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December 22, 2008

This blog begins its seasonal break today and departs in a shower of tinsel and gift wrap, not to mention the "traditional" end-of-year video message. With apologies to Rudyard Kipling...



(Feed readers may need to click here to catch the video. Video transcript available here.)

The blog is back in January with the final piece of the email marketing chain, an interview on B2B email, and more...

Happy Holidays: stay safe and healthy through 2009.

And most important of all: thank you.

December 19, 2008

One of the quiet little trends this year is the subtle growth of animated GIFs in emails. Perhaps because, contrary to expectations, they are well-supported by the major email clients and webmail interfaces.

Also, perhaps, because they seem to work. A/B tests by BlueFly, for example, found an animated email pulling in 12% more revenue than the non-animated equivalent.

Like a lot of email elements, animated GIFs don't work by definition...you have to use them right. So I got some insight on the topic from Tom Buchok, co-founder of Bannerflow and some relevant examples off Chad White, Research Director at Smith-Harmon.

After their comments, you'll find several useful links for more advice on animation in email.

What benefits can animated GIFs bring to your marketing emails?

Tom: "Overall, animated GIFs are not used very heavily in email marketing -- so a certain amount of novelty remains. Novelty can be an asset when trying to get your audience's attention."

"More importantly, animated GIFs allow for a more creative message. Retailers can use a single space to highlight multiple products, advertisers can use animation to highlight their call-to-action, or click-throughs-to-video can be easily visualized with an animated GIF."

What kind of things are retailers doing with animated GIFs?

Chad...

"Now is the time of the year when retailers pay extra attention to animated GIFs because of their ability to help them stand out in the inbox. Retailers have been using a variety of tactics, most of which are fairly subtle attention-grabbers."

"For instance, starting with a Nov. 7 email, Williams-Sonoma has been using animation in their header to draw attention to shipping deadlines and other information, but also just to get subscribers to give the email a second look."

"Avon, Piperlime and a few others have also used animation in their headers in the past."

"Another tactic I've seen used this year is using animation to draw the reader's eye down the email to encourage scrolling. Harry & David did that in a Dec. 3 email but using a cascading snowflake as bullet points, but Bluefly and Lands' End have also used this tactic."

"Similarly, in a Dec. 11 email, SmartBargains used an animated GIF to draw attention to their main call-to-action, animating a Christmas gift with the words "Tear me open!" on it. It reinforces the CTA in a delightful way that's not too in your face."

"But there are definitely opportunities to go-big with animation. One of my favorite examples remains the GIF used by Lands' End in a March 6 email last year. They not only used animation to show off some of the colors that their Beach Trekker Sandal comes in, but they also demonstrated how the Croc-inspired shoe becomes a slider."

"For products that move in simple ways, animation can be used to effectively demonstrate product features. Another example is an April 25 email from Neiman Marcus, where they show a few ways in which you could customize your Fendi Artist's Baguette."

When are animated GIFs a bad idea?

Tom: "Other than compatibility (see later), the single-most important factor to consider is file weight (kilobytes). Animated GIFs can get significantly larger than their static counterparts, especially as the GIF file includes more and more color."

"Further, if the animation is gratuitous that is a bad thing. Make sure that the animated GIF is achieving a true objective."

What are the design issues to watch for?

Tom: "While maintaining a keen eye on animated GIFs' file weight, designers should also keep their eye on how file compression affects the design. If the file starts to look garish and pixelated, maybe an animation isn't the best route. Make sure it looks good first."

"Especially in email, it's important to treat any type of animation as a billboard -- readers' interest cannot be assumed to be much longer than 10 seconds. Keep the copy to a minimum and make certain that the first and final frame of the animation says everything it needs to. Almost pretend to be working on a billboard."

[Editor: Here's what happens when you forget that advice]

"Designers also need to ensure that these animations don't look like a broken record. Never-ending animations should be done thoughtfully."

Any compatibility problems with email clients or webmail interfaces?

Tom: "With Outlook 2007's shift to HTML rendering in Word, rather than IE, animated GIFs do not display. This is the biggest compatibility issue. In Outlook 2007, the first frame is all that appears; designers may want to produce their file so that the first frame contains all the information needed."

