rumors of better HTML email functionality in future Blackberry models, software developers are going their own way developing applications for mobile devices that improve their email rendering capabilities. Like this one.

4. Mobile operators want to sell more data plans and mobile device manufacturers want to sell new (smart)phones. It's in both groups' interests to see mobile email catch on, which means making mobile email more efficient, easy-to-use and compatible with our existing email user experiences. Ergo...more incentive to get mobile devices displaying HTML email the way we're used to.

Of course, even if this scenario plays out positively, it will take time. So display inconsistencies between different devices, services and software will be with us for a while. And whatever happens, we still face two more problems as marketers.

1. There's a big display difference between a large desktop monitor and a small window on your mobile phone.

2. There's a big difference in the way people perceive and tackle incoming email depending on whether they're sitting at an office desk, at home or in an airport waiting room.

What say you?

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

January 09, 2008

How to write a winning subject line and choose the right day to send your email are two of the crunch topics in email marketing.

Step forward a new case study which looks at both. MarketingSherpa reports on how the Organic Dish determined the best approach in each case.

The article is noteworthy for illustrating the pitfalls that await the casual student of subjects and send times.

Take the former. While it's generally agreed that shorter subject lines are better, this can suck you into thinking size is everything. But it's just one factor. The actual words themselves are pretty important, no?

In the case study, a slightly longer subject line proved best because of the power of the call to action it contained.

This is why everyone encourages you to test. Because the only real way to know what works is to test the alternatives and see what works.

It's a point Karen Gedney repeats in her look at B2B lessons from the email campaigns of US presidential candidates.

Among the many sound tips, she suggests you may find value in changing sender names. Again, test carefully. Sender name recognition is vital to open rates and preventing unsubscribes and spam reports. So any benefits from the occasional name change need to outweigh the possible damage you might do to recognition.

This issue is also tackled by Janine Popick in a new blog post. She explains how you can migrate from one sender name to another gradually...so this name recognition is not compromised.

Back to the case study...

The other issue addressed is best day to send. A while back I posted a three point approach to this:

1. Check the various statistics and reports on "best day to send" to get some insight on the topic.

2. Make your own educated guesses as to the days your target audience are most likely to have the time and motivation to open, read and act on your email.

3. Test them to see which gives the best results.

This is exactly what The Organic Dish did with great success. The key is not to take benchmark "best day to send" statistics too literally, but to treat them as one of the pieces of information you use to decide which days you want to test.

EmailKarma has a nice post describing how to set about testing weekdays to find the sweetspot for your own program.

If that regime seems too much effort, then use the steps outlined above to narrow your choices down to the two or three most likely "best days" and just test these alternatives, rather than looking at a whole week.

Also, don't forget to go back to the topic down the road and test again. User habits change over time, with the season and as your audience composition itself changes. The best day to send email in Winter 2007 may not be appropriate for Spring 2008.

Tags: email marketing, email frequency, best day to send email

Has any business phrase ever reached such an appalling level of sigh-inducing tepidness as the standard wording for "there was a problem and we're sorry."

Such is its banality and ubiquity that it potentially communicates the opposite. When I read "We apologize for any inconvenience caused," what I understand is...

"We're not sorry. And we don't care about your problem or what we did. Because if we really did care, we'd bother to say something meaningful rather than fob you off with this inane attempt to convince you of our apparent regret."

Customer service emails and apology emails that follow campaign screw-ups are full of this phrase.

When did we forget that we're talking to people? Fight the gentle pull of tired stock phrases that have lost any positive emotional impact.

Creative email design and copy does not just mean fancy graphics and genius ideas. it means flipping an awareness switch in our brains that spots the stock phrases and says "can we write this in a more real and engaging way?"

If you know of any good examples, let me know!

Tags: email copywriting, apology emails

January 08, 2008

Finally found the time to sit down and work through all 325+ pages of the new edition of MarketingSherpa's annual email marketing report. The full review is here, or you can jump to the likes/dislikes and who should read it? sections.

When I close my eyes, all I see are open rates and heatmaps. A strong beverage is required before the next post.

Tags: email marketing benchmark guide, marketingsherpa

As growing numbers of marketers latch on to proven techniques and templates for "best practice" email marketing, there's always the danger you can get too comfortable.

