No man is an iland

October 31, 2008

It's Friday, the sun is out, birds are singing (somewhere, presumably) and this site is seven years old today: win birthday goodies. I have written over 2,200 blog posts on email marketing. So for one day I am going to stop and write about something else...

Today, an answer to the ultimate question. The question I get asked more often than any other:

"Don't you have a spellchecker? Your blog is called "No man is an iland." Island is spelled with an S! You are an idiot."

Perhaps I am, but not for the spelling error.

In 1624, John Donne (cool beard!) published his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. In it you'll find the immortal words:

"any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"

The paragraph that ends with that phrase begins with another, equally famous, quote:

"No man is an island. entire of itself"

In the original old English, island is spelled iland:


The blog's title comes from that original passage. Simply because it reflects my own philosophy that we all share a common humanity. There is no other motive (but see below).

In business terms, email marketers have a duty to their organization, but also to the wider email user.

A winning email marketing program is one that benefits both the sender AND the recipient. Because you can't have the former without the latter.

No email is an iland, either.

Of course, "No man is an iland" as a blog title makes no business sense at all.

It is useless for SEO. It conveys nothing about the topic. It casts doubt on the credibility of the author (you can't even spell island right!)

This is why I chose it.

SEO has stolen creativity from titles and headlines. You could call your book "Keeping the Key." But you'll probably call it "Email marketing: how to build loyalty through your email list."

You could headline a guide to Paris as "The city of dreams and baguettes." But you'll probably write "Paris: a visitor guide."

An email marketing blog should be called "Email marketing blog" or at least slip an email reference in there.

But being contrary is fun, too.

(Normal service resumes next week.)

October 30, 2008

Email Marketing Reports is seven years old this week*.

Why should you care?

Because in all the birthday excitement I have some prizes to give away.

They are...

• An email marketing t-shirt of your choice from Campaign Monitor's store (two prizes)
• A copy of Simms Jenkins' excellent Truth about Email Marketing book, signed by the author himself (two prizes)
• A Sacher Torte shipped by courier to you from the famous Sacher Hotel in Vienna, Austria

You have two chances to win...

1. The first commenter to guess the question I get asked most often by blog and newsletter readers wins the Sacher cake.

(If nobody gets it, I'll pick the most original suggestion.)

2. Anyone who leaves any comment on this post enters the draw for the t-shirts and books.

(Include enough info for me to be able to get in touch with you should you win: like a blog URL, web address, or a name and company affiliation.)

I'll pick random winners from all submissions received by midnight CET November 7th. Newsletter subscribers get an additional win chance by simply replying to the November 3rd newsletter issue.

Good luck. And thanks for blessing me with your time, attention and feedback over those seven years. A voice without listeners is a sad voice indeed.

*It started life as a few pages, with no blog and no email list either (yes, just like raaaaiiiiinnnn on your wedding day). Now around 1,000 unique visitors drop by each day and there are 5,000 feed and email subscribers getting the blog posts.

October 28, 2008

This is the second-most popular question I get asked. So time to provide an answer in the form of survey numbers and case studies.

It's something to show your boss or bank manager when you want to invest in a better ESP (or more advanced software) and make segmentation part of your email marketing program:

Surveys

1. MailChimp compares the average results from segmented campaigns with those from non-segmented campaigns. Segmented campaigns score better on nearly all measures of success.

2. MarketingSherpa charts a similar story in their Benchmark Guide, with segmented campaigns producing at least 30% more opens and 50% higher CTR than undifferentiated messages.

(Note: Both the Sherpa and MailChimp studies compare aggregated results from campaigns using segmentation to aggregated results from other campaigns not using segmentation. So it's not a direct comparison, but the trend is still clear and valid.)

Case studies

Just a couple of examples that crossed my inbox recently...

1. The Eastwood Company introduced RFM segmentation:

"We've experienced a 20% increase in e-mail marketing revenue, a 14% reduction in the number of opt-outs and decreased e-mail marketing costs by 25%"

2. Intermix saw clickthrough rates improve from 20% to 50% after segmenting recipients by their interest in different products and offers.

3. Motorcycle Superstore classified their email addresses into six customer types and sent each different content. The result? Open rates doubled and clickthroughs tripled.

4. William Hill sent a specific stream of emails to people who registered at their betting site, but didn't make a deposit. The ROI on this segmented campaign was reported as 125%.

Notes

You split your email list into groups, where each group has some shared characteristic(s). Then you tailor your email program to each group, with email content, timing and frequency reflecting those shared characteristics.

Inevitably, this boosts responses. And the above numbers confirm this.

Anything that lifts the relevancy of your message lifts responses and protects against email fatigue.

And as the holiday/recession-driven rush to send promotional email continues, email fatigue might just be the email marketer's number one enemy.

But...you rarely see data on the net value of segmentation after you account for any additional costs incurred. Advanced segmentation in particular might mean investment in new database and email technologies.

So don't forget to look at all the numbers: balance improved responses against the costs of getting that improvement. If you're lucky, you may find that - as with the Eastwood example - total costs even fall because you end up sending less email.

Not that segmentation has to cost much (if anything), as this post and Jeanne Jennings series on Really Simple Segmentation demonstrates.

Anyone else got numbers to back up the argument in favor of segmentation?

Tags: email marketing, email segmentation

October 27, 2008

[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.]


X marks the spot.

Your sender reputation is your ticket to the ball. It's the stamp of approval that helps you get through the ISP gates and into the inbox.

Unfortunately, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, reputation is a delicate thing...easily bruised, easily lost:

"It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it."

Traditionally, we've limited our understanding of sender reputation to the established reputation criteria used by ISPs to help decide what to do with your email.

But there is another kind of sender reputation out there: your reputation with recipients. Their perception of your email efforts helps them decide whether to open and respond to your next email, delete it, or mark it as spam.

The two reputations are connected. And this connection will get stronger as time goes by.

Why?

Because ISPs filter incoming email to give their customers (email users) a cleaner, clearer, smaller, safer, more relevant inbox. That's what those customers want.

So the ISPs are inevitably incorporating customer wants into their definition of reputation: a reputable sender is one who sends email that recipients want and value.

The clearest example of this connection between ISP and recipient reputation is clicks on the "report spam" button.

Your reputation with these recipients plays a powerful role in determining the number of spam reports you get. The greater the proportion of recipients who report your emails as spam, the worse your sender reputation with ISPs.

But it's not just about spam reports.

If ISPs are using their customers as a guide to what counts as reputable email, then what about all the other criteria that define a valued email?

A few weeks ago I speculated that the big webmail services would likely incorporate other subscriber-email interactions into their assessment of your reputation. If recipients don't interact with your email, then your sender reputation and deliverability would suffer.

Just last week, deliverability consultant Laura Atkins cited evidence that AOL are doing exactly that:

"No longer is reputation all about complaints, it is about sending engaging and relevant email. The ISPs are now measuring engagement. They are measuring relevancy. They are measuring better than many senders are."

AOL itself owns up to, for example, taking "not spam" reports into account when assessing your reputation. In other words, do people look for your email in the junk folder and mark it as "not spam?"

