No man is an iland

February 28, 2008

If you haven't taken the image blocking issue to heart, here's one more reason to do so...

Ken Magill reports that another major US ISP (Road Runner) has changed its email interface to block images by default.

And to give you a helping hand on that front, Linda Bustos has eight specific design tips for ensuring successful emails with images off. Although the tips are intended specifically for Gmail, many are equally applicable to other email clients and webmail services. The helpful screenshots and examples really bring the points home.

Then we have a few copywriting insights to brighten a dull day.

Jeanne Jennings brings us a set of tips on preparing for an email copywriting project and general approaches that will help produce results.

Hard to mention copywriting without talking about subject lines, which we'll come to. But first, Ray Schultz reminds us that the teaser copy in content newsletters is just as important, and has guidelines on how to write them. (Teaser copy is the one or two lines of text that encourage people to click on the link to get more / full information).

Now subject lines.

MailChimp have reviewed a mighty pile of A/B subject lines tests to conclude that there are few (if any) simple tricks.

They look in particular at the potential role of personalized subject lines. And in doing so demonstrate how careful you have to be when interpreting the results.

Does an alternative subject line work better because of what you added or what you took away?

More on design and copywriting | Tags: email design, email copywriting, subject lines, email newsletters

Derek Harding's latest article reminded me of some questions I once posed about some of the advanced email marketing practices out there. I'm still waiting for the answers.

Derek's article talks about the quality assurance challenges faced when using more sophisticated email tools, such as trigger emails, on-the-fly personalization, etc.

It's a polite way of saying it's easy to screw up when the technology is complicated. Much kudos to Derek for tweaking the nose of the breezy advanced email marketing utopia.

Email marketing still suffers from the gap between technological capabilities and implementation skills.

Consider, for example, that a recent survey of top UK retailers found that nearly half were not complying with local email marketing law.

Or read Stefan Pollard's incredulous review of all the things one organization-that-should-know-better is doing wrong with their emails.

There are two main reasons for the gap between best practices and actual practices.

The first is lack of awareness of the former among many marketers, a long-standing issue for which there is no easy solution.

But the second is the lack of time and resources. I can pick holes in my own email newsletter, most of which are simply due to not being able to afford the features and functionality I'd like.

So there's a challenge there to email marketing software manufacturers and services, especially those that (rightly) urge marketers to make better use of email:

1. Build systems that automate best practices and alert the user to problems

An issue I've raised before.

User interfaces could reject image tags without alt-text, alert you when a link only appears as an image (which might be blocked), etc. etc.

2. Build systems that are more usable

I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) that the super technology out there barely gets used. Or if it does, not to its full potential.

Rather like we only use about 5% of our PC's features. (Mine is really just a clever electronic typewriter.)

I had a look behind the scenes at Campaigner recently (disclaimer: they're a sponsor) and was pleased to see the development of visual tools for more intuitive building of trigger email campaigns.

Before you guffaw about the bone-headed simplicity of recommending more usable software and services, consider why most of us still can't work a VCR or DVD recorder properly.

3. Make best practice features affordable

Yes, another obvious one. But the fact is that a lot of people would love subscriber preference centers and such like, but can't get them though the value-priced ESPs and can't afford the premium services.

Competition should naturally lead to this, as evidenced by the growing number of services offering integration with Google's web analytics service at no extra charge. Here's hoping anyway.

Service listings | Tags: email marketing services, email marketing software, trigger emails

February 27, 2008

You may have heard of the problems with one politician's email messages due to pranksters signing people up without their knowledge.

By putting rude words in the sign-up fields for first and last name, the pranksters ensure emails get delivered to unsuspecting victims with the aggressive salutation "Dear (insert your favorite term of abuse)".

Now, presidential hopefuls are more likely to be the target of such pranks than your average email marketer.

But do you have any controls in place to ensure stupid names don't make it into your emails?

It's not just pranksters. The snider variety of real subscriber sometimes uses the sign-up field to send "witty" messages or input words that look funny when the subsequent emails arrive.

Or it might just be obvious typos.

Or people typing anything just to get through the registration process.

A quick run through my own newsletter database turns up such first name gems as:

• bOB
• dAVID (and many others with inappropriate capitalization)
• yyy1216
• aff
• business

Emailers with small B2B lists (like me) can do manual checks. Bigger lists might consider running automatic checks against known lists of rude words, rather like some forum software uses.

Anyone recommend some techniques or tools that might help? And anyone got some lovely first name examples from their own lists for us?