(Chad adds, "For that reason, it's also recommended that you not use animated GIFs to communicate frame after frame of text.")

What good examples have you seen?

Tom: "Here's a classy way of using a never-ending loop -- it is clean, non-intrusive and, most importantly, easy on the eyes.

"And here's a retail example merchandising several jacket colors from REI."

Useful reads

Try these for more info:

• The good folks at Style Campaign have some holiday season examples, pick out their top 10 animated favorites and have a detailed guide to making animated images in Photoshop.
• Writing at MediaPost, Chad offers up five reasons to use animation and some tips on how best to do it. His RetailEmail blog has a whole section devoted to the subject.
• Suzanne Norman of Emma Email Marketing also has some best practice tips.
• Mark Wyner has details of support for animated GIFs in the main email clients and webmail interfaces.

More on design issues | Tags: email marketing, animated gifs, animation in email, email design

December 17, 2008

Hey, it's almost the end of the year. If my brain had a battery indicator, it would be flashing red. So let's take a brief break from the serious stuff and revisit a tricky issue raised on this blog last year:

What if Santa was an email marketer?

Enjoy.

December 16, 2008

So we're looking at the chain of events that leads from sending an email to getting a click. Our challenge is to find the weak links where people are dropping out.

Here's that graphic again, showing the progression:


Last week we discovered ways of assessing whether Event 1 (Delivery) was the problem. And if you thought those techniques lacked certainty, it gets worse.

Despite all our clever tools, there is no reliable data to tell whether someone, for example, didn't click because they deleted your email before looking at it (failure at the recognition stage) or whether they read it voraciously but the final call to action hit the wrong tone (failure at the interaction stage).

Weep and wail. How can we optimize the chain when we don't know which part needs optimizing?

There is no simple answer, much as we'd all like one. Though there are moves afoot to find one.)

The practical approach, as so often, is to look at the numbers you can get out of campaign reports and apply a heavy dose of intuition and interpretation.

That's easily said, but difficult to explain or implement of course.

Typical result metrics (sales, downloads, registrations) don't help too much here. You need to examine the intermediate numbers. Let's explore a few examples...

Open and clickthrough rates

You can get into long arguments about open rates in particular. But put them to one side and consider some possibilities...

Have a lot of people never, ever clicked or opened an email? If it's not a delivery problem, it suggests a failure at the recognition or pre-interest stage. You're not getting them involved with your email at all.

Do you have high opens, but very few clicks? That tells you that you've overcome the recognition and pre-interest hurdles. But the main content isn't holding the reader's interest. Or the opportunity to interact (usually a call to action) isn't doing its job.

Do you have low opens, but high clicks? Since those that do get to the email seem to click, the problem is likely at the recognition or pre-interest stage: you're failing to make that initial connection.

[You're probably asking, what counts as high? What counts as low? That's where experience and intuition comes in.]

Unsubscribe and complaint rates

For someone to unsubscribe from your email, they have to at least give the contents some consideration, even if only to find the unsubscribe link. So a high unsubscribe rate suggests you have a problem with "interest": your content is not attractive enough to those readers.

Look particularly (if you can) at the number of people who unsubscribe after receiving their first email. If people aren't even giving you a second chance, then it suggests a big disconnect between what people expect and what you're sending.

If complaint rates are particularly high, it's possible the problem is a little earlier in the chain: perhaps people aren't recognizing the email they signed up for and think you're spamming them?

Care with assumptions

The reason why intuition, interpretation and experience play such a role here is because there are often numerous possible explanations for why a number is notably high or suspiciously low.

For example, high open rates are often put down to a winning subject line. But here are 14 other reasons your open rate might be doing so well.

If a lot of people unsubscribe after their first email from you, it might be because what you send isn't as valuable as they expected. Or maybe they subscribed for the coupon incentive you offered in the sign-up form and never had any intention of staying subscribed anyway.

Best practice comparisons

A safer way of evaluating your email marketing chain is to simply list best practices for optimizing each link in that chain and then compare that with what you actually do.

What are these best practices? Watch out for the next post.