So the new email marketer looks to improve deliverability by focusing on the red area in our Venn diagram above: where the two reputations meet.

The new email marketer tackles their reputation with ISPs directly, by keeping lists clean of dead addresses etc. And indirectly by improving their reputation with recipients.

The new email marketer builds a solid reputation and relationship with recipients by doing all the things we've covered in this series.

These recipients engage with the emails. The ISPs take note. And your sender reputation - and delivery rates - rise accordingly.

It matters now more than ever before.

Analysts warn (again) that people are getting too much marketing email.

The holiday season is on us. And people turn to email marketing as a cheaper way to market in a time of declining budgets and a down economy. The inbox flood is likely to get worse, not better.

Email users and their address providers will not reward those who add to that flood with "me too" messages.

They will reward those that value their reputations, by providing value to their recipients.

As Benjamin Franklin also said:

"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."

Part 18 coming soon...

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, sender reputation

October 23, 2008

Now that forward-to-a-friend and the newsletter approach are making comebacks, can we say the same of the pop-up subscription box?

"Hopefully not," I hear you say. But things have changed...

There was a time when surfing the web was like living in a Jackson Pollock painting. Your desktop became an abstract maze of colors, forms and calls-to-action. Every second site you visited triggered a new browser window containing an ad or email subscription opportunity.

Pop-ups were intrusive.

They interrupted the visitor experience before it even started.

They cluttered up screens.

And they scraped the bottom of the ethics barrel: remember the fake "close this window" icons that tricked you into clicking on the ads?

Dark days indeed.

Fortunately, blocking features in all the major browsers have largely eliminated pop-up windows from browsing life. To everyone's great relief.

So why bring them back into the discussion?

The problem wasn't the concept, but the execution on websites: interrupting the visitor experience with irrelevant ads and/or overzealous calls to subscribe to the email list.

There are parallels to spam here: email isn't the problem, just the way it is used by spammers.

Nobody has an issue with a small box appearing over the content you're viewing when that box contains something useful. Think the small information screens that pop-up when you mouseover or click on "what's this?" and "help" links.

So how about popping up a subscription form only when the visitor has spent some time engaging with your content? At a point when the subscription offer becomes an added-value service, not an unwanted intrusion?

Perhaps after viewing a certain number of pages? Or after a certain length of visit? Or after viewing pages which closely complement the topic of your emails?

If you were a B2B service, you might popup a subscription form after someone viewed a few articles in your "resources" section: "Get more articles like this direct to your inbox."

The concept reflects the idea behind trigger emails. Send email (or overlay a subscription form) in response to a suitable action. This ensures the message is more relevant.

Even with this kind of careful application you may say "I hate popups, it can never work."

But the evidence suggests otherwise.

For example:

• Lisa Harmon describes how major retail brand J.Crew has been using pop-up subscription boxes for some time
• Darren Rowse explains how judicious use of a popup subscription form produced a ninefold jump in sign-ups with no apparent negative side-effects. His experience is not unique.

If the idea appears worthy of further exploration, here are some things you need to consider:

Implementation

We're not actually talking about traditional popup windows here, but rather overlays appearing on top of the displayed content. These are unaffected by popup window blockers.

Your ESP or software may offer an off-the-shelf "popover" subscription form or you may need to get into coding (not my field, but easy for those with some knowledge).

Defining triggers

When do you show the popover? How long should the visitor hang around before it's displayed? What pages should trigger a popover subscription form?

Should you put a frequency cap on how many times a visitor sees it: once a session? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month? One-time only?

The skill here is to avoid the approach that gave the original popup concept a bad name. You only want to interrupt the visitor when it is seemly to do so and when it is most likely to be of benefit to them.

Much like the store salesperson who only offers her help when the customer clearly could benefit.

Monitor performance

Any implementation of popovers needs careful monitoring. In two contexts...

First, how does it impact subscriptions? And how do these subscribers perform relative to the average in terms of response, spam reports, length of time on list etc.

Second, how does it impact website browsing habits? If people are put off by the popover, do not expect them to write in and tell you. They will vote with their mouse.

Check how the popover influences the number of repeat vists, visit durations, number of pageviews per visit etc.

This dual monitoring approach gives you the information you need for an informed decision about the net value of the idea.

Compatibility with other third-party services

One legacy of the poor implementation of popups in the past is that you may not be allowed to use them on pages connected with third-party services.

Check the terms and conditions or documentation associated with any PPC search engines, ad networks and similar that you use: ensure you're not breaking any rules or quality guidelines.

Common sense

You know your website audience better than anybody. They are your life and blood. How will they likely react to a new popover?

Implement slowly, taking the most user-friendly approach you can and build from there. And test, test, test before scaling-up.

For the record, I have no immediate plans to use popover subscription forms at any of my sites. But neither will I reject the concept given the success others are having with it, and given the more sensitive, user-friendly approach outlined above.

What do you think? Would you use them? Are there any other issues to take into account?

(P.S. We all hate popups - we're not talking about "those" kinds of popups in this post.)

October 22, 2008

Our mini-series on holiday email marketing has looked at planning and past campaigns, frequency and stand-out tactics, and tips for the days immediately before and after shipping deadlines pass.

But not every recipient is looking for Christmas presents. And not every sender gets a seasonal response boost in Q4. So...

Don't forget other holidays and cultures

In a networked, diverse world, you can't make assumptions on what the holiday season means to different people. Christmas isn't the only end-of-year festival.

Luc Vezina, head of marketing for email service provider Campaigner reminds us to give holiday email campaigns "a careful read for cultural sensitivity" before hitting the send button. He adds:

"It's widely accepted today to use more neutral and inclusive terms such as holiday season and happy holidays, rather than 'Merry Christmas,' but it's still important to double check your language."

"You don't ever want to turn potential buyers away, so take the extra step to make sure you're using language that appeals to the widest audience possible."

Linda Bustos, ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software and author of the Get Elastic ecommerce blog highlights the value of other gift-giving opportunities, such as Hanukkah or Kwanzaa.

But how do you know which festivals to feature?

Linda has some ideas for identifying customers interested in particular holidays:

• "Ask them upon email signup, or ask them to update their preferences"
• "Send themed emails and segment responders vs non-responders"
• "Send general holiday offers with links to landing pages for Hanukkah Ideas etc."

DJ Waldow, email marketing account manager at email service provider Bronto offers a warning about timing...

"Be aware of when holidays start and end. The big one for me is Hanukkah. It changes every year."

It's a warning echoed by Chad White, Director of Retail Insights at the Email Experience Council and author of the Retail Email blog, who notes:

"Last year I saw HP promoting Hanukkah gift cards in an email a week after the holiday, which some might have interpreted as ignorant or insensitive. Normally it's around Christmas time, but last year it was early December."

[Kwanzaa is always December 26th to January 1st. You'll find annual dates for Hanukkah here.]

What about those of us with no seasonal response boost?

Many email marketers (including me) have no obvious seasonal selling opportunities. Do we need a holiday marketing plan?

Linda says "it depends," as there is no easy answer:

"In your industry, are deals and purchases typically made over the holidays? What are your decision makers most occupied in doing? Some businesses shut down for a week over the holidays - or longer. Understand thy customer and market accordingly."

