No man is an iland

No man is an iland (no S), and I owe a constant debt of gratitude to those resources that keep me up-to-date with email marketing advice, wisdom and insight.

Each year, I publish a new list of my personal favorites – the people and places who’ve proved their value as an email marketing resource.

It’s a personal list, not an exhaustive one: there are many other wonderful resources out there, particularly for specialist niches. So please feel free to add to my suggestions through the comments.

Media sites

After a few years howling in the media wilderness, email has slipped past the bouncer and is back dancing with the cool kids in the marketing nightclub. Everyone is writing about it.

MediaPost’s Email Insider still ranks as a big favorite, largely because of the top notch columnists there, especially Loren McDonald. Loren’s also the top email personality to follow on G+

ClickZ and me go back well over a decade. It was there I first read about the killer app (yep, email was once the hot new marketing thing). They have six solid columns now.

A special shout out goes to those by Derek Harding, Jeanne Jennings, Mike Hotz and the great Simms Jenkins.

Other media & membership sites I go back to regularly are:

• MarketingProfs (especially the “Get to the Point: email marketing” newsletter)
• Econsultancy
• iMedia Connection
• MarketingSherpa

The latter is worth joining to get access to the back catalog of case studies with real campaign numbers (some of which I even wrote, back when I used to freelance for them).

Finally, a special mention also for SmartInsights, which features email articles by digital marketing Überguru Dave Chaffey and Tim Watson, who always impresses me with his critical analysis and thinking. (Disclaimer: I write there, too).

Blogs, newsletters, etc.

Phew…the number of email marketing blogs and newsletters is somewhere in the four figures by now. Everyone has their personal favorites. Here are mine:

The Retail Email Blog is the go-to place for keeping up with trends in, well, retail email marketing.

Author Chad White also produces regular reports and throws in his own wise insights with his coverage of the sector.

Pay close attention to anything you see by Dela Quist and colleagues at Alchemy Worx (newsletter).

It’s hard to find the correct word to describe their insights, so I’ll put it like this: nobody has made me think harder about email and my own assumptions and ideas than Dela.

The folk at Bronto have kept up a high standard of practical posts for a long time now. Also especially good for retailers to read.

The email design world is blessed with some excellent resources and I’ve already highlighted 22 sources for design inspiration elsewhere. But a quick extra mention for:

• Style Campaign (written by mobile email design Goddess Anna Yeaman)
• CampaignMonitor (Ros Hodgekiss and colleagues offer strong support for the email design community)
• Litmus (sterling work by Justine Jordan)
• Email on Acid

The deliverability world also has some fine blogs. My favorite is Word to the Wise by Laura and Steve Atkins. You’ll also get a lot of useful information and studies out of Return Path.

Good aggregators for those short of time are the Email Guide and the Email Institute. Special shoutouts also to:

• WhatCounts (particularly articles by Christopher Penn, who comes at email from many different and innovative angles)
• The DMA EMC blog (featuring a lot of top UK talent)
• MailChimp (recently the blog has been more service oriented, but check out the article backlog and resource guides)

Statistics, studies and background data

I have separate posts covering sources of numbers and studies you might need for background or presentations. For example:

• Benchmark statistics
• Value of email marketing – why do it?
• How big is email? – webmail and email numbers
• Mobile email use
• Smartphone numbers and market shares

Community sites

I recently joined the Only Influencers member site and email marketing discussion list.

I’m largely a lurker, due to time issues, but have learnt an enormous amount through the willingness of some very clever people (vendors and marketers alike) to share their expertise, results and practical know-how with others.

It’s invitation-only, so contact Bill McCloskey (it’s his brainchild) to see if you would qualify for an invite.

Another public discussion community is the Email Marketers Club run by the delightful Tamara Gielen.

Twitter accounts

Recommending top Twitter accounts to follow is a hopeless task: there are so many good ones. I am annoyingly selective about who I follow, so most of those that I do are going to give you value for your time. Most of the resources mentioned in this post also have associated Twitter accounts.