Any other suggestions for pinpointing the weak areas in your emails?

December 12, 2008

Last week we learned that most of our opt-in subscribers are NOT in fact clicking.

Before you can do something about that problem, you need to know where you're losing these subscribers in the sequence of events that starts with a sent email and ends with a click.

That's actually a very difficult task. For all our clever tools, we know very little about how people interact with our emails.

Do they even get them? Do they see them and delete without reading? If not, how much do they read? How long do they give us to capture a click before they move on to the next message? All questions that are tricky to answer.

But all is not lost...

Let's begin by looking at the first event in the chain: the email arriving in the inbox. Or not, as the case may be.

Most email campaign reports tell you how many emails went out and how many bounced back as undeliverable. We assume the difference is how many got delivered to inboxes. Not true.

A number of "legitimate" emails get silently deleted as "spam" before they get near an end user. And a number get through but are automatically diverted into the user's junk folders.

A mail that never gets seen has a pretty poor chance of garnering a click.

How can you tell if you have a hidden inbox delivery problem? Here are five techniques to use:

1. Intuition

Author John Naisbitt is quoted as saying:

"Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data."

When you send out an email, you should have some pretty sensible expectations on its likely performance.

If the actual results fall well below expectations and for no obvious reason (like your ESP's tracking system died five minutes after your emails went out), then delivery problems are a likely candidate.

If the open rates on successive emails are 35%, 33%, 38%, 33%, 12%, then it's likely you had a delivery problem with your last email. (Or an even worse one than the one you have already, but don't know about.)

Even declining responses suggest that recipients are progressively turning away from your messages. Meaning that at some point they will start marking you as spam and your sender reputation (and delivery rates) will suffer as a result.

2. Domain segmentation

I covered this last month. If you look at your campaign results for all recipients sharing a particular email address domain, then you can spot anomalies.

If your email gets a 30% open rate, but your open rate among subscribers using an @hotmail.com address is 0%, then there are two explanations. Either Windows Live Hotmail users have got something against you or (much more likely) your email isn't reaching them.

3. Monitoring services

One tactic is to open email accounts at the popular address domains in your list, add these accounts to that list, and then check each after your campaign goes out.

It's a tiresome task though.

Fortunately, one woman's tiresome task is another's business opportunity and there are numerous services that will do the job for you.

Deliver Monitor and Delivery Watch are two standalone inbox delivery monitoring services. They give you a seed list of addresses to include in your mailings, then report on the results.

These reports normally tell you what percentage of your emails to leading domains like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL and others likely got through to the inbox, got filtered into the junk folder or got deleted en route.

This kind of monitoring is also commonly included in wider deliverability service packages offered by specialists like Lyris, EmailReach, Pivotal Veracity, Return Path, and others.

4. Proxy monitoring measures

Two other measures indicate a likely delivery problem (or an upcoming one).

The first is your presence on blacklists. While these blacklists vary in their practical relevance to your delivery success, suffice to say the more blacklists you appear on, the more delivery problems you're likely to have.

This page explains things in more detail and includes a list of standalone tools for checking your blacklist presence, as well as a list of leading blacklists (who will let you check their records directly).

Blacklist monitoring is also commonly part of the package offered by the inbox monitoring and deliverability services mentioned above.

The other proxy is to use feedback loops (FBLs) to monitor spam complaints leveled against your emails. Again, growing complaints suggest it's only a matter of time before ISPs start blocking your email (if they haven't done so already).

Feedback loops might be part of the standard service offered by your ESP or you can sign up to FBLs directly. See here for a list.

5. Deliverability testing tools

B2B email marketers are at a disadvantage. Inbox monitoring services inevitably focus on address domains favored by consumers (but don't forget that many business people use "consumer" webmail addresses, too.) And corporations don't offer feedback loops.

Are corporate spam filters accidentally catching your legitimate email? Fortunately, there are services that will give you some idea.

The main design testing services commonly include the results of tests against the more popular spam filters used by businesses. And, again, those commercial deliverability services listed earlier usually offer something similar, too.

Now being a swotty scientific type I have to warn that you will never get a perfect answer, whatever combination of tactics you use.