Luc suggests no seasonal sales doesn't have to mean no seasonal messages:

"It's a great opportunity for B2B and services companies to reach out to their customer base and prospects with a Seasons Greetings email. Customers and business associates appreciate holiday greetings, and it helps you stay top of mind with your most important audiences."

"You can also use email marketing around the holidays to reward returning or long-standing customers with special offers and discounts to show them that you value their business and look forward to working with them in the new year."

Given the lack of business activity in many offices as New Year approaches, many B2B newsletters skip an issue or two during this period. But Linda advises against this strategy:

"It's best to maintain consistency. If you send biweekly, keep it up, or explain why your ezine is 'on holiday'."

A problem with omitting an issue is it can mean long breaks between emails. If, for example, you send monthly emails and readers only look at every other issue anyway, a missing issue means some subscribers seeing no email for 3 months.

It's hard to maintain interest and mindshare with those kinds of intervals. And will new subscribers even remember they signed up if the first issue they see arrives almost two months later?

Here's how I approach my biweekly newsletter if an issue is due out in late December...

I produce an "email lite": a short, friendly, lighthearted newsletter issue which maintains Linda's consistency of delivery, keeps me top of mind, but doesn't burden the recipient with yet more business info at a time when their attentions may be elsewhere.

Last December, this meant a simple email message with a video holiday greeting making a point about the topic covered (email marketing). You can see the video here.

That ends our 4-part look at holiday email marketing. Thanks to my four panelists for their time and super insight. And good luck to you all for the rest of Q4!

More on holiday email | Tags: holiday email marketing, seasonal marketing, holiday ecommerce

October 21, 2008

Given my inability to do a good Sarah Palin impression, I have to find another way to exploit the US election bandwagon.

Both the Obama and McCain campaigns are delivering salutary lessons to marketers on the role of deliverability.

One study suggests that a lack of email authentication is costing McCain's campaign a few deliverability points. (Thanks to a reader for the tip.)

And Laura Atkins reports how Obama's campaign emails are facing some blacklist problems through permission issues.

What can we learn from these candidates for the world's most powerful political position?

A spammer is not defined by how they look, who they are, where they live, the size of their organization or the value of what they promote. A spammer is defined by their actions.

A lot of companies take a flexible approach to permission because they're "not spammers." They don't operate out of cellars in Florida, with offshore hosting accounts and emails promoting new body parts for underconfident males.

Doesn't matter.

You act like a spammer would act, you get treated like one.

Nobody gets a free deliverability ride. Not even the next President of the USA.

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, john mccain, barack obama

Last week I invited deliverability experts to clarify some issues and they didn't disappoint. Mickey Chandler of Spamtacular, Al Iverson of Spam Resource, and JD Falk and Michelle Pelletier of Return Path sent in comments and emails with answers.

To summarize...

Popular spam filter SpamAssassin does penalize you for sending HTML email with no text version, or for sending HTML email with a text version that differs from the verbiage used in the HTML.

(See Mickey's post for the details.)

But text versions aren't just about deliverability. Some people have their email clients set up to view only the plain text version of an email. As JD writes, if these people get no plain text version to display, then they...

"...will be annoyed, and thus more likely to mark the message as spam. This includes a great many old-skool unix geeks (like me), who don't have a "report spam" button -- but do have the ability to block the sending IP outright."

As so often, there is a danger we forget the user experience in our obsession with the technology of sending email. Thanks for the reminder JD.

October 20, 2008

The hailstorm of woe continues as the media bombards us with promises of impending economic doom and a need to watch every penny closely.

How do you deal with that in your emails?

Many marketers are using the talk of crisis to express solidarity with readers, and highlight top deals and discounts. The message is plain: you need to save money...we can help you do that with these deals, coupons and offers.

I'm not going to argue with that, other than to highlight two dangers.

The first is the need to get the tone right.

"The sky is falling" messaging drives fear which drives response. Fear is a common tool in the copywriter's toolbox. But it can drive the wrong sort of response, too:

"If things are that bad, maybe I shouldn't be spending any money at all."

Equally, there are branding issues here: nobody likes the bearer of bad news. Even if it comes with free shipping.

A positive tone likely works better: Chad White has a good example from Office Depot and Lisa Harmon and Alex Madison highlight various "email takes on the economy" here.

The second danger is the hole you can dig yourself into.

There's a lot of pressure to discount as the year ends.

We have the seductive appeal of "save now while you still can" messaging, a desire to capture holiday shopping budgets, the need to meet annual sales targets and the uneasy feeling you ought to be doing what everyone else is doing.

And most everyone else is piling on the offers as December approaches.

You can get caught up in a spiral of ever-deeper discounts and ever-more urgent calls to action, eventually causing you to disappear up your own tail before exploding in a shower of 100%-off coupons.

What's left is an audience immune to promotional deadlines and bored by anything but the hottest deals and heaviest discounts. You just became a cheap brand.

Not saying it will happen, just saying it can happen.

So what are your alternatives? Well, here's one suggestion...

Remember the basic premise behind the lowly content-rich email newsletter?

"...the objective is usually to induce actions in and over the long-term. Newsletters aim to make the recipient of a newsletter much more likely at some time in the future to take the kind of actions ultimately desired by the publisher."

They're not about driving immediate sales, but putting you in the position to get that sale when the potential buyer is ready.

As such, they play a traditional role in lead nurturing: newsletters are ideal for products or services with a long sales cycle. Hence their popularity in the B2B world.

Now the idea of a long sales cycle is traditionally linked to the nature of the product or service: primarily purchases requiring big outlays (cars, new IT systems) and/or involving complex decision making.

Suppose, though, that the long sales cycle comes not from the product, but from the budgetary constraints of the consumer.

If there is an unwillingness to spend on anything but true necessities, then the sales cycle lengthens for many products and services. A new pair of fashionable shoes every month becomes one every six months.

Can you then apply the newsletter concept to these non-necessities?

Instead of using just promotions to grab a piece of a smaller pie, should you also use valuable content to build trust, loyalty and awareness? So you can take a bigger piece of the bigger pie once the recovery sets in?

Just a thought. Is the e-newsletter due a bigger role in email marketing?

More on newsletters | Tags: email newsletters, email marketing

October 16, 2008

In the first two parts of our holiday email marketing special, our panel of experts covered planning, role models, frequency and ways to stand out from the crowd.

Now it's time for them to pick out email tactics and strategies suited to the last stages of the holiday season (and beyond).

What can we do as we approach the end of the buying season?

Last-minute shoppers (especially the male version) are not a minority.

Luc Vezina, head of marketing for email service provider Campaigner notes that last year, "...nearly 17 percent of shoppers had not even started and over 50 percent had only completed half of their shopping by December 18." (According to the National Retail Federation.)

Is there anything special we can do to best serve this kind of buyer?

"If there is a time to significantly increase email frequency, it's the two or three weeks before Christmas."

But what about in-email tactics?