Tags: email marketing, email personalization

A recent aside on the future of email marketing suggested the one certainty was the growing importance of the sender-recipient relationship in driving email success.

With impeccable timing, a survey of consumers delivers some hard numbers to support this contention.

Surveys like this always have the problem that what people say they do and what they actually do are not the same.

But ignoring that for the moment, the results show, for example, that the better they know you, the more emails they'll tolerate. And the more likely they are to open those emails.

Recognition alone is of course useless unless there is a positive association with your name, brand and previous emails. The relationship is key.

While that all sounds self-explanatory and elicits "yeah, yeah" comments from hard-nosed marketing practitioners, think on it a minute.

Have you ever cut corners on things like permission on the assumption that it's "easier to ask for forgiveness"?

Have you ever looked back over your emails from the perspective of a customer and asked where you might improve the value you send?

Have you ever wondered why average open rates tend to be around 20% and most clickthrough rates well under 10%? However you measure these things, it's clear there's an awful lot of room for improvement.

Email marketing has done well for a long time because you could run a mediocre or self-centered program and get away with it.

But as time passes, the hurdles that ISPs and web services place between your email and the inbox of your recipient are increasingly based on signals from the recipient regarding the value and desirability of your emails.

Equally, as recipients grow more discerning and pressed for time, tolerance for mediocrity drops.

A double whammy. The quality bar is rising, and those that fail to meet the required standards risk not only a lack of response, but tougher penalties in terms of delivery blocks.

We have been warned.

Tags: email marketing, email relationships, email deliverability

February 26, 2008

"There are plenty more fish in the sea." Except that isn't true anymore. As it gets harder to find people willing to part with their email address, two things need to happen.

1. Look for new and better ways to drive new subscriptions
2. Do your best not to lose those subscribers you do have

As such, list growth isn't just about acquiring addresses. Your whole program bears responsibility for keeping these addresses happy so they stay with you.

Indeed, the qualities that encourage retention also encourage new sign-ups. As Tom O'Leary puts it in a post about forward-to-a-friend:

"If you create content that stirs emotions, causes laughter or inspires recipients in some practical or meaningful way; they will probably want to share it with others in their life."

Retention is key to list growth for a simple reason: if you have a leaky bucket, you plug the leaks before you add more water.

If a lot of people leave your email program, find out why and address the problems. Don't just throw more good addresses in and hope this time they'll stick around.

This whole concept is explored in depth by DMNews and multichannel merchant, who both get a host of experts to weigh in on how best to build a list of email addresses.

One strong message is to simply be aware of the value of an email address. Or as Andy Sernovits puts it:

"There is nothing more important than capturing an email address on your home page."

Among the expert advice is a lesson from the Avis Budget Group, who had considerable success using transactional messages to encourage people to sign up to their promotional email programs.

You'll find many people sensibly recommending you put marketing messages in transactional email (order confirmations etc.) But nearly all focus on the cross- and upselling opportunities..."thanks for buying this book, why not buy the sequel."

Based on the Avis experience, perhaps it's also worth thinking about plugging your newsletter and other email promotions.

At the other end of the chain, there are things you can do to rescue those who would otherwise unsubscribe.

This may be as simple as making it easy for people to change their email address, a topic Loren McDonald covers in this article.

Or you can develop specific opt-out prevention strategies, as outlined in new articles by MarketingSherpa, Wendy Roth and Melinda Krueger.

More on list building | Tags: email marketing, email list growth, email address acquisition

There are two reasons to keep half an eye on the future of email.

First, the more you know, the better you can prepare for (and exploit) coming developments in your marketing efforts.

Second, you can drop little comments into meetings and sound like you have a finger pressed hard on the pulse of the online world.

Arguably, the two big challenges for email marketing are "spam and security" (hence the interest in authentication) and the growth of alternative online communication tools (like social networks and instant messaging).

Neither mean the end of email. But both are changing the way people use and manage email. And both factors drive the evolution of the surrounding technology. With inevitable repercussions for marketing.

Back when it was cool to pronounce email as beyond medical help, many argued instead that we'd see email incorporated into, even dominating, communication hubs.

The suggestion is that your email software or webmail service will morph into a multichannel communication dashboard.

Last week, for example, saw the announcement of Mozilla Messaging, the new entity charged with taking on future development of the popular Thunderbird email client.

The implication in the announcement is that this future development may take on aspects of the dashboard approach...

"As people struggle with keeping track of disparate communication channels and social networks, this nexus of control becomes a sweet spot for integration..."