Spam filters at both ISP, corporate and user level, for example, have flexible settings. So monitoring services can only test against generic settings and not the full range of real-world alternatives.

Identifying a delivery problem is just the start, of course. Next week we'll look at how you might diagnose problems elsewhere in the email marketing chain. And then we'll look at what you can do to solve those problems...

Have you got any tips for identifying hidden delivery problems?

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, inbox monitoring, spam filters

December 09, 2008

A common theme in 2008 was the need to accept self-responsibility for your delivery success. You can't expect your email marketing service to wave a magic wand and ensure all your emails end up in the inbox.

The reason is the growing role of sender reputation in determining how ISPs and others treat incoming email. And this reputation is largely determined by your own list management and sending practices: what you send and who you send it to.

But it would be wrong to dismiss the role of the ESP entirely. Deliverability may be your responsibility, but an ESP can provide support to help you manage this responsibility effectively. What kind of help can you look for?

(Note: the real-world ESP examples are just that: examples, not endorsements. You'll find a big list of ESPs here.)

IP address issues

Sender reputation is largely tied to an email source (predominantly the IP address from which the emails are sent).

As a result, it's often better to have such a sender IP address for your exclusive use. Then you're in complete control: it's your practices that are determining the reputation of that IP address.

If you share an IP address with other senders, their poor email practices might drag down this reputation.

Now, it's not quite as straightforward as that, as this post explains. There are cases where you may prefer to share an IP address, particularly if you're not going to send enough emails to establish your own reputation with big ISPs.

Your ESP should at least be aware of the role of sender IP addresses and reputation, and be proactive in managing their clients and IP addresses so that the latter do not run into reputation problems.

Example: StreamSend offers customers a private IP address.

Support for authentication

As Ken Takahashi recently noted, "A lack of authentication won't get you filtered out (yet), but it does subject you to more scrutiny from anti-spam technologies."

Does your ESP provide you with the tools or information you need to authenticate outgoing emails? (See these articles to learn more about email authentication.)

Example: Silverpop enables SPF authentication for all new clients, with other authentication options available according to need.

Good ISP relations and deliverability expertise

Top senders of email have good relations with top receivers of email. This is not so the ESP can pull a few strings and get your email fast tracked to the inbox. That's not happening.

But good ISP relations mean an ESP can provide better support when you do have a problem with a particular ISP: getting the information you need to solve a problem and guiding you toward better practices.

Example: ExactTarget has a dedicated deliverability service team.

Bounce management tools

One of the important aspects in sender reputation is the validity of emails on your list. Your reputation suffers if you continue to email invalid or dead email accounts.

A good ESP provides you with feedback on bounced email and gives you the tools you need to manage these addresses. For example, automatically suppressing "dead" addresses from future sends.

Example: Listrak "removes all hard bounces from your list automatically...(and)...allows you to set the number of delivery attempts for soft bounces."

Feedback loops

Feedback loops (FBLs) are a mechanism by which larger ISPs can tell senders about spam complaints generated by their emails. And it's these complaints that can hurt your sender reputation most and see you put on blacklists.

Top ESPs are registered with important FBLs and able to give you information on complaint levels, so you can start investigating the likely cause: poor content, poor permission, bad subject line, etc.?

Example: MailChimp uses FBLs to automatically unsubscribe addresses that generate spam complaints at major ISPs.

Pre-send spam checking tools

Most ESPs now have tools you can use to test whether your email is likely to make it past some of the more common spam filters out there.

Example: Campaign Monitor has a tool that will "run your campaign through popular spam filters at the desktop, server and firewall level before you send it."

Best practice support and advice

The real key to delivery success is keeping subscribers happy. Ignoring the techniques and technologies for the moment, ISPs are essentially filtering incoming email so that the ones that get through are the ones people want. So any tool or feature that keeps people engaged with your emails is, indirectly, a deliverability tool.

Obviously there are budget issues at play, but try not to design your email program around the limitations of your ESP. Instead, find an ESP that supports what you want to do to make your emails better (double opt-in, welcome messages, segmentation etc.)

