No man is an iland

May 30, 2008

Part 5 of an ongoing series:

(We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.)

Part 4 of this series stressed the importance of quality over quantity. Nowhere is this more apparent then when considering your actual list of email addresses.

Lurking silently on your list are any number of addresses that still accept email, but never produce an open, click or any other response. Not a big issue, really: they're not doing any harm. Or are they?

1. For a start, you're paying money to send email into a black hole.

2. A mass of unresponsive subscribers dilutes the impacts of any tests or changes you make, so it's harder to draw conclusions on what works.

3. Sending to addresses that still exist but are abandoned by their user hurts your sender reputation and thus leads to unfavorable treatment of your emails by ISPs.

4. Each new email to an address that lost interest in your messages long ago runs the risk of being reported as spam.

Balancing all this of course is the fact that some email addresses go quiet for weeks and months and then suddenly generate a sale, download etc.

So should you delete unresponsive email addresses? Or should you hang on to them and accept the risks for the sake of those potential extra sales?

The new email marketer knows when to hold and when to fold. Here's how...

First, it goes without saying that any addresses that no longer exist need to be removed as soon as possible (many ESPs do this automatically for you).

Second, you can of course preempt the unresponsive address problem by following email marketing best practices to ensure the right recipients get the right, relevant emails.

Stefan Pollard has a nice take on this, where he advises you "provide demonstrated value in each e-mail." Not just in terms of what you send and when, but in ensuring you communicate your value to potential and existing subscribers.

That said, what are the next steps in dealing with dormant addresses?

Identify non-responsive addresses

To identify your non-responders, you need to...

• Define a response. Most experts suggest a non-responder is anyone who has not recorded an open, click or other measurable action (sale, download etc.)
• Define a cut-off point. How long should the gap be since the last recorded response before you consign an address to the dormant file? There are no easy answers here, since it depends on your business model, strategy, products, services etc.
• Ensure non-responders really are what they seem

This last point is important. A lack of response does not automatically mean the recipient is not interested in your email.

For example, the problem may be one of deliverability. Is your email actually reaching that address?

Look at your subscriber base on a recipient domain-by-domain basis. If one domain has an unusual number of non-responders then the issue is more likely that your emails aren't arriving there. Or use DeliveryMonitor or a similar delivery tool or service to see whether your emails reach inboxes.

Another problem may be measurability. Text-only informational newsletters containing full articles will never get any opens and few clicks. If your email model doesn't encourage measurable responses anyway, you might want to be careful labelling and deleting anyone as a non-responder.

Once you have identified your dormant addresses, you have three choices:

Option 1: Get the opt-in again

One alternative is to email non-responders with a request to recommit to the opt-in by clicking on a confirmation link. If they don't "opt-in" again, then they get removed from the list.

Morgan Stewart has written on this topic with some excellent advice on tactics to use:

Opt-in email best practices
Opt-in email campaign strategy

One warning though. If people recommit to the opt-in, this doesn't necessarily solve the underlying problem.

Why were they not responding? Presumably because what you sent wasn't relevant or valuable enough.

A reconfirmation strategy should try and include an opportunity for recipients to communicate their preferences and interests. For example in a survey or through an incentive to update their preference pages.

Then you can change what you send accordingly.

Option 2: Conduct a reactivation campaign

Another alternative is to create a specific email or series of emails aimed at winning back recipient interest. Clearly your existing emails aren't working for non-responders, so whatever you send them has to be different and provide enough value / incentive to rekindle interest.

Again, it's a pyrrhic victory if you can squeeze out a click or two and triumphantly return the subscriber to your main email list. You need to solve the underlying problem, just like with the reconfirmation campaign described above.

What will you send in future to ensure this subscriber remains responsive?

Reactivation campaigns are one of the flavors du jour in email marketing. Try these articles for practical tips on how to conduct them:

6 tips to win back inactive subscribers
How to reengage inactive subscribers
Start the year right and win back inactive customers
When parting isn't such sweet sorrow

Option 3: Reconnect with old subscribers

The third alternative is the special case where the reason for non-response is because you haven't sent them any emails for a while.

Sending a first email to people who signed up long ago and haven't heard from you recently has its own dangers, as outlined in this post.

The key is understanding the point at which "long ago" becomes "too long ago". Permission is like the wild squirrel in my local park. It only hangs around as long as you keep feeding it. Permission erodes with time unless you keep it current by sending regular, engaging, relevant emails.

Wait too long, and permission is gone. No permission...spam. Ding!

DJ Waldow has an excellent post explaining the role of the time gap in determining whether you can start emailing old addresses again.

See also:
The secret to successfully emailing to old addresses
How to launch an email program
Sending your first campaign to an old email list?

Dump the rest

If you still get no response after trying to reconfirm or reactivate an address, it's time to delete it from your list to avoid the problems outlined at the top of this post.

But don't give up on the associated human being. As Stephanie Miller suggests, consider switching to another communication channel (e.g. direct mail) to market to them.

Tags: email marketing, list management, reactivation campaigns, list hygiene

May 29, 2008

This story over at The Consumerist illustrates perfectly why keeping to the letter of anti-spam law is often not good enough.