This potential merging of social networks and email mirrors the thinking of Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web. In a recent interview, he outlines a spam-free vision of email in the context of trusted communities:

"With the semantic web, we are building these trust systems so that you can find out if it comes from someone you identify and what their role is in relation to you: if you actually want to receive email from this person."

Trust already plays a key role in email marketing, but will we see new email systems that use social network concepts to give even greater control to the user?

Just last week, Ken Magill reported on a new email address service which does exactly that.

And even the military industrial complex is working on new standards for secure email.

What will all this mean for you and me? Hard to say with any degree of confidence. Except...

...everything points to the relationship between sender and receiver determining whether email is wanted and delivered.

In that sense, nothing changes. Great email marketing has always been based on building good relationship with recipients. Through strict permission practices, and targeted, valuable content and offers.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

More on strategy | Tags: email marketing, future of email, email marketing strategy

February 25, 2008

When someone signs up to your email program, there are four increasingly advanced ways to treat them:

1. Add them to your list and let them wait for the next email scheduled to go out

The technical term for this is "a wasted opportunity." By not extending any kind of email welcome, you're ignoring them at the very moment they are most engaged and positively disposed toward you.

And let's hope they didn't sign-up the day after your monthly newsletter went out. Otherwise by the time they get their first email from you, they might have forgotten they ever subscribed.

Now they think you're a spammer. Great.

2. Send them a welcome email and then add them to your standard email marketing program

Here you need to adhere to some basic best practices for welcome emails. Even those using value-priced services and software should be able to send this kind of welcome message.

Miranda has some good and bad examples for you here.

3. Send them a series of "welcome" emails tuned to the needs of new subscribers, then eventually shift them across into your mainstream email marketing program

Chad White talked about this "onboarding principle" last August.

A series of welcome messages guides the newcomer into your program, priming them for the "real thing," and making the most of the greater level of interest in your brand/business generally shown by new subscribers.

In addition, you get to learn more about the recipient based on their responses to these welcome messages. That information can feed into your main program to ensure they get relevant emails.

Adam Covati provides a good example in this analysis of the early messages in the Netflix email marketing program.

And his colleague DJ Waldow describes how one company overdid the welcome, risking an end to the email relationship before it has a chance to gain traction.

4. Send them a stream of welcome emails, customized according to the source of the signup and what you know about them. Then eventually move them into your wider program, depending on how they respond to your initial messages

If you can use segmentation with your main emails, then why not with your welcome messages?

You don't have to wait to segment based on responses to previous emails. You can use the information you get at signup or the information you already have about the prospect/customer.

At the very least, you should know where they signed up. So you can add nice touches like "thanks for visiting our booth at the ACME Tradeshow" to your welcome.

And if the new subscriber has expressed clear content preferences, make sure you respect them. Dylan Boyd reveals the frustrations induced when you don't.

February 22, 2008

Despite all that modern technology, the traditional email newsletter is still plugging away turning loyal readers into loyal customers. Three recent interviews help make the point...

Michael Katz reveals the value in the e-newsletter approach, particularly for service companies. And Anna Billstrom and Christopher Knight interview ISITE Design and JPMorgan respectively about their own successful newsletter efforts.

Not that a newsletter need be entirely about marketing a business. Brad Day talks about his experiences building a publishing venture though the medium of email in this interview about his Weekend Sherpa ezine.

Back in the B2B marketing world, Karen Gedney has a much more rational look at one company's use of email to drive tradeshow visits. (The same case study appeared previously elsewhere, but was reported rather sloppily.)

And on the B2C side, Josh Nason reviews the email efforts of baseball teams and finds problems when you try to impose uniformity and central control over a set of franchises.

In a typical business, central control ensures brand conformity. But with baseball, the team is the important brand to would-be subscribers, not Major League Baseball. Which makes things more complicated

February 21, 2008

Without her smile, the portrait of Lisa Gherardini is just another painting hanging on a French wall.

And so it is with email marketing. Small and subtle differences can have far-reaching consequences.

As more and more people catch on to best practices, so more and more messages get the broad basics of email marketing right.

Which means the little things become increasingly important in differentiating one company's email from the next.

But with our noses thrust painfully against fast-moving grindstones, few of us take the time to reflect on the subtle changes that can add up to a whole lot more marketing success.

And yet there is so much opportunity out there.