Customer filters

One indicator of how serious your ESP is about supporting deliverability is their attitude to new customers. If they let anyone send emails through their systems, then chances are they're not too concerned about such things as sender reputation.

Do they have any checks in place to ensure their customers are meeting (and continue to meet) basic email marketing standards, such as requiring an opt-in, monitoring legal compliance etc.?

Example: Bronto has a vetting process for new clients.

Cooperation with accreditation services and whitelists

Your ESP may already work with whitelists and certification services, so that their customers get fast-tracked into these programs or priority consideration or simplified application processes.

Example: VerticalResponse also acts as a reseller of the Sender Score Certified accreditation program.

That's a few pointers to get you started...if it all seems complex, there are deliverability consultants and services out there to help you.

...and I invite them to weigh in with their additions and modifications!

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability

December 05, 2008

Take a look at the total number of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your last email. Now compare that with the total number of emails sent. What percentage clicked?

For most people (including me), the answer is likely less than 15%.

Think about that. We have over 85% of subscribers not clicking on email they explicitly asked to receive.

Over 85%.

Doesn't that strike you as odd? A missed opportunity?

Most are not unsubscribing. Or hitting the spam button. So why aren't they clicking? They sign up for something, you send it, they don't click...strange.

Something is going awry in the chain of events between the marketer clicking on the send button and the recipient clicking on an email link.

To solve the problem, and get more people clicking, you need to know three things:

1. What are the events that make up this chain?
2. How can you tell which part of the chain is failing you?
3. What can you do about it?

Let's begin by identifying the links in the chain. These are the five steps I'd like to focus on:


Delivery is about actually getting the email in front of the recipient in the first place. Which means negotiating delivery hurdles at the macro (ISPs, webmail services, corporate IT filters) and micro level (individual settings at the email user level).

Recognition is about ensuring that the recipient identifies the email, ideally through recognition of the sender or list.

Recognition triggers positive memories of past experiences with that sender's messages, brand or on/offline presence. In other words, it labels that message as unworthy of instant banishment to the spam or delete folder.

Pre-interest is about communicating enough immediate information to ensure the recipient pays closer attention to the message and wants to explore the content in more depth.

Interest is about the actual content itself, and its ability to hold that attention, excite interest and create a desire to take further action.

Interaction is the final step in the chain, where the email provides the right outlet, tool or environment (usually in the form of a call-to-action and link) for the recipient to actually take that further action.

When results need improving, a common (and admirable) reaction is to look for ways to send more relevant, valuable, timely email.

But given the above, it's clear there's even more to it than that. A message which fits the needs and interests of the recipient NOW can still fail if the email isn't recognized in the inbox. Or doesn't make it to the inbox. Or makes it hard to find a link to click on.

Clearly we need to find ways of identifying the actual source of our problem before we can take specific action to improve success. We'll begin that task next week. But before you go, two more critical points.

1. Email marketing works. Imagine how much undiscovered potential still remains, given that we're only getting clicks from under 15% of the audience for each individual email.

2. The email marketing chain actually goes on further. A click is itself just part of the chain that leads to some event that truly defines the success of your email (a download, a sale, a registration, a pageview, a donation, etc.)

But all that happens outside of the immediate email environment, which is why we'll conveniently ignore it for the moment...!

December 01, 2008

What do all the above communicate to the recipient?


If you have to justify yourself, then chances are you haven't got the right kind of permission from people on your list.

Permission-based email has its own inbuilt justification: people explicitly requested it.

If you are getting reported as spam even though you send permission-based email, then a permission reminder is one option. (See also MailChimp's recent post.)

But reminding people that they did actually sign-up for these emails doesn't get at the root cause of the problem. As we saw last week, recipients define spam as "unwanted" email as much as "unsolicited."

Instead, you have to ask why people don't want your email anymore. What can you do about it? And if you can't do anything about it, are you at least making it as easy as possible for them to get off your list?

A reader asked:

"What about audio in e-mails? Is there a good technology that you know of to embed automatic audio in e-mails? Something that works in Outlook as well as Google and Yahoo mail?"

I've covered video email technology in the past, but anybody have any answers on audio email? Do the same issues apply?

Answers in a comment, email or postcard: all appreciated!

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