It's an extreme example, but not honoring an unsubscribe request immediately (US law gives you ten days to do so) meant one company kept sending emails to a pet owner about her dog. Except the dog had just died.

Nothing illegal going on...but oh my goodness me!

Before anyone blames the problem on a bad coincidence, consider that the writer expected the unsubscribe request to work immediately (because most do). When people continue to get emails they thought they unsubscribed from, how do they react? Here's a clue:


A free email marketing t-shirt to the first person who can tell me three other potential problems with the company's email program, based on the above report (use the comments).

Also, read the story's comments to see the mixed views out there on what is and isn't legitimate marketing email. It's an education.

The key takeaway (as always) is that there is no right definition, but you do need to do what you can to stay away from the dark side of the email spectrum.

Tags: email marketing, spam, anti-spam

May 28, 2008

An unfortunate misconception in email marketing is that there is no downside to bad email practices. Other than the loss of a bit of time and "a few dollars" to send out the email.

Not so. There are a number of hidden costs, many of which fail to get even a whiff of attention when contemplating email marketing design and strategy.

When you prepare an email marketing task, you probably ask "how will this help drive a positive response from subscribers?"

A good question. But...

Do you ever ask, "how will this help drive a negative response from subscribers?"

The positive responses are often easily seen. The negative responses are often hidden.

Example: sending a copy of a campaign to all those who didn't "open" the first email. You can easily see the additional clicks and sales the resend produces.

But do you understand the consequences of sending yet another email to those who didn't "open" the first because they're already tired of the number of commercial emails they get?

You probably already know about the most obvious "hidden cost" of email marketing.

If your subscribers don't like what you send, they can use the "report spam" button to "vote" you on to blacklists that affect your future ability to get emails through to inboxes.

But there are more.

For example, buried in the recent Habeas consumer email survey is this little tidbit...



We tend to think of poor deliverability simply in terms of fewer opens, clicks, sales etc. But since we see a steady stream of emails go out the door, we fail to recognize that recipients see a different picture.

Emails that go missing for a week or three, then turn up again. Or emails that never arrive, no matter how many times you sign-up.

That's a black mark against your business or brand. Getting emails delivered isn't just about driving positive responses. It's also about avoiding negative ones.

The same damage to your image occurs if emails arrive, but aren't recognized. They might as well not exist. Which is why it's important to focus on ensuring recognition and accountability in your email program.

Then even if you do get through and get recognized, you take an image hit if your email looks lame in the preview pane, webmail interface or email client.

Not lame in terms of the basic design, but lame in terms of accounting for image blocking and rendering issues.

Again, it's not an issue of missing clicks (which all email marketers understand and often accept as a cost of email business). It's the damage done to your business image and reputation (which few email marketers take into account).

If your image-only email shows up as a hollow rectangle with a safety warning attached, few recipients will think, "ah, an understandable result of overzealous image blocking on the part of my email client. I shall download images instantly in order to enjoy the full glory of this commercial message."

(Some might.)

Many will think, "lame email" (lame brand, lame business).

Which is another reason why experts continue to write about important design elements like:

• alt tags for images (see this Blue Sky Factory piece)
• image blocking and the preview pane (see Loren McDonald's latest article)
• testing for when images fail (José Manuel Alarcón Aguín discovered some great tools to make this easy)

So when you weigh up the pros and cons of email marketing tasks, don't forget to account for the hidden costs of not doing something...

More on email and branding | Tags: email marketing, branding, email design, email deliverability

What better way to celebrate Wednesday than to pluck a few case study morsels from the banquet table of email life.

New ideas

1. Sundeep Kapur reviews various approaches to the birthday email.

In one of the examples discussed, open rates were not only higher for the actual birthday email, but stayed higher than average for the next three emails after that. Evidence for the positive benefits of relationship-oriented email strategies.

2. The experience of Analog Devices with their revamped email program demonstrates why it pays to think harder about the purchase and user habits of your subscribers. For example, midnight proved a better time to send email to engineers than midday...

Doing it right

A few bloggers take a closer look at the winning features of favorite emails...

3. Lisa Harmon picks out the positive design and content elements in a couple of food-oriented emails.

4. Josh Nason runs over the content in two music emails.

5. And Dylan Boyd sings the praises of putting key offers right up at the top of the email in the space normally reserved for the "see the web version" message.

Doing it almost right

6. SEOmoz looks at the successes and failures of various B2B and B2C email newsletters, and ends the article with some design and content tips from the reader perspective.

7. Anna Billstrom takes her frustration with poor email design out on Avis, and discusses why email design is less Monet and more mundane.

8. And no 2008 blog post would be complete without a timely mention of the US presidential elections. Michael Whitney uses a John McCain email to explain the dangers of over-long copy with no calls to action.

Tags: email marketing case studies

May 27, 2008

Hot on the heels of the Habeas survey comes more detailed research from ExactTarget on channel preferences among consumers.

The 20-page white paper is behind a registration screen, but worth the effort to download because it offers a thoughtful, realistic and surprisingly objective (for an ESP) look at exactly how you should approach one of today's biggest online marketing problems...

With consumers using any number of different communication channels, just where do you focus your marketing efforts? Do you foxtrot with Facebook? Tango with Twitter? Samba with SMS? Or do the paso doble with double opt-in email?