The shining example of recent weeks is the snippet text that appears religiously and rigidly at the top of many emails. Stefan Pollard highlighted the missed marketing opportunity and others have since commented on how a little more snippet text thought can boost responses (see this post by DJ Waldow, for example.)

So-called administrative content offers ample opportunity for meaningful improvement. Justin Premick, for example, reminds us of the impact of your footer. And this blog has seen detailed discussion over the role and value of such things as permission reminders.

I chose the word subtle, rather than small, in the post header because often it's just a question of a gentle shift in perspective that reveals the opportunity.

For example, we worry about the words in our calls to action. But have you thought about the impact of color?

If your list is a small one, you probably never bothered with subject line tests. But if you rank all your recent subjects by the corresponding results, do you see any nice patterns emerging?

This shift in perspective applies equally to big picture stuff. Dylan Boyd points us to one example where a little lateral thinking turned losers into winners.

And Kevin Hillstrom demonstrates what happens if you take a longer term perspective when analyzing your results: you suddenly find value in email addresses you might otherwise have ignored.

Let's hope some of the thoughts and links above bring a smile to your face come the next campaign report.

Following up on yesterday's post about all the top email marketing blogs out there, you might like this lovely new tool from eROI.

It's a mobile RSS reader, featuring an aggregated feed of some of the best email marketing writing out there. So if you ever harbored thoughts of escaping the joys of email marketing now and again, you now have one less excuse.

More importantly, you can take me to the beach with you. I'll take the deckchair under the palm trees.

February 20, 2008

An exhaustive review of many months' (actually years') worth of reading dozens of email marketing blogs allows me to finally update my personal list of top ones.

The 44 featured blogs are split into categories, so you'll find the best blogs on retail email practices, blogs for small business email marketers, blogs on deliverability, design etc. as well as the general ones.

Suggestions for new or missing blogs to monitor are always welcome. Feel free to use the comments to suggest them.

If it sounds like a lot of blogs to monitor don't forget that some of the general blogs (including the one you're reading) often pick out and write about the best of the current posts for you.

February 18, 2008

You use the reports you get after sending out an email to refine your approach next time. The more value in these reports, the better those refinements.

That's one of the reasons experts have long recommended that these reports go beyond measuring the opens and clicks an email generates. They should also track what happens when recipients visit your website through a link in the email.

After all, your ultimate goal is rarely a click. It's an action you want people to take or an experience you want them to have. And usually that action or that experience takes place on your website.

So measuring the true success of your emails depends on measuring what happens at the website, too.

After all, 500 clicks and 200 sales is better than 1000 clicks and 100 sales. If you only measure clicks, you'd falsely assume the second email was the way forward.

Traditional solutions to this measurement need are to have dedicated landing pages for email campaigns. Or integration between email applications and web analytics programs.

Both approaches have their limitations for those on small budgets. Which might explain why surveys often find few people measuring conversions, ROI etc. As Simms Jenkins noted recently:

"Marketers are missing an opportunity to use metrics in order to gain the executive support needed to grow their programs. This speaks to the continued need for measuring the impact of email on the complete customer experience."

Enter Google, riding a white horse.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service (which I use) and you can code your email links to allow it to track those who click on them.

Dave Kearney explains how in this MediaPost article. A few weeks ago, Glenn Gabe wrote a similar piece (but with more detail) and expanded on his concept in the comments to this blog post.

Of course, those with the right resources have access to the top-end email marketing services, who have integration with leading web analytics software and services built in. Pleasingly, this functionality is spreading to the value-priced email marketing services, too.

Earlier this month, for example, both MailChimp and StreamSend announced integration with Google Analytics as part of their basic services. I'm sure others will follow.

At this rate, even niche publishers like me will have no excuse for not tracking beyond the click. Which is great, no?

More on analysis | Tags: email marketing, web analytics, google analytics

February 15, 2008

Let's be honest, this whole email delivery business is very frustrating. Even pristine, highly skilled senders run into trouble now and then, as this piece from Practical Ecommerce reports.

What's a legitimate marketer to do? Other than slump wearily in the bar stool, order another whiskey and pontificate on the unfairness of life, love and Hotmail's anti-spam technology?

Ah, but we are made of sterner stuff. We can face the reality that it's neither fair nor unfair. It just is. And the rules of the delivery game mean that the fault for problems usually lies close to home.

That's a message that comes through good and strong from Mickey Chandler's blog post, and he takes the trouble to give us many explanations of the things you might be doing to get your emails blocked.

For marketers, spam is usually defined as "not my email." But Mickey reminds us that recipients can mark mail as spam for all sorts of reasons. Including the fact that your message just looks kind of wrong.