1. Communicate the urgency

Linda Bustos, ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software and author of the Get Elastic ecommerce blog suggests you remind shoppers of the need for action:

"...include how many days remain before shipping cutoff dates for gifts to arrive on or before December 24."

Luc supports that sentiment, adding:

"Effective campaigns can make finding the right product easy (for example, a campaign with gift suggestions for different budgets or family members) and will contain a call to action that reminds them that time is running out."

2. Offer gift cards

The electronic gift certificate is a mainstay of last-minute holiday shopping. As DJ Waldow, email marketing account manager at email service provider Bronto puts it:

"Make it simple for the lazy shopper. Offer a gift that does not require shipping...a gift that can be emailed."

Chad White, Director of Retail Insights at the Email Experience Council and author of the Retail Email blog, agrees.

But he also has a related tactic to help out those shopping too late for gifts to arrive on time. You might let people...

"...send an e-gift announcement explaining that a gift will arrive after Christmas."

3. Promote faster "delivery"

Chad also suggests giving shoppers faster delivery options as time runs out. For example:

• "Use overnight/expedited shipping (discounted or free)"
• "Shop at your local store - being sure to include a prominent store locator and any special store hours"
• "Buy online, pick up in store"

He notes, "...that often means including multiple messages in an email, but it can be done in a non-cluttered way as in this Target email and a bit busier Linens 'n Things email."

But how about when the holiday shopping season has passed? Do our experts have any advice on how to piggy-back on the holidays as you move forward into 2009?

Post-holiday season follow-up campaigns

Once seasonal sales have died down, there's plenty an email marketer can do to keep their email marketing success going.

1. Target the gift recipients

Both Chad and Linda advise switching emphasis to gift recipients once December draws to a close.

Linda suggests experimenting with "Get what you really wanted?" messaging, while Chad highlights product support emails:

"Brand manufactures, especially those of electronics and other complex products, might want to follow the lead of Sony. Every January, they send out a "Get a gift from Sony?" email with information and resources that help subscribers get the most out of any Sony products they may have received as gifts."

"This not only shows that Sony cares about customer service, but can lead to upsells and a closer relationship with the customer."

2. Ensure gift cards are used

Chad suggests we might also follow a trend from last year: promoting gift card redemption...

"A few retailers like Bass Pro Shops, Foot Locker and Sports Authority even incentivized subscribers to redeem their gift cards. Gift cards aren't counted as sales until they're redeemed, so retail CFOs will certainly appreciate a push on redemptions."

And, of course, gift card redemptions are another upsell and cross-sell opportunity.

3. Learn from the past and move forward

The intense email and sales activity of the last months of 2008 also gives you a lot of data to work with. Luc notes:

"Post holiday season is a great time to look closely at your email marketing metrics. Your metrics reports and analytics contain valuable data such as response and clickthrough rates that tell you which campaigns, messages and tactics worked well and those that fell flat."

He continues:

"Use this data feedback to refine your campaigns going forward, and you'll see even better results...not only for the holiday season, but throughout the year."

Linda has a similar message. Based on what you learnt, you can...

"...highlight your best deals (again, personalization and segmentation really help here) and get customers thinking about the New Year - is it going back to class, getting back to the gym or gearing up for Valentine's Day?"

Next week's final installment looks at cultural issues and has some advice for those who get no seasonal sales boost at this time of year.

More on holiday email | Tags: holiday email marketing, seasonal marketing, holiday ecommerce

If you want a quick sales fix, then shipping offers, coupons and %-off promotions can do the job for you. And you'll see that tactic applied extensively in your holiday inbox.

But the value of a tactic is not necessarily a direct reflection of its popularity. If applied too liberally, discounts today can mean less revenue tomorrow.

I don't normally simply link out to another article without comment, but this blog post by Kevin Hillstrom is simply a must read for anyone who uses discount promotions in their marketing emails.

October 15, 2008

The emails you send, the online versions of that email and the subsequent landing pages all need to give people some way to sign up to your list.

Why? After all, anybody seeing those emails and pages must, by definition, already be a list member.

Wrong.

All this talk about forward-to-a-friend and getting subscribers to share content on social networks etc. can get bogged down in techniques and link coding discussions.

We forget a core goal: to introduce this content to a new audience so they'll sign up for the list.

By definition, shared content is seen by people who aren't on the list. So they need a call-to-action somewhere that lets them sign up.

File it under "obvious but often forgotten." I forgot. Did you?

Tags: email marketing, viral marketing

If there is one area that regularly throws up questions, it's deliverability. Perhaps some of the specialists can weigh in here...

Text/HTML

1. If you send your email as multipart/alternative and have a text version with wording that differs significantly from the text used in the HTML version, what are the likely deliverability consequences?

I ask because I see many big brand emails where:

• The text version is just a link to the web version of the email, or
• Some of the text in the HTML version is "invisible" since it appears as an image. So the text and HTML versions are similar when viewed by a human, but won't appear similar to a piece of software trying to "read" the text.

Are these brands making deliverability mistakes, or do they know something I don't? I'd always assumed this would lead to a higher spam score in, for example, SpamAssassin?

(N.B. Using images to display text also causes problems when images are blocked.)

2. Is there any deliverability penalty if you send just an HTML email but coded as text/html rather than multipart/alternative?

(Ignoring the question of whether you'd want to!)

Reputation and links/images

In a recent blog post, Return Path's Alex Rubin noted:

"...some receivers auto-enable images and links for the highest reputation senders."

I know that certain email certification programs have this benefit at selected ISPs. But...

3. Are there any ISPs where a solid reputation (but no certification) means your images and links are automatically enabled?

If so, this would add more weight to the argument that deliverability tactics are not just about getting email delivered.

Just a quick note that the Why do email marketing? page has been updated with the very latest ROI estimates from the DMA's new Power of Direct study, as reported by Ken Magill.

The Why? page is a large collection of statistics and survey results that you can use to build a case for doing email marketing.

October 14, 2008

Last week I looked at adding "share this" links to your emails. After explaining how you might choose which social bookmarking, news and network sites to link to, I was asked exactly what form these links should take.

What code do you use when linking to places like Facebook or Digg in your emails or landing pages?

In my experience you have four choices.

1. Social link tools

There are various services that let you place a single "share this" link on a web page. When a user clicks on that link, it brings up an intermediate social linking page which allows them to submit the content to any one of a range of popular social sites.

Example tools include Socializer, SocialMarker, Socialize-it or SocialBookmarkIt.

The problem here is that these links are script-based in their default format and thus suited to landing pages, but not emails (at least not without a workaround).

There are also branding issues. The activated social linking page is usually hosted remotely and features third-party ads or logos.

Check, however, for premium tool versions that allow customization of that hosted page to support appropriate branding, colors, fonts etc. that better integrate with your website look and feel.

2. Social link generation tools

Another alternative is to use a tool that automatically generates HTML link code that you simply add to your email or landing page. Examples are the Social Bookmark Link Creator and the ICE tool.

To use them, you need only know:

• Which social sites you want to link to from the list supported by the tool
• The URL of the content you want shared (i.e. the page that people following a shared link should end up on)
• The title of that shared content

Your choice of URL is likely either an online version of your email, a specific landing page related to the offer in your email, or the full article you see after following an email link below a headline or teaser text.