Special shout outs to:

Andy Thorpe, Jordie van Rijn and Remy Bergsma: all master sharers of email links and insight. Also check the blogs associated with their accounts.

Some other names to watch for: top sharers and/or fountains of insight on Twitter and elsewhere:

• The Trendline Interactive team, e.g. Andrew Kordek
• The Inbox Group team, e.g. Scott Cohen
• The Red Pill Email team, e.g. John Caldwell and Shannon Holato
• Kath Pay, Scott Hardigree, Steve Henderson, Mia Papanicolaou, Spiro Malamoglou and don’t forget pretty much all the people who I follow.

Those getting started, particularly in small businesses

These are email marketing services whose blogs and other content is well suited to small business, often going well beyond email in the topics they address.

Michael Katz’s newsletter is the only one on this planet I find myself reading every issue, even if I don’t have the time to do so. How does he do that?

These ESPs are also well-tuned in to the needs of the smaller email sender:

• VerticalResponse
• AWeber
• GraphicMail
• GetResponse
• Benchmark Email
• Constant Contact

Bonus people

These are not all email focused, but a few other folk I’ve found struck a chord with me in one fashion or another.

• DJ Waldow, whose monumental enthusiasm and embracement of all things email and social is like having your own personal trainer.
• J-P De Clerck, whose prodigious content output is equally inspiring. More importantly, he has very independent, ethical and forward-thinking views on marketing online.
• Ken Magill, whose coverage of the industry reveals the incalculable value of style, personality and writing skills in creating reader loyalty.
• Jim Ducharme, a top sharer and a writer on email/social media issues with a heart and mind in the right place.
• Robin C Kennedy, the top commenter on this blog…many of his comments deserve their own post. Thanks Robin!
• Kevin Hillstrom, whose blog has taught me more about analysis and measuring the true value of email than I even knew I needed to know.

Author’s note: A couple of the people or organizations mentioned above are also sponsors or clients. A couple are former sponsors or clients. Many I’ve had personal contact with. Many don’t even know I exist. None have bought me a beer.

One or two have sent me t-shirts (I’m a sucker for t-shirts) or chocolate (ditto). All are listed solely on merit and my (inevitably subjective, UK and US-biased) evaluation. Please do add your resource suggestions below!

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email advertising basics

Having no life to speak of, I’ve been thinking about subject lines.

Much of the advice I read is pretty absolute. Like:

“You dare not put everything in capitals.”

Or:

“Only Satanists use long subject lines.”

But there are few absolute truths in life, and even rules have exceptions.

Shouldn’t use all capitals? Probably not, but it works for Overstock and the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

Keep it short? Agree. Well, keep it as short as possible without sacrificing on potential impact. That’s not the same thing.

See, for example, the work by Alchemy Worx on how longer subject lines can benefit click rates. As Simms Jenkins notes:

“We have clients where short and to-the-point subject lines…and others where lengthy subject lines tease you into reading the email and acting”

Any doubt about what works best FOR YOU is quickly dispelled with a simple A/B test. After all, you can’t argue with numbers, can you?

Unfortunately, that’s not an absolute truth either.

Test data is not hard to obtain. The tricky bit is the interpretation. And that’s where a lot of us go wrong.

So in the grand tradition of frizzy-haired 19th century scientists, I’m going to experiment on myself to reveal some of the problems you need to avoid.

What happens if you remove subject line branding?

Here’s a test I did with this site’s email newsletter.

The first 164 issues of that newsletter used a subject line that begins:

(Email Marketing Reports)…

The theory is that consistent subject line branding means people recognize the email in their inbox. Recognition is good (except when it’s bad).

So what happens if we remove that subject line branding? Place your bets now…

Here the results of an August A/B test (note that everything else about the email stayed the same):

Subject line 1: What YOU see versus what your readers see + how to get email attention
Open rate: 22.9%

Subject line 2: (Email Marketing Reports) What YOU see versus what your readers see + how to get email attention
Open rate: 21.8%

Given the size of the test samples, the small difference in open rate was not significant.