One way to avoid inadvertently sending "messed up" email is to use a pre-campaign checklist. You can create your own, but the following articles offer their versions for you to build from:

• Your 10-Point quality-control checklist from Stefan Pollard
• Things to check before you launch your email campaign from Tamara Gielen
• Your email campaign launch checklist from Janine Popick
• Before you hit send from Karen Gedney

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing checklist, email deliverability, spam

Let's head toward the weekend with some good examples to boost your collection of ideas, inspiration and (inevitably) "things not to do."

We begin our journey with Andrew Seel highlighting the good points in three emails from an agency, luxury retailer and insurance comparison service respectively.

Linda Bustos goes over a Valentine email from Circuit City with her views on what works and why.

And DJ Waldow and Chad White team up in a video analyzing the email designs of such luminaries as BlueFly, All Recipes, PajamaGram, and American Airlines.

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

February 14, 2008

A lot of serious posts recently. So time to lighten things up with the follow-up to the alternative email glossary. This time: email marketing jargon you never heard of, but probably recognize...

Premature gratification
The sudden burst of euphoria that comes from seeing a 100% clickthrough rate in your campaign report. Before realizing that this is based on one click from the only person to open your email so far. Which was you.

Pork cutlets
Email you no longer want, but you can't unsubscribe from, because you know the people who produce the email and don't want to offend them (we've all been there). This is why it helps to have an anonymous sounding email address.

PSS or post-send syndrome
The sinking feeling you get when you realize the email you just sent out has a typo in the subject line.

Campaign blindness
The affliction that means you didn't spot that typo, even though you read over the subject line at least a dozen times before approving it.

The Santa Coefficient
A number indicating the percentage increase in commercial email sent in November and December. (If you do want to track seasonal email peaks, check Chad White's work at RetailEmail.Blogspot.)

List ghosts
Those people who signed up to your list but have never, ever opened, clicked on, or responded to any emails (just who are these people?)

FaceSpace fever
Mental condition leading to a desire to make "email is dead" comments whenever a new online communication technology gets a cover story at Wired magazine.

Nano-segmentation
When your advanced targeting rules mean your last campaign went out to just two people (and both bounced as undeliverable).

Got any more?

More cartoons and humor | Tags: marketing humor

February 13, 2008

Continuing the theme of looking at email with a fresh perspective, we often forget the context of our emails.

Context?

Merriam-Webster defines context as "the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs." What we might call the email environment.

It helps to consider all the different kinds of context in which our emails operate, each giving you ideas for how to improve what you do.

Some examples:

The emotional context

Stephanie Miller reminds us that our emails are not alone, but are one part of a busy inbox:


The rest of the world does not see email as a marketing medium. Though relationship building (and ending) is just as relevant, as a Google Valentine survey reveals.

Hence the value in thinking of your email program as creating an engaging experience as much as a series of standalone messages demanding an immediate response.

This holistic approach lets you build long-term success and relationships. An example is retailer Second Act's brand building program, where email is a key component in driving closer and more meaningful interactions between the customer and the business.

Seasonal context

The Second Act case study also reflects the value of tying email to the season (in their case with a football-flavored campaign).

This builds on email's suitability for reaching people with timely messages, a concept driven home by Michael Goldberg in his article on driving ROI from seasonal campaigns.

Display context

Then we have the issue of where your emails are actually displayed. There are two aspects of this.

First, there is the question of devices and software. Designing emails for different display environments is a well-covered topic in email marketing literature. MarketingSherpa, for example, just brought out a long article on email marketing and the iPhone.

But there is the second aspect, too. Where are people when they see your emails and how does this impact their readiness to read your message and respond to it?

This idea of "display environment" gets less coverage, but will be ever more important as mobile email use increases, especially among consumers.

It's getting harder to make assumptions about email habits. Consider this tidbit on the work mail / private mail divide from a recent survey of messaging technologies by Network World:


(As an aside, the survey reinforces the idea that email is evolving, not dying, and will continue to be the dominant form of communication medium in the future.)

A more specific example comes from a look at Pizza Huts emails, where an hour or two difference in the send time can potentially make a huge difference in results.

Clearly context matters. After all, no man is an iland.

Tags: email marketing, email design, email strategy

One point often forgotten in the best practices mantra is that each collection of readers is unique. And their unique behavior or response to different elements of your email program changes through time

So following proven (by the majority) tactics and approaches is a sound and safe way of going about email marketing. But we should be aware that we might be missing out on a few extra responses if we looked at things differently every now and then.