The lessons I took away were these:

Email remains a strong channel. Not necessarily because people prefer to use email above anything else (even if most age groups do), but because people prefer to use email to interact with businesses.

This reflects the wider point that consumers are not using one channel to the exclusion of all others. Nor are they using many channels for the same purpose. Instead, each alternative channel has a particular role or context in the life of each consumer.

SMS is for texting friends and getting urgent alerts. Email for writing to grandma and receiving event information. And so on...with a different pattern for each person.

This insight leads to two practical conclusions...

First, you need to give people a choice of ways to hear from you and let them pick the best one. Which means getting away from seeing RSS, instant messaging, social networks, email etc. as competitors and instead viewing them as components of a wider holistic approach.

Second, when you look at where to invest your time and resources, you need to reflect on how your delivered content and relationship with the recipient fits with the context of each communication option.

Email's great strength is that people accept its use as a vehicle for commercial messages (permission-based ones at least). The newer channels don't have that yet. The newer communication channels are more private. More personal. More suited to those businesses with a more intimate relationship to the consumer.

So a punk band can probably use SMS willfully to reach its fans. But a supermarket chain might have less success.

However, these preferences and contexts will change through time. Just as banner ads and email did. I remember the days when ads on websites were cursed as the spawn of Beelzebub.

So the right distribution of resources among different channels now will not be the right distribution in five years time. It pays to constantly review the situation.

Email evangelists tend to assume that the younger generation will all switch as one to email as soon "as they get a real job." People probably thought the likes of me would return to the telephone once we left university.

The Greeks were right. Everything changes.

Fascinating isn't it? If you haven't spent time on how best to reach your target audience in a crazy online world, use the study report to kick start your thought processes.

Tags: email marketing, multichannel marketing, consumer communication preferences, exacttarget

Surveys of consumer email habits and preferences leave much food for thought for the enlightened email marketer.

Consider the annual Habeas survey of "consumer attitudes towards email and online interaction with businesses."

I'll let you browse the numbers, but here's the standout message...

There is an astonishing level of distrust and uncertainty around. And a clear desire for email relationships with companies that respect the privacy of the inbox. For example...

• 69% of respondents "expressed concern about being victimized by email fraud scams"
• Around 75% "prefer engaging with organizations that exhibit strong privacy practices"
• 80% "are not comfortable with businesses sharing their email address"...but Internet users believe that the majority of companies are likely to do exactly that.

Good email marketers are, of course, doing none of the things that might worry the typical consumer. But are you communicating that effectively?

A consumer-friendly privacy policy and strict permission practices have more value if you tell people about them. Consumers want to be reassured. They want to know you won't abuse their email address. They want to know what to expect from you.

Tell them on your sign-up forms and subscription pages, and give them another reason to loan you their email address for marketing purposes.

Tags: email marketing, consumer email, email privacy, permission email

May 23, 2008

Part 4 of an ongoing series:

(We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.)

Seen from afar, email marketing is a boiling mass of mediocre email programs all scrabbling to send more offers more often to more and more (and more) subscribers. Like some insatiable digital beast.

The beast needs slaying.

There are two challenges for marketers. First, your email competition is everywhere. You are always a mere moment away from your subscriber abandoning you for the next email in the (in)box.

And this subscriber is getting harder to please by the day.

Second, there's a bigger downside to bad email marketing than just wasted expense. Emails guide perceptions of your brand and business. Bad email...bad brand...bad business.

And let's not forget those consumers happily condemning poor commercial email to "report spam" purgatory, like Roman Emperors at the Colosseum. Thumbs up...you live to send email another day. Thumbs down and you may never be seen again.

Quality is the answer.

But that's like saying, you need to fish better if you want to catch more fish. Not very helpful.

What does quality mean in the new email marketing?

If we go back to our maelstrom of mediocrity, quality applies at the three pressure points: what you send, when you send it and who you send it to.

Sending high-value content or relevant offers.

Sending them often enough to keep folk engaged and responsive, but not so often that they get overwhelmed and unresponsive.

Sending not to anybody, but only to those whose needs and interests correspond with what you offer.

But if you want to really distinguish yourself from mediocrity, attract loyalty, get responses and improve all the other factors that contribute to success, then quality means...


Few email programs can have mass appeal to a mass audience. Yet we often design the whole program assuming this to be the case.

You don't want, for example, subscribers. You want the right kind of subscribers: active, responsive, engaged, interested, loyal ones. Quality, not quantity.

The selection process begins with sign-up, where you ensure prospective recipients know what to expect from you, so their expectations match, mirror and are met by what you actually do in terms of email content and frequency.

Once on board, your actual campaigns nurture the subscriber through time, binding them tighter and tighter to your program.

There are three aspects to this.

First, new email marketing does all those things everyone in the industry writes about all the time: send relevant, targeted content.

This message tends to get ignored through over-familiarity and a belief that relevancy and targeting can only be achieved through clever (and expensive) database and segmentation technologies.

Not so, as these posts explain:

Simpler ways to achieve relevancy in emails
Targeting good, prevaricating bad
Targeting too difficult? Start simple - it works

(Although more complex approaches are of course interesting for those with the skills and resources. See Anna Billstrom's article for some examples.)

