No man is an iland

A recent end-user survey by ContactLab found that over 60% of respondents had at least two email accounts.

Which one are they using to get your emails?

It’s an important question because not all email addresses are created equal, even when the owner is the same person.

Some accounts are checked less often than others. Some are relatively free of clutter. Some contain so much commercial email that your message disappears into a black hole of unresponsiveness.

So how might you persuade would-be subscribers to give you the address they pay most attention to?

Build trust and value before they subscribe

One answer lies in understanding why people have multiple addresses. The same end-user survey reveals, for example, that two such reasons are:

1. “I use some accounts to receive emails that are of no or little interest to me”
2. “I use some accounts without my real name to protect my anonymity”

Clearly, anything you can do to build trust and highlight the benefits of a subscription is going to help persuade the would-be subscriber to give you their “best” email address.

Trust and value are heavily influenced by previous experiences with your website or organization. But your sign-up copy is also important. The posts 22 ways to build trust and Best practices for sign-up forms have relevant advice, but you might, for example…

• Post up samples of your previous emails (pick out the ones that triggered the most interest)
• Display testimonials from happy subscribers
• Give control to the subscriber. For example, give them a preference center so they can choose the kind of content you send them
• Solicit subscriber information on a voluntary basis: require very basic information for the initial opt-in, then give people the opportunity to reveal more information only if they want (see How to get accurate subscriber information)
• Keep to high permission standards: make the opt-in very clear…no misleading text or pre-checked boxes
• Set content and frequency expectations: make it clear what they’re going to get and how often
• Provide obvious access to clear privacy information

Another option is to decide what kind of domains make a “best” address and then incent the subscriber to hand over the appropriate one.

Find out what makes a “good” email address

A common split for end-users is a “work-based” email address and a “private” webmail or ISP address.

Some marketers still regard webmail addresses as undesirable and unresponsive, at least partly because of the days when they were throwaway email accounts commonly used much like disposable email addresses are today.

Those days are long gone, with the likes of Gmail and Yahoo! Mail offering feature-rich, robust webmail services that are now the premium address for many individuals.

Webmail and work domains still have their pros and cons, though. For example:

• If a webmail address is the user’s main address, it will likely remain valid for a long time. “Work” addresses can die as people shift jobs
• Major webmail services offer users far more email storage space than typical corporate mail accounts
• Major ISPs and webmail services usually cooperate with one or more email certification services and offer feedback loops so you can monitor spam complaints. Deliverability management can be harder for work domains, since you can never know exactly what systems are processing your emails
• However, a greater number of independent domains on your list can spread the deliverability risk. If a significant proportion of your list are at one email address service, then a deliverability issue there hits you hard
• Webmail addresses are likely to be accessed throughout the week and day, perhaps with a bias to evenings and weekends, but may also only be checked infrequently. A “work” domain is likely to get checked more often during the working week from a working environment
• A webmail or ISP address rarely provides any insight on the origin or location of the subscriber. A “work” domain offers clues to the subscriber’s organization and identity.

One interesting exercise might be to compare response metrics for the webmail/ISP addresses on your list with responses from “work”-based addresses to see if one is better for you. (For a list of free email address and webmail providers, see here.)

If – for whatever reason – you decide one kind of address is preferable to another, what are your options?

1. Force the email choice

Your first option is to decline subscriptions using unfavorable addresses, forcing the would-be subscriber to enter, for example, a work-related or more personal address.

There’s a trade-off involved.

Any restrictions you place on the would-be subscriber or any action you force them to take lead to a lower conversion rate: less sign-ups.

So you need to be sure that the added value of your preferred address justifies this.

Online forms for one B2B company I’ve talked with, for example, reject sign-ups or registrations where the entered email address features one of the common webmail services.

They do so because they use the insights provided by the domain name to better prioritize leads. And they believe it dissuades the less-than-serious (and thus less valuable) leads from signing-up in the first place.

Not everyone agrees with such an approach, of course.

2. Influence the choice

A less drastic option is to work the sign-up copy to favor a particular kind of address. For example, instead of asking people to submit their “email address”, you say something like:

• Submit your work email address
• Enter your main email address

I could even imagine “Don’t miss out on our limited time offers: enter an email address you check regularly” as something worth trying out.