This premise is another reason for the constant advice to test.

For those wondering how to set about testing in a methodical way, Karen Gedney outlines a typical routine to follow, drawn from Jordan Ayan's book.

And her colleague Jeanne Jennings describes how you can use self-generated response curves to predict the outcome of a (test) send without waiting for all the results to come in.

David Baker also has advice on what to test. But more critically, he makes a crucial point about the context of that testing.

Namely that it's not enough to find the best of two tested alternatives. Instead, you should design tests where the results identify principles and approaches you can apply continually in the future.

So testing should be about learning as much as optimizing an individual element of an email program.

Just as testing reflects acceptance that we don't know everything about our subscribers, we can also try taking different perspectives on the whole business of email and see if that helps refine our skills and success.

Gene Liebel sets the cranial wheels turning in this article, where he suggests how you could look at your email program from a usability viewpoint to come up with better approaches to keeping users happy.

Another example of innovative thinking comes from the always great Stephanie Miller in this piece. She describes how you might use a different email approach depending on the sign-up source of your subscriber. Particularly important when you start adding sign-ups from third-party sources.

A trick to get logical folk like me to draw better is to position the object upside down, freeing your mind from left-brain assumptions. Try the same concept with email and who knows what might come out.

More on testing | Tags: email marketing, email testing

February 12, 2008

Time to catch up with a few peeks behind the scenes of what others are doing right or wrong with their emails. Here you go...

Ben Chestnut looks over Delight.com's email from subscription through to the sale and is impressed.

Matthew Finch casts an eye at HMV's email program and describes how a lack of coordination between house lists leads to problems with the subscriber's experience.

Josh tries out Pizza Hut's emails and suggests improvements to their marketing recipe.

MarketingSherpa has a free dirty dozen report on some typical mistakes made by email newsletters.

Each mistake is outlined in detail in the 43 page report, which includes numerous screenshots and examples of those emails that got it right.

Anna Billstrom gets the inside scoop on InformationWeek's newsletter strategy and email tactics in this interview with editor Stephen Wellman.

Raj Khera reviews a cruise email from Disney to reveal the problems that arise when you get a disconnect between what you expect from a brand and what they actually deliver in their email and on the landing page.

Blue Sky Factory use a fictitious email to demonstrate how beautiful design doesn't always make a good email.

...and to finish on a brighter note, Lisa Harmon gives examples of all the Valentine's Day subject lines she got last year. Inspiration for your marketing (and personal?) emails.

Tags: email marketing case studies

The big email providers can be shy of revealing too much about their approach to filtering incoming email. Understandably.

But in this interview, Mark Risher (anti-abuse product manager for Yahoo! Mail) reveals plenty of detail of the web giant's plans for authenticated email and how authentication impacts your efforts as an email marketer.

This quote should set you thinking:


See also the same source's overview article on Domain Keys Identified Mail.

More on authentication | Tags: email marketing, email authentication, yahoo mail, dkim, domainkeys

February 11, 2008

Discovered today that there is still much confusion out there about the difference between authentication and certification. For those who share this confusion, here some quick easy-to-understand help...not the whole story, but enough to grasp what's going on.

Use the comments to expand the explanations, if you want to add anything.

Email authentication

Email authentication refers to some behind-the-scenes changes you can make to the administrative records concerning the source of your emails and/or the emails themselves.

These changes are encapsulated in technical authentication standards and, if implemented correctly, organizations receiving authenticated email can verify your identity and confirm that the email really does come from you or from someone authorized to send email on your behalf (such as your email marketing service).

There are no universal authentication standards in place. But some popular standards exist and are used by a growing number of ISPs, webmail services and others managing incoming email.

By authenticating your outgoing emails and thus making your identity clear and verifiable, you are also accepting accountability for those emails. As such, authentication is increasingly seen as evidence of a good email sender.

And not authenticating your emails is increasingly seen as evidence of a bad sender. As such, authentication can help ensure your emails get delivered.

However, verifying the email sender's identity does not in itself really say anything about that sender's actual email practices. So authenticating your emails does not guarantee your emails preferential treatment.

But it will help establish a good reputation with ISPs etc. and is often required before you can apply for any such preferential treatment.