Second, if you want influence with a few rather than ignorance from the majority, then you have to actively strive not to please all the people all the time.

That's not the same thing as targeting and segmentation. It's an invite to try to be a little different at the "risk" of only appealing to a smaller group of people. But it's not really a risk. Because if you're not different, you're stuck in a morass of competition.

It's an invite, in particular, for content publishers to develop a unique voice or standpoint. A personality.

Third, it means you need to keep your list free of non-responsive addresses. The new email marketing does not send email to those addresses which are technically or emotionally dead.

Technically dead addresses are those unable to receive email. All that goes into bounce management.

Emotionally dead are those addresses technically able to accept emails, but that don't ever respond to messages. We'll look at that issue more closely later in the series.

May 21, 2008

Rarely does a day pass without some new piece of information cracking my veneer of email self-assurance...sigh!

A functional unsubscribe mechanism is a marketing and legal requirement for anyone sending commercial emails. Fortunately, we're all secure in the knowledge that we have a nice web form that lets people get off our lists no problem.

Or does it?

Dylan Boyd and Joshua Baer each point out real examples of unsubscribe pages that don't work if you use particular web browsers.

Lesson 1: when you check if your unsubscribe function works, test it in all the different web browsers (and versions of these web browsers) you can lay your hands on. (Which means Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.)

You've probably also checked how your basic email design template displays in various email clients and webmail interfaces. Using one of the design testing services out there.

Lesson 2: Don't assume what looked good last week looks good this week.

The Email Standards Project, for example, just spotted changes in the way Yahoo! Mail handles paragraph spacing, eerily reminiscent of a similar issue with Windows Live Hotmail.

Since these design testing tools cost as little as $5 per test, it's now realistic to pre-test the rendering success of every email before you send it out. But...

Lesson 3: Don't assume that your email will always render correctly just because it looks good in the design tool screenshots.

Eh?

It's the web browser problem again. At the big webmail sites, there are two layers of rendering going on.

The first is the way that the webmail interface displays and handles HTML email (which is what the design tools do a great job of testing).

The second is how the different web browsers display the HTML email. So it's perhaps worth setting up test accounts at the very large webmail services and checking your designs in various web browsers now and then. Just to be safe...

Tags: email design, unsubscribes, web browsers

May 20, 2008

Commenting on a post on bounce management, blog reader Roy Rajan raised the specter of disposable email addresses.

These are email addresses that can go bad about 30 seconds after you send out a confirmation email. Ouch!

A new article over at the main site describes the phenomenon and its implications for marketers. And offers tips on how to avoid being a victim.

Disposable address services arise because people have had bad experiences with websites and email programs. They've submitted their email address and seen it abused.

Marketers find these services annoying when trying to build an opt-in list. But the focus of our ire should not be on the services' users, but on the spammers and poor email marketing practices that drove them to use these services in the first place.

More on email list building | Tags: email marketing, disposable email address, temporary email address

May 19, 2008

Sometimes all the testing and preparation in the world won't help. After sending out an email newsletter earlier today, the backend systems went down almost immediately meaning all links broke for about 90 minutes.

Here's what I did...would you have done anything different?

1. Put out a note via the blog to apologize and let people know I am aware of the problem and am trying to fix it.

2. Put out a similar note in a prominent position on the homepage.

3. Ensured someone was ready and waiting to answer emails and calls instantly, so that when people got in touch about the email problems they got an immediate answer. (Thanks to those who did write to let me know.)

4. Left rude messages for the ESP.

5. Removed the homepage note and updated the blog post as soon as the problem was fixed.

6. Accepted that this is going to cost me subscribers, opens, clicks, pageviews and - worst of all - credibility.

7. Banged my head against the wall for a full five minutes. S*** happens, but that's no consolation when it happens to you.

8. Since the problem was temporary, I will not burden people with a second send. But I will discuss the problem in the next newsletter issue (since the e-newsletter is for email marketers, an apology and explanation doubles nicely as relevant content).

Notes for the future:

1. If your links and reply-to address run through the same backend technology service, then a failure of that service means there is no obvious way for people to unsubscribe or contact you by email. Bad.

So somewhere in your email, put a simple contact email address that runs through a different system. That gives people an alternative when the main systems fail.

2. Take no risks with service maintenance. If your ESP is playing with their system in any way, try and hold back any campaigns until you're sure they're finished, even if you're assured that this maintenance should not affect your emails.

The unfortunate thing about lessons is you have to have them before you can learn from them...

It's an Alanis Morissette moment. If you're trying to click on the links in the site newsletter that just went out, the tracking server just went down. Should be OK shortly. Apologies!

Update: fixed.

May 16, 2008

Part 3 of an ongoing series:

(We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.)

A natural extension of the relationship approach described in part 2 of this series is the need to accept accountability for your emails.

Accept and welcome accountability for your emails.

Again, you may find the word "doh!" rising inexorably to the front of your mouth. But wait...accountability in modern email marketing means much more than just taking responsibility for the results of your campaigns.

Both recipients and those who provide their email address service (ISPs, webmail services etc.) face a continual challenge when processing incoming mail.