Anyone tried similar copy strategies?

3. Take what you can get

The final option is not to worry about it and leave it to the subscriber to decide for themselves, based on the trustworthy and high-value impression you project with your site, organization and sign-up copy…

So, what do you think? is it worth trying to get subscribers to submit certain types of email address?

If you have an opinion, let me know in the comments or buzz me on Twitter.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Building an email list

If you’re looking to take the next big leap with your email marketing, one way is to distinguish between two types* of best practices.

There are best practices that help optimize your email marketing. Truths that are as near-universal as we can get them. A good example is sending new sign-ups an immediate welcome message.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where not sending some kind of welcome message is the best course of action.

That’s what best practices are supposed to be about: proven approaches that are better than the alternatives.

But there’s another type of best practice. One that does not optimize your email marketing, but does prevent you from blowing it up.

These are really “safe practices” and exist as best practices because industry experts recognize that “a little knowledge can be a bad thing.”

In a review of an unusual email, Justin Premick raised the issue, asking:

“…are best practices always the way to go?”

One response came from Laura Atkins, who said:

“The things we tell people are best practices are not written in stone and inviolable. Rather, they’re a way to succeed without understanding all the ins and outs of email.”

It’s a concept worth expanding on.

There are a lot of tactics that bring excellent results if applied wisely. If not, they lead to disaster.

But wise application demands an understanding and attention to detail that can’t be taught (or learned) in 140 characters or a 400-word blog post.

So rather than try and run the risk that over-simplification leads people to make poor choices, industry experts often take the safe route and preach absolute best practices that aren’t always truly best practices. But they will keep you out of harm’s way.

For example, nearly everyone (me included) would say that a best practice is not to send emails that are pretty much all-images. Because image blocking kills the message.

That’s not really a best practice. That’s a safe practice.

Fact is, image-heavy emails – in the right circumstances with the right execution – can outperform the alternatives.

Newsmarketing, a Swiss agency, recently tested 6 different levels of images in 2.1 million emails to see which drove most traffic to a landing page.

The winner? The giant single image with a text salutation. Details here (in German only).

The catch is knowing the right circumstances and the right execution that lets you break the rules. To make image-heavy work, you need a solid understanding of various factors:

• role and strength of imagery in driving action for the audience/conversion in question
• trust factors
• proper use of alt attributes
• text/copy interaction
• use of sender and subject lines to encourage curiosity
• Subscriber open rate patterns
• etc.

…all of which takes time and effort to understand. Knowing people are often not in a position to find that time, experts deal in safe absolutes: don’t use image-heavy emails. If they didn’t say this, too many people would make mistakes like this one:

There is no reason to respond to this email. Now I could download images out of curiosity, but the email does not do enough to exploit the curiosity effect.

The sender is a marketing agency, the subject line is “November News” and there are no alt attributes, so my curiosity really isn’t aroused enough.

Email marketing without best practices is like being put in a Formula 1 racing car. Know what you’re doing and you’ll reach your goal faster. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you end up in a car wreck.

So experts take the “safe practices” route: stick to your family car. It’s not always as fast, but you’re much less likely to crash and burn your email marketing program.

Of course the positive side to this is that if you do take the time to understand the nuances of various tactics…if you know what the right circumstances and execution are…if you know what’s a best practice and what’s a safe practice…then you can “break” best practices and profit as a result.

Not forgetting the critical role of testing here.

The required knowledge comes not only through experience, but through interaction with other practitioners and extensive reading. Because “when to break the rules” information is out there if you look for it. (Alternatively, hire a consultant).

More examples

A best practice is to include privacy reassurances immediately next to sign-up fields for email lists. Correct. (People need to know their email is safe in your hands before submitting it.)

But…if you have a trusted brand, does an overt privacy reassurance actually raise privacy concerns where none were there before? When I removed mine, sign-up rates increased. Perhaps worth a test?

A best practice is not to increase frequency significantly. Correct. (This can lead to more spam complaints and deliverability problems.)