3. Add links manually

If you're happy adding links to emails and web pages, there's nothing stopping you inserting social links manually.

Nearly every social site contains information on the appropriate code for "share this" links, and often provide buttons and other graphics to make these links more attractive.

These links are always suitable for web pages (i.e. landing pages) but not always for inserting into emails, where you want a basic HTML link and not a script or form-based "share this" link.

Below you'll find the relevant explanatory pages for building "share this" links to some of the more popular social sites, together with an indication of whether these links are suitable for use in an email:

• Facebook...for emails, use this link format:

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=FULLURL where FULLURL is the web address of the content you want shared

• MySpace (not suited for emails?)
• Delicious...for emails use this link format:

http://delicious.com/post?url=FULLURL&title=TITLE

• Fark (includes plain links suited to emails)
• Slashdot (ditto)
• Digg (ditto)
• StumbleUpon (ditto)
• reddit: here for script-based links and buttons or here for the simple link suited to email

(Always test "share this" links before each email goes out to ensure they still have the appropriate format.)

4. Check what your service provider can do

With all the interest in integrating Web 2.0 and email, ESPs will inevitably seek to provide supporting tools. So check whether your service is planning functionality that automatically inserts social links into your emails.

At the moment, I'm only aware of Silverpop's "share to social" tool, which inserts links to the MySpace and Facebook social networks. I'm sure other ESPs will follow.

The advantage with using an ESP tool is simplicity and (particularly) tracking features you usually don't get with manual solutions like those above.

The disadvantage is you probably want alternative or additional social links that your ESP won't necessarily offer.

This is new ground so please do add your own advice, suggestions, corrections and/or experience in the comments.

Tags: email marketing, social networks, web 2.0, social bookmarking

October 13, 2008

Part 1 of this series on holiday email marketing looked at preparation and past campaigns.

In this second installment, our email and ecommerce experts turn their attention to two critical issues: frequency and standing out from the holiday crowd.

So, do you send more email?

Conventional wisdom states that when people are willing to buy and spend more (notwithstanding economic woes), you should give them more opportunity to do so.

So we should send more emails in the holiday season, right?

Our experts answer that question with a "yes, sort of" ...followed by several ifs and buts.

The main problem is that everyone is upping frequency, so that alone may not be enough to break through. As Linda Bustos, ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software and author of the Get Elastic ecommerce blog notes:

"Your signal will fade simply because everyone else is also ramping up messages."

Chad White, author of the 2008 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season says that 88% of the retailers he tracked increased their email frequency during the holiday season. Some of them by more than 300% compared to pre-holiday volumes.

1. Be careful and watch the numbers

Upping frequency also has its risks: subscribers (or particular groups of subscribers) may tune out or reach for their "report spam" buttons.

So if you do up frequency, keep an eye on related metrics.

Chad, who is Director of Retail Insights at the Email Experience Council and author of the Retail Email blog, says:

"I would encourage folks to watch their spam complaints and unsubscribe rates closely during the holidays and perhaps send fewer emails to their less engaged subscribers."

It's a concept echoed vigorously by DJ Waldow, email marketing account manager at email service provider Bronto:

"Track your key metrics closely. You know you are overmailing if your unsubs/complaints begin to trend upwards. Also, is your open/render rate on the way down? If so...you may be sending too much email."

2. Send more value

Email fatigue is less likely if you're sending relevant messages. Luc Vezina, head of marketing for email service provider Campaigner says:

"You want to keep your targets interested, but bombarding them with irrelevant emails is bound to backfire. If you send repeated emails to your targets, make sure they provide value."

He suggests offering more information on the products customers might consider purchasing:

"User-driven product content such as ratings, reviews and Q&As can provide credible product information that customers want."

"A purchase can trigger an email asking the customer to rate or review the product. Then, come holiday time, you can send a top rated products promo email."

"Offering this information to your customers can serve as a valuable tool for them. The best part is they'll remember who provided it and go back for more."

3. Send to the right people

DJ advises you avoid fatigue by segmenting your list based on established criteria:

"Segment on past purchase behavior, consumer type (high vs. low value), click behavior, location, etc."

Chad suggests you take this a step further and...

"...consider offering additional email streams that require an additional opt in."

"Last year, Montgomery Ward and Petco ran 12 Days of Christmas campaigns that required an additional opt in. That allows your most interested customers to receive additional emails, while avoiding fatiguing the rest of your list."

"While only a small slice of your list will opt into these emails, they will be highly engaged customers that should be much more likely to convert."

4. Consider alternative communication vehicles

Finally, if email fatigue is a concern, Linda reminds us that email is not your only choice for customer communications. You might also consider...

"RSS feeds which are accessed on-demand, Twitter links or even SMS messaging. SMS is exciting because it's possible to send messages when GPS-enabled phones are within close range of your physical stores, if you have them."

And Luc suggests more Web 2.0 functionality:

"Retailers are also linking products to social networking sites like Facebook where a customer can add a product to a wish list or add a note to his or her profile about the product being viewed on your site."

How do you stand out?

Of course, you have more leeway with frequency if you can get your emails to stand out more from the morass of seasonal messages.

Much of that comes from typical best practices, with regular testing to identify winning designs, offers and subject lines. Relevancy, as always, is critical. Chad notes:

"...increasingly, segmentation and targeting are the keys to standing out. We talk all the time about how important relevancy is, but it's even more important when your inbox is suddenly getting 50% more mail."

Linda agrees:

"Proper segmentation and personalization will certainly help. The more you can understand what kinds of products and offers your subscriber is most interested in, the better click through and conversion you will achieve - obviously."

But what about specific approaches to garner attention?

A common suggestion is summed up by DJ: "Be different."

He suggests, for example...

"Allow consumers to Buy Now for the holidays. In other words, why wait until December to buy your gifts? If I could buy now and guarantee my gift arrive by the holidays, I'd do it in a second. Avoid the stress of last minute shopping."

Luc adds:

"Everyone offers free shipping around the holidays, so offer something more to your email subscribers to reward them for their loyalty and to encourage list growth. Add a viral component to your email campaigns by encouraging subscribers to forward coupons or special offers to friends."

"Also, it may sound simple, but customers like it when you're polite."

"Taking the time to personalize emails via the subject line, salutation and content provided not only makes your email stand out in a customer's crowded inbox, but it also makes customers feel like you know them and know what they need."

Finally, a key reminder from Linda:

"Geographic segmentation is important because winter doesn't look the same across North America. Are you promoting scarves and mittens to Floridians? Likewise, you don't need to market the US Thanksgiving holiday to Australians, Brits and Canadians."

Next installment: Are there any specific tactics you can use as the gift-giving season draws to a close? And what about when the holidays are over?

More on holiday email | Tags: holiday email marketing, seasonal marketing, holiday ecommerce

October 09, 2008

One of the ways to combine the email and Web 2.0 worlds is to encourage subscribers to redistribute email content via social sites (like Facebook or Digg), as discussed recently in this post and Loren McDonald's thoughtful article.

This makes intrinsic sense, but (as so often) it's easier to say what we should do than to say how we should do it.