This challenge is to distinguish between the good, wanted email and the bad, unwanted email, so they can deliver/read the former and delete/block the latter.

Many things distinguish spam from non-spam. But a big one is accountability. Spammers and other denizens of the email underworld do not, by definition, want to be held accountable for their actions.

If you run a good email program, delivering value and respecting permission, then you are prepared to stand up for that. You are willing to make yourself accountable to those two key audiences: ISPs and your subscribers.

Why?

Because accountability communicates trust. Trust helps you get past delivery barriers. And trust drives response.

So what practical form does this all take?

In a comment on a previous post, J.D. writes:

"These games -- in effect, trying to pretend that your mail isn't really from you -- just make you look like a spammer. Be proud of your brand!" (The games he refers to are switching IP addresses and similar deliverability tricks.)

Incoming mail processing technologies grow ever more sophisticated. Rather than become involved in a complicated arms race to "trick" the system, it's now better to clearly identify yourself to all and sundry. Let your long-term reputation as a sender of good email gain you access to inboxes.

One step is implementing authentication, which enables email receivers to reliably identify the source of the email.

A second step is to ensure there are no loose cannons in your email program. No emails going out without the same care, attention and accountability you give your main campaigns. Jordan Ayan has some details on this.

But accountability isn't just about identifying yourself to the technological systems that manage email Accountability also implies ensuring your emails are recognized by recipients.

Recognition contributes to trust and is itself a driver of response. Studies show time and time again that recognizing the from line, for example, of an email is a key factor in deciding whether to open that same email.

The from name gets most of the attention when it comes to driving recognition, and you'll find some interesting insights in recent articles at the Emma blog (on political emails) and from Chad White (retailer use of sender lines), as well as in previous posts here.

But ensuring recognition is about much more than using an appropriate from name. This earlier blog post covers the ground well, describing how numerous elements of your emails and wider email program can ensure you get recognized in that inbox.

Accountability works in an online world where trust and recognition are critical elements driving positive responses to your messages. But only, of course, if you're a good mailer. And we'll look at more definitions of what makes an email "good" in subsequent articles.

Related post:
Email marketing 2.0 is accountability

Tags: email marketing, email authentication, email recognition

Just a couple of quick links for US marketers looking for insight on the Can-Spam changes. Insight that goes beyond regurgitating the press release:

1. MarketingSherpa has a seven minute podcast on the topic with Jeff Mills of eROI.

2. Ray Everett-Church of Habeas has a long blog post which goes into detail on the new definition of a sender.

3. Datran Media's Chief Privacy Officer gives his recommendations in another post.

(Also contact your email marketing service provider...I've heard several are producing useful documents for their customers.)

Please do recommend any other useful interpretive resources in the comments.

And those FTC docs again: press release | detailed notice

More on anti-spam laws | Tags: email marketing law, can-spam, anti-spam, spam laws

May 15, 2008

In recent months, adding video to your emails has threatened to go mainstream. And we finally have a broad consensus on how best to do it...

Don't let the coolness factor seduce you

While it's still somewhat edgy and cool to have online video, the buzz factor diminishes with each passing day. Video is no longer quite so cutting edge.

Before you add video to your emails, assess it like any other element of your content. Video in email must...

• ...serve a business purpose (build awareness, build engagement, better showcase products to improve sales, educate, etc.)
• ...deliver value to the recipients (a video of your new offices is not cool, not relevant and not valuable.)
• ...match the brand and business behind it. Amateur "talking head" videos are fine for little independents like me. Not so fine for big corporations with a brand to protect.
• ...display properly.

This last point was the hurdle for much of email marketing's history, but the consensus is that you should avoid video/email compatibility issues by putting the actual video on a web page and using the email to drive traffic to this page.

Get people to view the video

This is where creativity is required with the call to action that gets people to click on a link and view the video at the destination landing page.

While you can apply established copywriting principles to this call to action, most "video emails" now take the screenshot route. The call to action is a clickable image of the video:


Even better, a clickable image of the video as if it were ready to play:


(You'd want text links somewhere too for those unable to see the images.)

The Email Standards Project newsletter took this approach and reported that the "...screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link."

If you want to see some good examples, see this post from Dylan Boyd.

And David Baker suggests a creative alternative might be to use animated .gifs to simulate the start of a video and then encourage people to "click to continue viewing."

What about embedding the video directly in the email itself?

Despite various vendor claims to the contrary, I've yet to see any independent verification that this works effectively. As David puts it:

"I've seen many samples, and the vendors specializing in this claim they can deliver this experience, but I have yet to see them perform consistently enough in our test environments to suggest it to our clients."

Related post:
Videos in email: case studies and resources

Tags: email marketing, video emails, video in email

According to a recent SubscriberMail survey, the problem most cited by email marketers is "swamped inboxes." Getting attention in a cluttered marketplace is not a new challenge, but an irritatingly persistent one.

One solution mentioned with predictable regularity is to make emails more relevant to the recipient. In fact, the word relevant comes from the Latin relevare, meaning "to raise up." Which is exactly what we want to do with our emails.

But relevancy is itself a challenge if you don't have funky databases and targeting technology whirring away in the background. Or is it?

Relevancy implies making a connection between the recipient and your email.