This echoes stats from MailerMailer, who aggregated results from emails with branded subject lines and compared them with those from campaigns without subject line branding.

They didn’t find much difference either.

But wait…

Now let’s see where I messed up and dig out some issues with my rather typical subject line test.

Open rates?

Let’s begin with the obvious one.

The newsletter seeks to drive traffic back to the website. So “opens” is not actually a major goal, just a means to a click. Let’s look instead at click rates:

Branding: 13.3%

No branding: 16.6%

This difference is significant.

Removing the branding increased the number of clicks through to the articles at my site. I might also look at pageviews generated, unsubscribes, spam complaints and other metrics to get an overview of the true impacts.

The trouble with using open rates as a judge is that subsequent metrics don’t always follow the same pattern. The winning subject line (based on clicks, sales etc.) does not always have the highest open rate.

It’s actually quite easy to write subject lines for high open rates. Segment by gender and send this to your male subscribers:

“Free beer as a thank you for subscribing”

You don’t want to do that?

Quite.

Open rates are rarely your goal. And, thing is, you have to offer the free beer.

You don’t want subject lines that lift interest and expectations, only to shatter them with the actual content. That trains people to distrust your future subject lines. Which is “not good”.

Your short-term open rate boost may not produce the same lift in actual responses. And it may hurt future responses, too.

That’s why “urgency” works best when used genuinely and intermittently. If every few days you send out a “30% off for two days only”, the value of that urgency is lost to anyone who has received more than a handful of those messages.

And that’s why subject line “tricks” need careful and intelligent application.

How many changes are you actually testing?

Here’s the next problem: was this test comparing a branded with a non-branded subject line?

No.

By removing the branding, the subject line also gets shorter.

So there are actually two changes at play here: branding and length. So what do we attribute the click benefits to?

Did the absence of branding get more people to take a second look to see what the email was about, rather than dismiss it as “another email from that marketing site”.

Or did the shorter subject line mean the actual information on the email’s contents was seen by more people?

Or was it a combination of both?

The ideal subject line test tells you something you can apply in the future. But many tests look like this:

“30% off new summer fashions” vs “SUMMER SALE 2 Days Only!”

The results reveal a winning subject line for a particular campaign, which is a legitimate and useful outcome. But they give little insight on what it was that made that subject line better.

If subject 2 wins, was it the capitalization, length, urgency, etc. that made the difference?

Without such insights, you have few lessons to apply to future emails.

Net changes disguise negative impacts

And there’s another big danger when more than one thing changes…

Suppose the removal of branding actually hurts results, but the shorter subject line more than compensates for it?

If I then conclude that non-branded subject lines work better, I’m missing out on an important insight: that branding actually helps. Perhaps the best subject is something like this:

(EMR) What YOU see versus what your readers see + how to get email attention

Now let’s make it even more complicated.

Different people may be responding in different ways:

• The presence of a branded subject line may boost results for some who like my emails: they recognize the email and open it
• It may hurt short-term results for some who like my emails: they recognize it and file it for later review (better long-term results)
• It may hurt results for some who are ambivalent about my emails: they recognize it and know there’s no special reason to open it
• It may have no effect on readers using a smartphone, who might focus much more on the from line anyway

Removing branding will see response move in different directions, depending on the recipient. We only see the net effect.

My recent thoughts on reactivation campaigns reflect the fact that subject line elements may have different impacts, depending on the recipient segment.

Novelty versus real effects

If my kids get green pasta, they will show more interest in the meal.

Is it because green pasta is inherently more interesting than any other color pasta? Or is it because it’s different to the yellow pasta they normally get?

Or both?

When you deviate from a regular pattern or approach in your subject line, there are two elements driving response changes.

The first is the impact of change itself: the novelty value.

The second is the fundamental impact of the change: what we might call the true impact.

Both can wear off or change with time, especially the first.

The novelty factor in email marketing means changes like removing the branding or all capitals need reevaluation in a later test to see if the results still hold. Are the results repeatable?