But…this advice largely applies to sending “more of the same.” There are ways to increase frequency that deliver more value to both the subscriber and the sender. See this post.

A best practice is not to force people to scroll horizontally when viewing an email. Correct. (Mostly because compelling people to scroll doesn’t work when people don’t…um…feel compelled to scroll. And some email clients have problems displaying wide emails)

But…give them a reason to do so and perhaps you open up a novel, memorable email experience? See Justin Premick’s look at Stuck in Customs, Dylan Boyd’s analysis of Abercrombie and Fitch emails or Anna Yeaman’s take on a very creative email from the Canadian Tourism Commission.

The takeaway here is not to rush out and start ignoring best practices. Without the background understanding, that way lies email marketing hell.

But if you can gain (or hire) a more nuanced understanding of issues, you might be able to break selected rules to the benefit of both you and your subscribers.

What do you think?

*A third type is best practice that isn’t really best practice. It’s a lazy title for someone’s opinion or an approach that is best for a particular scenario but isn’t universally applicable. For more on this, see Morgan Stewart’s excellent post.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing tactics

Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication
Part 3: Domain-based reputation
Part 4: Certification
Part 5: B2B and sender reputation

And so we come to the end of this series. To finish, I compiled a list of 192 deliverability resources available for you at this site and elsewhere.

These cover: introductory articles, themed article collections (e.g. authentication, sender reputation), blogs, Twitter accounts, tools/services and a special section on deliverability’s future.

If you have any recommended sites, services etc. to add to the list, use the comments to let me know. Though 192 is a nice figure, being the sum of ten consecutive prime numbers.

P.S. A big thanks to Chris Wheeler, George Bilbrey, Deirdre Baird, Jeremy Saibil and Tom Sather for their expert contributions over the course of this series.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Getting email delivered

Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication
Part 3: Domain-based reputation
Part 4: Certification

You can’t avoid the idea of reputation when talking about deliverability.

And we’ve already seen how your reputation as a sender of email will become associated with your domain, making you more accountable for your email activities.

[Accountability is a good thing as long as you're delivering true value to your subscribers. It helps keep bad emailers out of the inbox.]

Still, some marketers wonder just how much attention to give sender reputation.

OK, it plays a major role at big B2C webmail services and ISPs. But small corporate IT departments don’t have the email throughput to start classifying senders using some detailed sender reputation formula.

So can’t B2B list owners safely ignore the topic?

Let our experts guide us…

It is true to say that reputation-based filtering plays a smaller role in B2B than it does in B2C.

George Bilbrey (President) and Tom Sather (Professional Services Director) of Return Path confirm that…

“…content filtering is likely to always be a bigger issue in the corporate world where system administrators may set limits on what employees can receive.”

But that doesn’t mean reputation is irrelevant in B2B. Indeed, Bilbrey and Sather describe the idea that B2B deliverability is only about content filtering as a myth.

Here are three reasons why B2B marketers also need to worry about their sender reputation.

1. Business users have “consumer” email addresses

In the past, many senders regarded free webmail addresses as the preserve of fly-by-night freebie hunters. Webmail has come a long way since then.

Many people use a webmail address today – like Gmail or Windows Live Hotmail – because of the robust feature-rich services offered, integration with other online activities (like chat) and longevity.

So check any B2B email list and you’ll likely find a significant proportion of “real” “active” webmail addresses on it.

For example, 15% of those who opened the last issue of my own niche B2B list did so at a webmail service.

2. “Consumer” webmail services power business addresses

Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity, tells us:

“…ISPs like Yahoo don’t just provide free webmail accounts, but also rank among the largest hosts for businesses.”

She adds:

“Marketers set up their own domain and mail under these hosts, so even though you may think you are sending your mail to a company’s domain, it’s going through the same delivery processes as Yahoo.”

Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability at Bronto, also cites the growing spread of big ISPs and webmail services into business mail hosting:

“…the ISPs are increasing their footprint with companies outsourcing mail handling to them, such as Gmail’s popular Google Apps email for companies.”