Email marketers tend to think of this too narrowly, seeking to relate the next email directly to something the recipient did before (past purchases, past clicks, ticked content fields on a sign-up form, etc.)

"You bought a book on religion so this email contains offers on other religious books."

Which works.

An alternative and simpler approach is to pursue relevancy by exploiting different kinds of connections...

Connect to the recipient's wider environment

What is likely occupying the mind of the recipient these days? Think expansively - cultural trends, changing seasons, upcoming TV or sporting events. How can you make a connection there?

This is largely what Nick Usborne calls giving your emails a sense of now.

Nick writes:

"...it is essential that you make a connection with what's important to them right now...That connection with now could be about the weather, the news, a holiday or anything else you can think of."

This approach is implicit in seasonal offers and content, like those suggested by Evan Adlman for the summer.

You do, however, need to be aware of issues raised by different time zones and geographical locations.

Summer in Wellington, Florida is winter in Wellington, New Zealand. The Superbowl is a big deal in the USA, but passes without comment in most of Europe.

Connect to the human being

Really. There's a man or woman sitting in front of a PC, laptop or mobile device with all the needs and wants typically associated with a selfish lump of sentient bone and muscle.

Now it becomes obvious that your newsletter editorial, for example, should talk to the subscriber as an individual not as one of a group.

If you send out an email on a Friday afternoon on a hot summer's day, you can imagine the kind of mood the typical recipient is in at that time and adjust content and tone accordingly.

Connect to a representative of your wider audience

If you don't have sophisticated data on subscriber preferences and past actions, simply extrapolate from what you observe of your wider audience.

What products and content are "hot" right now on your website? What search terms are people using to find your site at the moment (or to search within your site)? What are people talking about in relevant forums and blogs?

That's all useful intelligence for planning relevant email offers and content.

Any other tips on making your emails more relevant?

Tags: email marketing, email relevancy, email copywriting, targeting

May 14, 2008

One of my favorite email marketing columnists (Simms Jenkins) has written "The Truth about Email Marketing," which is due out early August but was announced today and can be pre-ordered now at Amazon.

I had a small input to the project so I'll let others do the reviews. But there are two interesting points about the book of interest to us all.

First, the publisher is FT Press, which belongs to the same publishing stable as the Financial Times. The quality of the publisher is further mainstream recognition of the importance of email marketing.

Second, the book is not simply another nuts and bolts how-to, but addresses many wider aspects such as organizational strategy, outsourcing, etc. Again, a positive sign that the industry as a whole is maturing.

Other books | Tags: the truth about email marketing, simms jenkins

May 13, 2008

Important movements on the law front in both the USA and Canada...

Can-Spam latest

You may have seen the news that the USA's FTC has issued new rulings and interpretations on Can-Spam, the national legislation that defines what you can and can't do with commercial emails.

The press release is here, the related 109-page Federal Register Notice here.

Perhaps the most far-reaching clarification is that senders cannot require subscribers to log in to an account in order to remove their address from a list.

Which might mean subscription options need to be accessible without a username and password.

That has long been a best practice in the email marketing world. So there's a lesson here. Best practices are best practices for a reason. They make marketing sense AND they can often protect you from future changes to legislation.

Canada catches up

Canada was perhaps the most notable industrialized nation not to have specific anti-spam legislation in place. This is now changing.

The S-235 Anti-spam Act ("concerning unsolicited commercial electronic messages") got its first reading in the Canadian Senate on May 7th. Status and text is available here.

As far as I can tell, it requires an opt-in (with some exceptions) before you can send someone commercial email.

And now for the traditional addendum: these laws (actual and proposed) simply state what you have to do to be legal. ISPs, webmail services and individuals use different criteria to decide what is and isn't spam.

Relying on legal compliance alone to keep you in good standing with these entities is like turning up to a Viennese ball in a bikini; legal, but unlikely to meet with a positive welcome.

More on anti-spam laws | Tags: email marketing law, can-spam, anti-spam, spam laws

May 12, 2008

Part 2 of an ongoing series:

(We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.)

Let's begin with the R word. Now don't scream, but here it is...relationships.

Finished screaming? Think you might have heard it all before? No, you haven't. Here's why...

The new email marketing demands a mindset that pays more than lip service to the concept of relationships.

We can all tell the difference between customer service mandated from above and customer service that results from a true willingness to please the customer.

So it is with email and the relationship. If you truly value the email relationship with recipients, then that attitude pervades all your activities and lets you employ winning tactics (see below) you'd otherwise not think of.

Here's what I wrote to a friend earlier today in a conversation about different communication technologies:

"At the end of the day what really drives success is the quality and value you deliver. That's all that matters. If you have a niche and strive constantly and consistently to deliver this quality and value, it will pay off in the end."

"People's ability to take in information hasn't magically improved. So however you cut and dice it, there's only room for a few voices to be truly heard. And the quality voices will rise to the top."

Delivering quality and value comes naturally when you are relationship oriented. Or as Al DiGuido puts it, think of subscribers like family:

"Your family members don't want to see themselves as a segment or target. They want communications that are personalized, relevant, and meaningful to them..."

Once you see recipients as people you want to keep happy and loyal, best practices fall out naturally.