If you put links to social sites in your email, which sites/tools do you link to? And where do you put them?

Which social links do you feature?

Every extra link in an email or web page is another distraction from the core message and another piece of screen real estate occupied. So the link has to justify its existence.

There are hundreds of websites built to allow users to repost content for others to find. Hundreds. Which ones deserve the space?

You're probably most interested in getting people to share content on social news sites, social bookmarking sites and, particularly, social networks. Here some factors to bear in mind when choosing the right ones to feature...

1. What sites are most popular?

In the absence of official statistics, only educated guesses are possible on the reach of different sites. Even published account numbers can be misleading since popularity is as much about user activity as about registered users.

Some helpful resources and suggestions:

• SEOmoz has a nice overview of the "best" Web 2.0 sites in numerous categories, which you might use as a proxy for popularity.
• In terms of social networks, comScore published recent figures suggesting Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 as the three most popular.
• Wikipedia also has a list of social network sites, together with user estimates (most of which are based on Alexa, which I would find hard to recommend for such purposes).
• The same site has a list of social bookmarking sites, of which the two biggest are (my opinion) Delicious and StumbleUpon.
• Top social news sites (again, my opinion) include Slashdot (especially IT stuff), Fark, Digg and reddit.

2. What's realistic?

Ask yourself if the material you are suggesting people share elsewhere is truly suited to each potential venue.

Digg is a hugely popular social news site which tends to get included automatically in any collection of "share this" links. But is your content really likely to warrant attention from Digg users? Probably not.

I've written over 2000 blog posts, many of which have received much positive coverage from those in the email marketing space. Total number of posts that ever got significant coverage on Digg? One. And it wasn't even about email marketing.

Would it make more sense to replace Digg links with a smaller social news site better targeted to your niche?

3. What suits my audience and topic?

According to comScore, the most popular social network in France is the Skyrock Network. More popular than Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 combined.

If you know your audience, you'll know which sites they use. If you're selling financial software systems to CFOs, do you really want MySpace links in your emails?

A similar point applies to the nature of the content/offer you want shared.

Want to spread a recipe? Consider Im Cooked.

Want to spread a search marketing article? Consider Sphinn.

Want to spread news of your latest stroller? Consider MothersClick.

Where do you put the links?

Even when you know which "share this on..." links to use, where do you put them? I've seen them everywhere but in the subject line.

Do you put them in the email or on your landing pages? In both? Top of the email? Bottom? Next to the content? Next to each article snippet?

How prominent do you make the links compared to your main links? How many "share this" links do you include? Do you use text-only links or funky little graphics like those you often see under blog posts (or both)?

And what language do you use? "Share this at Facebook," "Post at Facebook," "Facebook" etc. etc.?

Like any call to action, this is something you're going to have to test. Unless anybody has some experience they'd like to share in the comments?

An alternative of course is to have a single "share this with others" link in your email which takes people to a landing page containing many more social site options than you'd put in your email.

You can also put your "forward to a friend" email tools in there as well, or any other links and copy encouraging word of mouth.

This is all largely new territory for the email marketing world. What say you?

October 08, 2008

Just a quick heads up that MarketingSherpa today released the long-awaited 2009 edition of their Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. You can download the executive summary for free.

I haven't read through a copy yet, but as soon as I do a full review will appear here (the page currently shows a review of the 2008 edition).

(Disclaimer: I have all sorts of relationships with the publisher, who I used to work for. They even sent me flowers once.)

OnlineMarketing.info launched last year as a custom search engine featuring handpicked (by me), authoritative sites and services with decent information on email marketing.

Another major update yesterday saw the coverage expand to around 400,000 indexed pages on over 330 specialist websites.

Take a look and use the comments to suggest new sites for review at the next update.

Among the latest additions: the Box of Meat blog, LyrisHQ, various postmaster pages, Deliverability.com, Email Yogi, ISIPP, Sender Score Certified, and many more...

October 07, 2008

The end-of-year "holiday" season is a time of promise and challenge for email marketers. Wallets open up and inboxes fill up: the competition for attention affects us all, whether retailer or not.

I picked the brains of four email and ecommerce experts to come up with advice on how to get the best out of year-end messages. You'll get their insights in four posts over the coming week or two.

Today's first installment looks at your holiday email preparations and some good campaign examples from last year.

What should you do now for holiday sales success?

1. Get everything else ready now

The holiday season is not the time to make changes to basic designs and processes. That all needs to be done in advance. The prospect of holiday sales should provide enough incentive to get all those little improvements done before October is over.

Chad White, Director of Retail Insights at the Email Experience Council and author of the Retail Email blog says, "You should certainly wrap up any big bang email redesigns by mid-October or so, as well as put together any holiday-themed email template designs."

Luc Vezina, head of marketing for email service provider Campaigner (disclosure: a sponsor) adds:

"Now is also the time for software and creative retooling or to conduct any testing that might be too risky to perform during the peak season."

2. Step up email address acquisition efforts

List growth is good any time of year, but holiday promotions are great for conversions and for attracting new subscribers. Luc notes:

"Entice new subscribers with the promise of additional discounts and advance notification of holiday promotions."

3. Plan your holiday campaign calendar

4. Start building and testing seasonal emails

According to DJ Waldow, email marketing account manager at email service provider Bronto, while you might not be able to test holiday creative and subject lines directly, there's nothing to prevent you beginning the process internally...for example, "with your family and friends."

It's particularly important to ensure that offers are immediately clear to recipients, as attention spans are challenged by retailer email overload. Linda Bustos, ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software and author of the Get Elastic ecommerce blog says:

"Make sure your emails are always optimized for images off and maximize the power of the pre-header. No matter how fabulous your creative and offers are, if they're not "in your face" enough, the message may never get through."

5. Review your previous efforts

Chad says, "I'd recommend doing a full post-mortem on your holiday campaigns last year and note what worked and didn't and work that into your planned campaigns for this year."

6. Review other people's efforts

There's no shame in drawing inspiration from others. DJ suggests we wear a consumer hat and review the email that hit our inbox last holiday season:

"What did YOU like? What emails did you open? Click? Convert? Which ones did you delete without reading? Which ones annoyed you?"

So what are our experts' favorites from 2007?

Winning holiday email campaigns

Linda picked out a post-Christmas email from Drugstore.com with a "New Year Resolution" theme. Here's an extract:



She cites three key points that help the email work...

1. "December is typically a time when you focus on buying for others, and January when you shift gears to focus on yourself: your fitness, weight, health, appearance and breaking bad habits."

2. "It's also a time when you're typically broke. So Drugstore.com's up-to 40% off sale on personal necessities was very relevant."

3. "It also speaks customer language like Look My Best and Be Healthy rather than linking to Beauty and Health categories."

DJ Waldow is a fan of Nascar's "12 days, 12 deals" holiday campaign. He and fellow Brontonian Julie Waite explain why in this video review, with DJ saying:

"A theme-based or series campaign where I know for the next 11 days, the first thing I do when I get in in the morning is I'm going to be looking for that Nascar email to kind of get my fix."

Chad White has a few good examples for us...