Once you've got things pretty much on track, you can get lulled into a routine and find your creativity dulled by familiarity and the pressures of day-to-day business life.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Even with standard approaches and promotions. I was much enthused by the email examples reported by Lisa Harmon, who profiles some creative gift card promotions from last year.

In the pre-Xmas, post-shipping deadline period, every retailer and his mother leapt on the gift card bandwagon to keep email sales alive when wallets and purses were still open.

It becomes hard to distinguish yourself when everyone else is doing the right thing, too. That's where creativity comes in. Which is as much about a willingness to try as the actual mechanics of taking a traditional approach and giving it a unique twist or creative flourish.

If you need more inspiration along the lines of Lisa's examples, try the links to award winners and design galleries in this post.

And if you think your emails deserve recognition, you just missed the deadline for the EEC's email performance award nominations, but you can still try for a MarketingSherpa email marketing award (nominations close January 11.)

Tags: email marketing, email marketing awards, email design, email copywriting

For those who like to know what's going on in the industry as a whole, a couple of new reports for you...

Jupiter Research just published its US E-mail Marketing Forecast, 2007 to 2012. A snip at $1,500.

According to their press release, they predict email marketing spending will grow from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2.1 billion in 2012, with things looking rosy for spending on retention email and email sponsorships.

And those wondering what the big retailers are up to email-wise can pick up two new mini-reports from Chad "retail email" White.

The first covers trends observed in 2007 regarding such aspects as timing and frequency of emails, particularly in relation to specific selling seasons.

The second looks at how retailers promoted e-gift cards through emails sent during the holiday shopping season.

Tags: email marketing, email marketing statistics, retail email marketing

January 07, 2008

Yahoo recently announced changes to their anti-spam efforts. Changes that impact legitimate marketers, too. Word to the Wise has the technical inside story, particularly regarding Yahoo's use of Spamhaus blocklists.

The official Yahoo! Mail blog explains developments to the email user at large. It's worth reading the comments below that article, since you'll get alarming insight into consumer behavior and attitudes toward email and spam.

2007 saw email deliverability come into its own as an industry-within-an-industry. We now have delivery specialists and service companies ready to help you navigate your way safely through the complexities of the email delivery environment.

As this complexity increases, so life becomes harder for your average marketer sending out email. Many folk still aren't aware of fundamental best practices, so it's unlikely they're keeping up with the latest deliverability issues.

Indeed, the vast majority of poor email marketing comes not from maliciousness, carelessness or stupidity...but from ignorance.

Can the email service providers do more to adress this problem?

Some of the "value priced" companies already make a lot of effort to educate their small business customers on the right way to do email marketing (see, for example, the AWeber blog.)

But nearly all such efforts rely on people actively seeking information.

I'd love 2008 to see ESPs being more innovative about alerting customers to potential deficiencies in their email efforts.

Some already enforce best practices through built-in tools and features. Examples are requiring double opt-in sign-ups or automatically appending physical address data to email footers to help ensure compliance with anti-spam legislation.

But why not, for example, have poor campaign results trigger little alert boxes?

If someone is getting a 5% open rate, then a little red flag should pop up..."Your open rates are well below industry averages...click here to learn how to improve your results."

If an outgoing email is packed with links but generates few clicks...red flag and pointers to helpful resources.

Surely there's a role for expert systems to automatically diagnose problems and direct folk to plausible remedies?

There are cost and implementation issues involved, but the benefits for ESPs are clear.

If customers improve their practices and results, they invest more in email marketing services, generate better word of mouth and help ensure the ESP stays on good terms with the ISPs and webmail services.

Let me know if you've seen any good examples of such innovation (or if you're an ESP and are doing it already!)

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email marketing services, yahoo email, yahoo mail, email deliverability

January 04, 2008

Most of what we learn about email marketing is tinkering. Making the kind of changes that give little boosts to responses and results.

These kind of micro-level adjustments are not to be underestimated. Small changes to subject lines can make big differences to the results. Which is why the few words that go into the subject attract so much attention.

Here are three new posts on the topic: Michael Fortin covers the role of urgency, curiosity and controversy in driving people to open your email, while Stephanie Miller has two posts (