Further reading:

• Email authentication for marketers (updated February 2008)
• Email authentication guide (includes a list of ISPs checking for authentication)
• Email authentication: it's time
• Authentication category at EmailKarma
• ReputationWiki.org
• Authentication and Online Trust Alliance

Email certification

Email certification (often synonymous with email accreditation) is a third-party seal of approval for your emails. So unlike authentication, it does say you are a good emailer. However, an absence of certification does not imply you are a bad emailer.

Getting your email certified involves paying a fee to a third-party certifying agency and satisfying their certification requirements.

These requirements normally involve demonstrating that your email program and (sometimes) your organization meets various quality criteria, such as only sending opt-in email, using email authentication (!), attracting low spam complaints from your subscribers, and similar.

The actual form of the "seal of approval" varies from service to service, but essentially it gets you preferential treatment from those ISPs who recognize that seal.

So, for example, joining a particular certification program might mean your emails to certain webmail services are guaranteed delivery to the recipient's inbox.

Important aspects of certification:

1. There is no global certification program in place for email. The various private certification services each have their own arrangements with a select number of email partners.

2. It costs money to get certified. This may involve an application fee, annual fees and/or per email fees. So anyone considering certification needs to weigh up the costs against the likely benefits.

3. Certification is revoked if your email program no longer meets the certifying service's requirements.

Further reading:
Email certification and accreditation services

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, email certification, email authentication

February 08, 2008

An article published Tuesday at MarketingProfs.com outlined an email append process used by a publisher which sent my eyebrows instantly a-furrowing.

Email appending has become a formal business process with its own specialist vendors, but it seems somehow to have become disassociated from normal email marketing practices.

In today's online climate, nobody is keen to recommend opt-out email marketing. Where you add people to a list without getting their permission, but give them an opportunity to unsubscribe before you continue to email them.

But that seems to be a relatively common approach in email appending. Something that surprises the experts.

Opt-out is dangerous. Risky. Why?

Because when people don't opt out, it is not the same as opting-in. There is no active granting of permission to send them emails. And permission is the foundation on which email marketing success is based. No permission...much lower chance of success.

People may not opt-out because, for example...

• They never saw your first email
• They saw it and deleted it without reading it properly
• They couldn't be bothered
• They saw it and didn't opt-out because they've been told that you should never unsubscribe from spam
• They thought they'd give you a chance to prove your value

None of those folk can reasonably be considered to have actively opted-in.

Ignoring the likely poor responsiveness of these folk to future emails, you can find yourself running into delivery problems because they eventually get annoyed by your mailings and report you as spam.

Have fun trying to prove the opt-in to your friendly local blacklist administrator. You can't. You never got one.

As such, taking a name and physical address from your prospect database, getting someone to match it with an email address and then emailing that address on an opt-out basis seems like a task that needs very careful management to make it work. (Update: If you want more arguments against opt-out appends, Morgan Stewart has several in-depth ones.)

Not that email append has to fail. Some experts like it. Good articles on the issues and the best way to do appends are:

A Checklist for a Successful Email Append from Pivotal Veracity
Successfully Navigate E-Mail Append by Derek Harding
Email appends done right by Morgan Stewart

There are parallels between the opt-out email append problem and the USA's alibi anti-spam legislation: Can-Spam. It makes the opt-out approach legal. Thus luring the misinformed marketer into assuming it's perfectly fine to use opt-out.

I will never tire of repeating the point that compliance with anti-spam legislation is not a criteria applied by email users, ISPs, webmail services, etc. when deciding if you're spamming. Just because it's legal doesn't make it the right thing to do.

Others have also written on this critical point, most recently Laura at Word to the Wise and our favorite baron of blacklists, Al Iverson, who has today's golden quote:


So all together now, just because they didn't opt-out doesn't mean they opted-in.

Tags: email marketing, email appends, opt-in, opt-out, permission marketing, can-spam

February 07, 2008

Kevin Hillstrom recently polled his readers about what email marketing will look like in 2015. The majority answered "E-Mail evolves in ways we cannot yet forecast." (See poll results.)

Returning after an enforced week away from email -- you may have noticed the lack of posts -- the future of email marketing actually seems very clear to me. And important for understanding where to focus your efforts.

Kevin almost answers his own question in a subsequent post, where he explores what email marketers would do if email cost $0.05 per message to deliver.

He notes that the excellent tactics he describes will never get widespread application because email doesn't cost that much to deliver. There is not enough incentive to get people to work harder at email.

Or perhaps there is? The costs of sending email continue to rise. Not in the form of a delivery fee, but in the form of lost opportunities. Opportunities lost to email marketers through the evolution of email technology and email user habits.