Google recently noted that “over two million business and 20 million users in over 100 countries” have switched to Google Apps email hosting.

Over a year ago, Al Iverson reported that Yahoo was hosting email for over 125,000 domains.

3. Businesses use third-party email filtering services

We often mistakenly assume that email to a B2B audience must simply negotiate a local spam filter at the destination organization: one that just checks the incoming email’s content.

Pass that test and you’re in.

In an earlier post, Wheeler reminds us there are various deliverability layers to go through with corporate email.

In particular, many businesses are using third-party filtering services to sort email before it gets anywhere near a user.

Since these services process email for hundreds and thousands of businesses, they see enough messages to let them build sender reputation into the filtering equation.

Reputation problems (like too many spam complaints) are also a common reason for ending up on one of the public blacklists that IT departments might use to filter out spam from incoming email.

Jeremy Saibil, Director of Deliverability at Campaigner says:

“…it is important to remember that a considerable number of B2B mailboxes are protected by large filtering companies like Postini, Cloudmark, Message Systems, Barracuda etc, who all very much rely on reputational data to make delivery decisions.”

A similar concept applies to authentication. Baird says:

“…major spam filtering companies such as Postini and Spam Assassin are integrating DKIM into their processes and providing benefits to senders’ that are signing mail from their domains.”

Clearly reputation is important in B2B email marketing. Bilbrey and Sather add:

“We expect, much like major ISPs, corporate filtering companies will come to see reputation as more reliable than content filtering, though we expect them to continue to use both.”

The last word on this goes to Saibil:

“While it may seem as if reputation is lagging a bit behind in the B2B world, it is very much in play. At the end of the day, doing the right thing will be rewarded no matter what system is before you.”

OK, we’re coming to the end of this series on the future of deliverability. The final part offers dozens of useful links to relevant articles, blogs, websites and services. Look out for it in the next few days.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Sender reputation

Who cares what software people use to read your emails?

If you have a “safe” email design, you know each message displays gracefully whether viewed in Outlook 2007 or Gmail.

The only exception is when people use a mobile device, but you can get round that with the assumption that they’ll save your mail to view on a desktop later.

But there is value to knowing exactly where your emails are viewed.

Getting the stats

You may be wondering how on earth you can tell whether people are viewing your messages on AOL or Apple Mail. It’s only recently that the right tools have become available.

I used the client distribution component of the wider MailboxIQ service to analyze my list. Litmus is a standalone service or you may have access to a solution through your ESP (example).

Here’s a snapshot summary of the 50 or so different clients and webmail services my list used to view a recent newsletter issue:

83% viewed the email using desktop software (like Outlook), 15% using a webmail service (like Yahoo! Mail) and some 2% using a mobile device.

So what?

1. Compare with benchmarks

The first thing you can do is compare the numbers with benchmarks to see how your list differs and then think about why that might be so:

• Email client popularity stats by Campaign Monitor (June 2009)
• Email client statistics for B2B and B2C by Fingerprint (Sept 2008)
• Recipient platform preferences for B2B and B2C by Pivotal Veracity (Oct 2009)

It seems I have an usually large number of people viewing on Outlook 2007 (even for a B2B list), Apple Mail and Gmail.

This suggests the list is attracting a business audience that’s updating its software faster than most, perhaps a little more first-mover, tech-savvy than others and with a significant minority of design/creative individuals?

Supporting evidence for that interpretation comes from the data provided by MailboxIQ on the browsers used to view my messages in webmail environments:

Both Firefox and Chrome are more popular with subscribers than you’d expect given broader stats on browser market share.

Such knowledge might influence my content strategy going forward. It also worries me that my email’s design is pretty simplistic: what must those cutting-edge and creative folk think?

2. Compare with your list

Software stats are only recorded when an open/render is recorded (more on that later). Your standard campaign reports should also tell you which subscribers “open” an email.

So you can calculate the percentage of recorded opens associated with a webmail address (i.e. how many of your gmail.com addresses recorded an open) and then compare this with the results from your software/webmail distribution stats.

Let’s take the newsletter issue used to produce the software stats above.