The relationship mindset encourages you to think of email in terms of dialog and interaction, which leads to tactics that boost the customer engagement we're all supposed to be chasing. Stefan Pollard has some ideas for you on that topic.

It changes your tone of voice to one that resonates better with those you are trying to reach. So you automatically add more value to (and generate more value from) such things as:

• Technical messages like error pages and subscription confirmations (Wendy Roth shows how you can benefit from replacing the technobabble with real speech.)
• Transactional, trigger and one-to-one emails (Aaron Smith describes some best practices for those messages.)
• Welcome emails (Anna Yeaman offers her favorites here.)

And it drives other best practices certain to boost the right numbers.

It stimulates you to send timely messages based on what you know of the end receiver, such as birthday greetings. It encourages you to deliver valuable content. It stimulates you to send personalized email based on the recipient's unique needs or characteristics.

All of which drives trust, relevancy, credibility and a host of other buzzwords that summed up lead to one clear outcome: more and better responses to your email.

Tags: email marketing, relationship marketing, transactional emails, email strategy

Bounces are like parking tickets. You don't really want them. They're hard to avoid when there's a lot of traffic around. A few of them won't get you in too much trouble. Get too many and you're up before the spam courts.

You're less likely to have bounce-causing dead addresses on your list if you don't add dead addresses to your list (surprise!)

MarketingSherpa have four interesting practical tips on how you can avoid typos and misspellings in submitted email addresses and thus lower the bounce rates of your welcome messages or sign-up confirmation emails.

Two other common ways to introduce dead addresses to your list are if you lose the capacity for rational thought and buy a list of email addresses. Or if you wait too long before sending email to an address.

How long is too long when emailing old addresses? DJ Waldow has a good stab at answering that question for you in this pair of posts.

In both these cases, dead addresses may be the least of your worries. People won't expect your emails and you'll hear the sound of "report spam" buttons being pressed in response.

More on bounces | Tags: email marketing, bounce management, subscription forms

May 09, 2008

When you understand why people might want to leave your list, you can take steps to keep them on board and content.

Here's a new article from the main site with 14 tips on how to keep people happily married to your email program (and how to make the most of those that do leave).

May 08, 2008

The mediocrity of the masses has a powerful pull. Which is why so much "ordinary" writing or design is excused because "that's what everyone else does."

The problem is compounded in email marketing by the use of the term "safe" as in "safe" design. The sentiments are valid: design your emails so they render properly in a range of display environments.

This is a positive thing. But a side-effect is a drift toward uniformity. And the misapprehension that safe means boring. All emails start to look and sound pretty similar. Eyes may soon begin to glaze over.

So perhaps it's time to get a little edgy again, a sentiment echoed by eROI's Jeff; though for different reasons.

This need not mean "unsafe" design.

In recent articles, both David Baker and Loren McDonald suggest using open rates to identify those customers who will likely see images, allowing you to make more (creative) use of graphic elements when sending to that segment.

It's a concept I raised a few weeks ago, albeit to a mixed response.

David goes on to discuss the role of animated images in email, which are enjoying something of a renaissance. Just about every email client and webmail service supports animated gifs in emails.

Animated images had a bad reputation for a while, largely because marketers traditionally used them simply to attract attention. This quickly became annoying.

Anyone who remembers the ubiquitous punch-the-monkey banner ads of yesteryear will have a pathological hatred of animated gifs.

Since email is about delivering value to the recipient, animated images can work if (and only if) they enhance that value. For example by displaying a product in different colors or configurations.

Suzanne Norman has some advice on how to use them in email. And you'll find some inspiring examples from the retail world at Style Campaign and around the RetailEmail.Blogspot blog.

Tags: email marketing, email design, animated gifs, animation in email

In his crusade to help free us of our unhealthy obsession with open rates, Loren McDonald proposes some alternative approaches.

Among them, the idea that we should call it the "email render rate" to reflect the fact that all the open rate actually measures is whether or not a tracking image in the sent email was displayed.

Neither Loren nor I would expect the wider email marketing industry suddenly to start using the "render rate" term. But there's nothing to stop you from doing so.

Why bother?

Because words have power. Call something an open rate and people assume it indicates someone opened (read) an email. Even if you know better, it introduces subconscious bias into how you interpret open rate numbers.

Think of it as a render rate, and that subconscious bias disappears. This allows you to focus on what the number truly tells you about your email efforts and encourages you to look elsewhere for the numbers you really need to measure success.

Open rates guide | Tags: email marketing, email open rates, email render rates

May 07, 2008

Getting your emails into the inbox is part art, part science, part praying to Collatio, the Roman God of Lost Mail.

As a result, deliverability has become its own specialty, with dedicated services, expertise and jargon. Those who live and breathe delivery rates will welcome the appearance of an excellent new blog over at Deliverability.com, where you'll find various vendor experts at work.

The latest post, for example, warns about the spam complaints that can arise if you send out emails confirming an unsubscribe.

The deliverability.com blog joins a select number of quality deliverability blogs, including Word to the Wise, EmailKarma, Spam Resource and Box of Meat.

Tags: More email marketing blogs | email marketing, email deliverability

Email marketing is like trying to fill a bucket with holes in it. And email marketers fall into two schools of thought on how to do so.