Think of all the challenges now making life difficult for the email sender:

• Image blocking
• Preview panes
• Email fatigue
• Growth of mobile email
• Display inconsistencies among webmail services and email clients
• ...not to mention ever tougher and more sophisticated anti-spam filters

So if the "cost" of email marketing grows, you have two choices. Carry on doing what you do now and see revenues decline. Or adapt.

But how to adapt?

If you think of the mechanics of your emails and email program, there are plenty of things you can do.

Wiser folk than me have long talked about designing for preview panes and blocked images, authentication technologies, building a clean delivery reputation, the benefits of certifying your messages, improving open rates etc. etc. See this big selection of resources, for example.

These are the basics of a future-proof email marketing program. But an equally important perspective is one that gets away from the mechanics and looks at your overall program as a relationship builder.

All the challenges to getting emails read and acted on arise because of one basic principle. People are only willing to pay attention to emails they truly want.

All these challenges appear because services and people seek to...

• protect themselves from unwanted email
• restrict inbox access to those who truly deserve it, and
• make it easy for individuals to determine when and whether they want to read an email or not

So at an even more basic and holistic level, all the email challenges outlined above can be mastered by simply delivering what people want. Embracing the causes of those challenges rather than fighting them.

Then your subscribers solve the challenges for you. By downloading images, opening your email just based on the sender name (not the preview pane), extricating you from the junk folder and not reporting you as spam in the first place.

OK, sending emails that people want is a simple concept. BUT...it has to go beyond that.

If you want people opening your email irrespective of the size of their preview pane, then you need to build a connection that keeps them engaged and looking forward to your emails.

Because once you have the basic technical requirements in place, it's people and their perception of your emails that determine your success.

It's people telling services like Hotmail what is and isn't wanted email. It's people deciding to open your email rather than the emails of all your competitors, even before they know what's in it.

Targeted, relevant emails are an important step in this relationship-building process. But it goes beyond that. It's about all the other aspects of building an ongoing email experience that creates loyalty and ensures attention.

It's about...

• Ensuring your emails are recognized and associated with a reputation for value
• Proving a trusted partner, accepting accountability for your actions and respecting the principles of permission email marketing
• Seeing each email as one in an ongoing series of emotional interactions with subscribers, not a series of one-off messages.
• Being more creative, different, better than the competition. At the moment, you can achieve this simply through basic best practices. But as people and delivery processes get more selective and choosy, and competitors get clued in, it's the creativity that distinguishes you. A topic Tom O'Leary addresses in a recent post on the battle for recipient attention.

That is the email marketing of the future. And those aspects deserve your attention as much as the more conventional elements of a successful email marketing program.

Tags: email marketing

February 06, 2008

From Six Ways to Boost Conversion Rates by Bryan Eisenberg

I have nothing to add...

February 04, 2008

It's getting a little jittery out there with the specter of recession poking its unpleasant head in through office windows throughout the world.

Whether real, media-inspired or just a scare story, the prospect has prompted a few heavy hitters in the email space to ponder how email marketing and email marketers might cope with an economic downturn.

There are two dangers out there.

The first is presented well by Bill McCloskey in his Email Insider column, and reiterated by fellow columnist Loren McDonald. Namely that resources may shift to email because it's low cost and effective. Because it's safe.

That's not a danger per se, but it might be if those extra resources mean sending more email, rather than more effective email.

Despite all the good advice doled out by Bill, Loren and others, an inevitable rush to send more and more mediocre email would follow, and see the email resource overgrazed. Barren shopping carts and government regulation would likely follow.

At times like these, it's worth re-reading what Seth Godin has to say on the permission marketing concept that he was first to properly articulate.

Now the second danger.

Industry advocates have gone to great lengths to persuade businesses that there is considerable value to be gained from significant investment in the email channel. Because additional resources let you do clever things (like better segmentation and trigger emails.) All of which can increase profits.

Email has begun to shake off the unsophisticated low-cost image.

It would be tragic to see email return to that image simply because email marketers play the low-cost card to boost email's position in the context of an economic downturn.

Fact is that email is both low cost and worth heavier investment. It can work well with few resources, but also brings rewards through higher investment.

So it's a political balancing act when arguing for funds. Focus on the low-cost and you forfeit future investment. Focus on the value of investments in email and you forfeit current resources when money is tight.

The trick is to communicate the dual potential of email accurately and not to go overboard on how cheap it is just because a recession threatens.

Tags: email marketing, permission marketing, email marketing strategy

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