"TigerDirect's Pink Friday campaign, which donated a portion of sales to help fight breast cancer, really caught my attention."

Why?

"I'm sure it was in part all the pink in their design, rather than all the red and green being used by others. But the charity tie-in made sense given that Christmas is a time of giving and that Breast Cancer Awareness Month had been the month before."

Chad also highlights a couple of sweepstakes that stood out...

"Old Navy's wish list sweepstakes campaign was innovative in that it encouraged customers to browse and create wish lists in exchange for a chance to win all the items on their wish list. That's a sweepstakes that really drives product and brand engagement."

"The other sweeps was Neiman Marcus's clickthrough sweeps, where they gave you a sweeps entry just for clicking through the email to look at their Big 100 Gifts List. While it didn't drive deep engagement like Old Navy's sweeps, it was super easy...just clickthrough and you're entered to win. No forms to fill out."

And he also puts in a vote for Harry & David's Mr. Pear Head emails: "They made me smile every time I saw them."

Next installment: How can you stand out and should you really send more emails in Q4?

More on holiday email | Tags: holiday email marketing, seasonal marketing, holiday ecommerce

October 06, 2008

One email marketing tactic you hear little of is the email discussion list (definition). Back when Flickr was just a spelling mistake, discussion lists were an established online marketing tactic.

The list offered many benefits to its owners. For example:

• it built community (very Web 2.0)
• it provided a vehicle for ads, promotions and branding efforts
• it helped establish expertise and reputation

[Discussion lists also had marketing value for participants. Contributors could highlight their own expertise and build a reputation through useful posts, with email signatures promoting each author's business.]

All the big online marketing discussion lists I used to participate in have faded away. It seems people now prefer to interact on forums, blogs, social networks and similar.

Or do they?

Zappos is a poster child for online business success and customer service excellence. And they have a flourishing email discussion list: the Shoe Digest.

So is the discussion list still relevant? Here's my take...

People want meaningful interactions and simply seek out the vehicle and venue that allows that to happen most easily.

Email discussion lists suffer from the overload problem: there's a limit to how many discussion posts people will read through in their inbox, even in digest form.

So they migrate to forums and social networks, which are big enough and accessible enough to accommodate a large number of topics/discussions, while making it relatively easy for users to filter out those discussions they don't want to see.

However, email still has the age-old advantage that led to broadcast email initiatives in the first place: the messages go to the users, the users don't have to go to the messages.

To keep that benefit and overcome the overload problem, the best email discussion lists are now small, highly targeted lists, often invitation-only*. This keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high and the volume of posts under control.

So, for example, one model that might work well is a private discussion list for your most evangelical customers. Let them interact exclusively with each other and with your experts and executives.

Nobody talks about discussion lists anymore. What do you think: do they still have a place in the marketing toolbox or are they now just for collaborative groups without a commercial agenda?

*Zappos' list is large and public! The exception that proves the rule?

Tags: email marketing, discussion lists

October 03, 2008

Part 16 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.]

We all intuitively know that trust is important. It doesn't need explanation. We want and need recipients to trust us and our messages.

It's true of all marketing, but especially so for email marketing: spammers and other denizens of the dark side of online life have taught people to be circumspect about commercial messages that arrive by email.

So just how do you build trust through an email program?

Fortunately, many of the elements that make up the new email marketing also enhance trust. Think of the relationship focus, ethics or subscriber empowerment.

But what else can you do?

Um, you have to be trustworthy

Not to get all preachy on you, but you can't establish trust by saying you are trustworthy. Not in today's cynical world with its empowered consumers.

You have to live it and you have to prove it through your actions.

1. You have to be trustworthy

This concept is a precondition for all the following suggestions. Trying to maintain an illusion of trustworthiness without following through on the promise backfires. You raise expectations only to shatter them.

Appearance

The appearance of your email builds trust where it helps with recognition (of the sender) and projects quality (through the design).

Spam is spam partly because it, well, looks like spam: rough and ready with little care and attention paid to design details.

There is much you can do to help with recognition and you'll find many suggestions in this post. But some basics are...

2. Ensure a recognizable sender appears in the from and/or subject line

The sender is usually a person, organization, brand or product line and is normally chosen according to what recipients are most likely to recognize and respond to. See this article for more detail.

3. Brand the preview pane

Aside from the subject / sender headers, many people's first encounter with your email is what they see in the preview pane. So that needs to support recognition, too, by including identifiers such as a masthead or logo.

4. Put full contact details in the email's footer

Include your organization's name, postal address and a contact email address. The reply-to address should also be a working address that is monitored. Consider putting the name of an actual contact person in the email, too.

Tips 2, 3 and 4 are not about complying with email disclosure laws.

They're about the willingness to stand up and be counted. To clearly state who you are and accept accountability for your emails.

5. Encourage and respond to feedback and contact

Encourage recipients to contact you with suggestions and queries. Respond quickly, meaningfully and personally to incoming email. Human interaction breeds trust.

6. Show a sample at sign up

Give people access to a sample email when they sign-up to your list. This lets them know what to expect so they recognize it when it does arrive.

(Incidentally, Chad White reports that offering a sample like this can increase subsequent open rates.)

7. Use a failsafe design

Obviously there's a lot to email design. But in terms of trust, you want a design that works. In the sense that it never appears broken. It may not always be pretty, but it's at least functional.

This means designing your emails so they render acceptably across all the major webmail interfaces and email clients. Use a design testing tool.

It's especially important to minimize the impact of blocked images, with judicious use of alt attributes.

What about mobile email design?

There are no hard and fast rules yet for "safe" design for mobile email users. There may not even be a safe design for such devices.

But you have a little leeway here, as expectations are low based on the myriad of HTML design disasters everyone sees on their Blackberry. See these articles for tips on designing for mobile email.

8. Match design to brand expectations

If you're Apple, your email design needs to be slim, sleek and cutting edge. People trust what they know and don't like disconnects between what they expect and what they get.

Your design also needs to reflect your website. Not necessarily by cloning the look of the site, but by using shared elements (logos, colors, imagery etc.) that project a common "experience" and allow your emails to exploit the trust you create with your other online activities.

Recommendations

People are more likely to trust your emails if they come recommended by independent third parties. So...

9. Put in testimonials on your sign-up pages

You don't hesitate to post testimonials for your products, services or other offerings. So don't be shy about putting up testimonials for your emails, either. I do it.

10. Encourage readers to share your emails

The easier you make it for people to refer your emails to others, the more likely they are to do so.

These days, links or tools allowing subscribers to post content to social network and media sites are replacing the traditional forward-to-a-friend link, as this post explains.

Don't just put in links to sites like Facebook: actively encourage people to spread the word with appropriate calls to action. You'll find some advice and examples here.

Respect

The importance of respect materializes when you think of an email address as a physical object entrusted to your care. Note the word "entrusted." So your trustworthiness depends greatly on what you do with that address.

It helps to see the email address (and the permission to send emails to it) not as a gift, but as a loan.

Permission is given on a rolling contractual basis. The contract renews only for as long as you continue to deliver relevant, valuable content at acceptable intervals. And only for as long as you take care of that permission by not abusing it.