The old school tackles the problem by using more water and pouring faster. It's inefficient and dooms you to a never-ending game of catch-up and costs. (And eventually you run out of water.)

The new school plugs the holes.

This is the first post in a series with the gloriously pretentious title "The new email marketing." Subsequent posts explore the tactics used by enlightened marketers to exploit email successfully, sustainably, ethically and efficiently.

The old email marketing is volume oriented.

At its worst, the old email marketing sees email addresses as a commodity. The thinking behind this quote (heard by me at a recent event):

"I just bought 4 million email addresses. They're not targeted, but...(shrug)"

The old email marketing is short-term.

It sees sending more of the same emails, more often, as the answer to falling response rates. Ken Magill likens it to an addiction: you need to send more and more to get the same buzz. And like any such addiction, the eventual outcome is not pretty.

The old email marketing falls prey to blinkered and narrow interests, letting their email program become hijacked by too many conflicting or inappropriate goals or approaches.

The new email marketing thinks smart email marketing, not bulk email marketing.

Read the rest of the series

Tags: email marketing, email strategy

May 06, 2008

You probably get a clickthrough rate of under 10%, which means a lot of people aren't interested enough in your offer or teaser content to investigate further.

In many cases we kind of forget about those non-clickers and hope something grabs their interest next time.

But just because the main content or offer isn't tugging the right strings does not mean those non-clickers aren't ready to respond to the email. The very presence of the email reminds the recipients of your existence and can stimulate the urge to (re)explore your site and offerings.

In fact, some of those clicks are already a result of this. Which is why it pays to look at which individual links people click on, not just the overall CTR for the email.

Jack Felsheim, for example, cites one B2C email campaign where...

"...more users clicked on links directing them to the Web site than clicked on the product links offered in the e-mail...most of the customers simply used the e-mail as a trigger to visit the site."

You can help enhance this positive side-effect by putting secondary links in the email that might catch some attention and traffic if the main links don't.

Dylan Boyd gives us a nice example from an ecommerce site.

The key, of course, is to ensure that these links, their design and their placement don't overwhelm your main focus or call to action.

How do you ensure that?

Well, Chris Lovejoy suggests adding popular links as navigation bars to achieve the desired effect. Marc Kline echoes this advice, and recommends more contextual and image linking to boost CTR.

Of course, in an ideal world, the content/offer you send is so relevant and targeted that incidental clicks are not a big deal. But we don't live in an ideal world...

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

We've all read expert articles bemoaning the fact that so many marketers are doing something wrong with their email marketing. Or highlighting the common lack of appropriate resources and support for email efforts. (Heck, I've written some.)

Most recently, Alterian released research results showing that most of those surveyed were "intermediate" email marketers at best and none could be considered pacesetters.

Instead of galvanizing us all to improve our strategies and tactics or capture more resources for our efforts, are these admonishments having precisely the opposite effect?

Here's a quote from Robert Cialdini, writing in Current Directions in Psychological Science...

"There is an understandable, but misguided, tendency to try to mobilize action against a problem by depicting it as regrettably frequent"

Why misguided?

"Within the statement 'Many people are doing this undesirable thing' lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message 'Many people are doing this.'"

In other words, the message people get is that the "bad" behavior is normal and thus they are more likely to do it.

Cialdini, for example, showed that putting up notices about the regrettably large amount of petrified wood stolen from an Arizona national park actually led to more theft.

(You can read all about this in "Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion")

Perhaps we who write about email marketing need to focus even more on the benefits of doing better email marketing, the spread of good practices and the penalties for poor practices.

(I wonder if the same phenomenon applies to spam. The vast majority of articles on spam simply highlight how prevalent it is. Does this then establish "sending spam" as a social norm, thus subliminally encouraging people to do it?)

Tags: email marketing, spam, social norms, email marketing industry

Many thanks to the dozens of you who helped shape the scope of this blog using the poll. It's not too late to get your voice and vote heard.

Those of you who voted for more posts will be hearing from my wife shortly.

May 05, 2008

Things I learned last week as a first-time exhibitor at a major online marketing show in London:

• Based on the state of our booth on arrival, the people who deliver show fittings and equipment were clearly orphaned young and raised by bears.
• It's best to check-in your soul along with your coat and bags. You don't need it and it's easily lost.
• Beware the parallel economic universe occupied by trade show furniture, where the rental price on a small stool matches the GDP of Iceland.
• It is indeed possible to go for up to eight hours without food, drink or oxygen.
• Double opt-in is great when signing up people to your email program. But it doesn't work at trade shows. Visitors taking brochures from your stand do not expect to be asked "are you sure?"
• On the journey to the restrooms, keep your head down and avoid eye contact with other vendors. The only alternative is diapers.
• The best time for approaching visitors is immediately after a keynote seminar has ended. They are still in PPS (post-powerpoint shock), so you can slip a brochure in their bag without encountering resistance.
• You can never have too many pens, but you can (unfortunately) have too many brochures.
• When leaving, it is quite important not to confuse the rubbish bag full of unused brochures with the plastic bag full of visitor cards.

Any other tips you can pass on to a trade show newbie?

More humor

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