7.9% of opens recorded by my ESP were from subscribers with a gmail.com address, 4.2% subscribers with a yahoo.com address and 3.2% subscribers with a hotmail.com address.

All these numbers are higher than the equivalent number produced by MailboxIQ, suggesting that people are signing up with a webmail address but downloading their webmail to another viewing environment.

If the results were reversed, it would suggest many people are signing up with business domain addresses, but actually viewing the mail in a consumer webmail environment: either directly or because their email applications are actually powered by Gmail, etc..

[Gmail recently announced that over 20 million users do this.]

In reality, both these activities are happening. Your stats simply tell you which is happening more often.

The clear message is this: you can’t make assumptions about viewing environments based on the domain name of the email address.

B2B marketers may also be surprised at the volume of webmail users on their list (15% in my case), suggesting they need to pay just as much attention to webmail deliverability issues (particularly sender reputation) as their B2C counterparts.

3. Trend spotting and mobile strategies

If you follow your stats through time, you can pick up software trends that perhaps reflect changes in the makeup of your list. Most importantly, this data helps you decide on whether (and how) to tackle the issue of mobile email.

I have a small list and only 2% use mobile devices to view my emails. For now, it makes little sense to develop a fully-fledged mobile email strategy, with mobile-ready landing pages etc. But what if that number was 10%?

4. Design testing

Of course, if you haven’t got a “safe” email design, information on subscriber software use lets you know exactly what display environments you should be testing.

Perhaps you have a B2C list and never worried too much about Outlook 2007? Or a B2B list and ignored Windows Live Hotmail? Now you know if you were right to do so.

Even if your design is “safe”, there are things to learn. Most design testing tools do not include software/browser combinations. In other words, you get a single screenshot of how your design looks in Gmail. And maybe it looks just great.

But does it look great in Gmail when viewed in IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari? For example, I never really bothered to worry about Google’s Chrome browser. But now I see 17% of my Gmail users also use Chrome, maybe it’s worth investigating.

5. Customer-level design

What if you could associate a particular email software or webmail service with an individual email address? Could you then begin sending emails optimized for that particular display environment?

The possibilities are many. For example,

• Including detailed “add to address list” instructions that are a perfect match in terms of vocabulary and instructional steps
• Changing subject lines to fit the likely available space (especially for webmail users)
• Streamlined versions for mobile users
• Dumping inline CSS for an external stylesheet or “CSS in head” approach for those environments that support it (saving bandwidth costs)
• etc…

The danger here is that people sometimes switch between software or webmail services. But you could build in rules: if someone records the same software over a certain time period, then you can feel safe sending them future emails customized for that software.

Theoretically you could do this anyway for the webmail domains on your subscriber list. But as we’ve already seen, the domain name in the email address does not necessarily tell you where the subscriber actually reads their email.

Obviously, you’d need to test to see if creating such customized versions was justified by the results. But the potential is clear, especially when combined with other targeting technologies, such as trigger emails.

A note on measurement issues

As mentioned, a recipient needs to “open” an email for the tools to capture data on the software that recipient is using. So no data is recorded where no open is registered.

Pretty much every major email client or webmail service has image blocking in place, which prevents the open tracking image from displaying.

If we assume that people’s propensity to activate images is independent of the software they use, then this technical problem is irrelevant: everyone is equally underrepresented. But there are still issues to take into account when interpreting software distribution numbers:

1. The assumption isn’t necessarily true. Recent data from MailChimp, for example, showed that Gmail users tend to engage more with email than other webmail users (i.e. they are more likely to open email). So maybe the stats overestimate Gmail use.

2. Some display environments don’t have the facility to display (tracking) images at all. So, for example, certain mobile devices will be heavily underrepresented in the stats.

3. One-off deliverability problems can skew the results. If you trigger a block at Yahoo.com, well, the number of people viewing your email using Yahoo.com is…um…likely to be low.

If you trigger a block at Postini, then corporate users see less of your email than webmail users. The result: a false impression of how many people use software like Outlook.

Keep those issues in mind. In particular, you might want to average numbers over several campaigns so that short-term or one-off delivery problems don’t bias the stats too much.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing metrics