11. Apply the highest permission standards

You can argue all you like about which form of permission is best for your program. But people trust those who respect their privacy most. Which means obtaining clear and explicit permission. For example:

• No misleading text (e.g. "do not check this box if you do not want...") or pre-checked please-opt-me-in boxes
• Requiring a second action to confirm the opt-in (like clicking on a link in a confirmation email)
• Clear information on what people are signing up for (email type and frequency)

12. Be open about privacy policies

Don't hide behind legal speak, small print and hard-to-find terms and conditions. Make it easy for people to find out and understand what you intend to do with their data.

13. Respect permission even more than you have to

You may have good reasons for renting your list to third parties. You may have good reasons for using your list to promote other parts of the business, sister brands etc.

You may even have got a check mark in the right place "allowing" you to do all these things.

But fact is, people have their own expectations. And that usually means they don't expect ads from a new sender or promoting a new business initiative or company acquisition or partner brand.

If you want to do this, tread carefully. Linda Bustos, for example, has some advice on how to introduce a sister brand without suffering the pitfalls of implied permission.

Technical factors

Anything that helps your emails get delivered to inboxes helps build trust. It doesn't look good when your emails don't arrive or land in junk folders. And building trust across a series of relevant, decent-looking emails only happens if people see the actual messages.

More specifically...

14. Authenticate your emails

Apart from the deliverability benefits, authentication stops certain email clients and webmail services from adding "we're not sure the sender is who they say they are" alerts to your messages.

15. Consider certifying your emails

Again, there are indirect benefits through potential deliverability improvements. Beyond that, certification may also mean images work, links work and trust seals are displayed with your emails.

Certification also forces you to implement other trust-building practices in order to qualify for accreditation.

16. Ensure the technology is responsive

All the technology behind your email system should - doh! - be in good working order.

Two points as far as trust goes: systems should work quickly (send welcome messages immediately, process unsubscribes immediately) and the language used in technical messages to subscribers should be clear. Uncertainty breeds distrust.

17. Give control to the subscriber

Trust comes through openness and what could be more open than letting people control what they receive?

For those who can afford the functionality, build a preference center that lets subscribers go to your website and manage their subscriptions, update email addresses, modify content interests and other preferences etc.

Content

18. Deliver more than just "value"

While trust is certainly improved by delivering valuable, engaging content, have you ever considered delivering value without expecting any in return?

A main premise of email marketing is a value exchange with subscribers. You give them valuable information or offers and they give you money, clicks, attention, pageviews, etc. Everyone's a winner.

But there is always the potential for the nagging doubt that the only reason you're being nice is because you want something in return. "You can't trust them, they're only after your money."

How about doing something for subscribers that has no direct benefit to you? A free gift just for being subscribed? Timely information without any obvious call to action? For example, a bank might reassure subscribers about the current financial turmoil.

Of course it's not really altruistic because it helps trust, loyalty etc. etc. Hence a definition of altruism as enlightened self-interest.

19. Don't break your promises

There are two aspects to this. First, you have a promise built up as a result of who you are. A promise based on what people expect of your organization or brand. Which goes back to the Apple email design example above. If you're a fun-lovin', zany, edgy business, your emails should reflect that.

Second, during the sign-up process and in your welcome email(s) you set expectations for the future: the type, content and frequency of the emails you send. Stay true to that.

20. Avoid grammar and spelling errors

No comment necessary.

21. Check email functionality

Again, part and parcel of email marketing. Do the links work? Do they even exist? A reader just sent me a newsletter from an ESP announcing a new white paper on subject lines, but which had no link to the white paper in it.

22. Use a human voice

As I said earlier, (positive) human interaction breeds trust. Temper your use of jargon, corporate speak, marketing speak, IT department speak and consider adding a human voice where appropriate.

Replace the ESP's template welcome message with one of your own. Replace IT's "Your email has been received" customer service autoresponse with one of your own. Etc. etc.

These suggestions and links will get you started. For more ideas, try this detailed 2004 article from EmailLabs which is as relevant now as it was then.

And if that's not enough, use your comments to share some more ideas. Trust me, all feedback is welcome.

Part 17 coming soon...

October 01, 2008

Back when email marketing was new and shiny, a forward-to-a-friend tool was exciting, cutting-edge technology. Everybody wanted one.

And so the "send to a friend" link was born and became a part of the email furniture. You probably have one in your emails.

Do they work? Not often.

Can they work? Most definitely.

But the furniture needs dusting down and a fresh coat of varnish.

It's hard to find people who report much success with a send to a friend link. People discovered that hitting the forward button in their email software was a lot easier than clumsily copying and pasting addresses into online forms.

Send-to-a-friend became a relic, whose purpose is more to remind people to forward an email than serve as a medium for doing so.

Make email forwarding easier

One obvious option is to improve the cumbersome forwarding process. You might mirror the "be my friend" invitation technology used by Web 2.0 applications like LinkedIn to let forwarders import or select addresses directly from their webmail or Outlook accounts.

One vendor has reported up to 15-fold increases in forwards as a result of using such a tool.

Replace it with something better

Sharing content online is now more than forwarding emails. It's Facebook and MySpace and Digg and blogs etc.

So another option is to upgrade "forward to a friend" to "share with others," by replacing the "forward this" link with new links or tools that let recipients re-post content to their favorite social media sites.

The ever-excellent Loren McDonald agrees, noting that such a share facility solves many of the weaknesses of email forwarding. And he has some good suggestions on how to implement the concept.

Loren also cites a case study where one sender saw their message exposed to a much wider audience as a result of incorporating Facebook and MySpace functionality into an email.

It's another super example of how email and Web 2.0 technologies can complement each other (more examples here).

The dangers of sharing

In all the excitement over things like Facebook and Digg, don't forget that there are many folk who never heard of Web 2.0 or don't care to set up a Facebook account or share content on Digg.

Be careful not to annoy or alienate the large "Web 1.0 is enough for me" generation. And don't focus on the sharing mechanisms at the expense of the email's actual content and message.

When the social media links take up more space than the actual content, it's time to reassess both.

The best way to get people to spread your message is to create messages worth spreading. Obvious, but often forgotten in the Web 2.0 frenzy. We're back (again) to the idea of value. As I wrote in an earlier article on Web 2.0:

"All these new tools and technologies, like email itself, are conduits for content. Not an end in themselves."

Also be careful to keep your objectives in mind (another case of "obvious but often forgotten").

The content and messages that are shared most frequently aren't necessarily those that contribute best to your objectives. You are likely looking for more than just "reach." At the very least you want greater reach among your target audience.

Case in point: the most viral content on this blog was a short skit I did on the Internet in Ancient Rome. It hit Digg's front page but contributed a big fat zero to any significant measures of success (subscribers, feed readers, long-term pageview trends etc.)

So by all means track which types of messages are shared most widely. But don't use that as the only guide to planning future messages. Look at all the metrics before picking out "winning" offers, messaging or content.

P.S. If you like this post, consider putting it on Facebook, bookmarking it at del.icio.us, blogging it or running through the office with a copy in your hand shouting "Eureka! Eureka!"

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