Tests need repeating at intervals anyway – especially if your audience, content, goals etc. have changed and you need to revisit assumptions about what works best.

And, of course, the short-term attention boost that novelty value can sometimes get you is a legitimate tactic in its own right.

Chad White, for example, talks about “wake-up slap” tactics in email design, where deviation from the usual grabs attention. A similar concept might apply to subject lines.

The wider environment

Subject lines don’t work in isolation. They are commonly viewed along with a from line and (often) snippet text, preheader text and/or a preview pane.

So the results of any subject line tests also depend on that context.

I removed the branding from the subject. But…the from line is “Email Marketing Reports” and the preview pane features the site logo and the words ‘”The Email Marketing Reports newsletter”.

So the overall reduction in “branding” and “recognition” is considerably less than if the from line and preview pane didn’t also feature branding.

In the latter scenario, removing the branding might have hurt responses or lifted spam complaints as people had no clue who the email was from.

OK, let’s stop there as you simply must not write more than 500-700 words in an online article if you want a response (another one of those absolute truths).

Love to hear any of your views on how to better do and interpret subject line tests…comment below or on Google+

Find related articles:

• Channel: Subject lines

A lot of email marketing “best practices” aim to get subscribers to salivate when you ring the bell.

The bell, in this case, is made up of those recognition elements that tell the casual inbox browser that this email is from YOU.

They alert the reader to the promised treasures within your message.

So we use a consistent, recognizable sender name.

We feature brand names in subject lines.

We put our logo up top left, so it stands out in preview panes.

We use brand colors and work with a common design template. We paste up samples on our sign-up pages. Etc. etc.

Recognition leads to attention to interest to response.

Yay!

I’m all for this, but it does make one huge assumption: that people are interested in what you deliver.

The bad news is, many are not (check your response rates for proof).

When conditioning goes wrong

Here’s a disturbing theory…

For those who are no longer terribly interested in your messages, the ringing bell has the opposite of the desired effect: it tells them they can safely ignore your message. You have trained them not to pay immediate attention.

All the effort you put into conditioning readers to recognize your communications backfires when they’ve decided your emails are not worth their time.

But why should you care?

If they don’t like your emails anyway, it surely doesn’t matter if they ignore them?

Well, conditioning becomes very important when trying to win back or reactivate subscribers. Conditioning means most of these well-intentioned efforts are doomed to failure.

The problem with reactivation campaigns

Here are three scenarios where you want to reach those unenthusiastic recipients:

1. You’ve identified genuinely inactive subscribers: they don’t open or click and you’re pretty sure the steady stream of emails from you is not causing them to respond elsewhere either.

You’ve also identified why they might have gone inactive and taken action to ensure future emails would keep them in the fold.

2. Your emails never got too much organizational love, but now you’ve revamped your content and offers.

3. You had a few lazy weeks/months when you coasted a little and let standards slip. But now the email specialist is back from sick leave and you can return to your usual high standard.

We want to give those unenthusiasts a reason to take a new look at your emails: a “reactivation campaign”. Not a new concept by any means.

Most advice on such reactivation efforts focuses on sending a standout offer or a clever subject line. If our theory is correct, they shouldn’t work very well.

Why?

Because the emails carrying this offer or subject line still ring the bell that tells people “here comes another one of those emails we get little value from”.

So, do typical reactivation campaigns work?

Here’s what noted email expert Loren McDonald says:

Many marketers tell me their reactivation programs bring only 1% to 2% of their inactives back from the dead. Some are more successful, others less so. (My query on Twitter generated responses of 0.91%, 1.82% and 3.2% reactivation rates.)

One lesson, suggests Loren, is that we should work harder to stop people going inactive in the first place.

But what can we do when it’s too late? As I’ve asked elsewhere:

You’ve trained people not to pay attention, so how do you prove that you deserve that attention with your special reactivation offer or improved email program?

Untraining the trained

If recognition and familiarity actually work against us, should we then try the opposite of what we normally do?

Should we try some of the things we’d never (or rarely) consider doing if we were mailing active subscribers?

And that’s the point. If we’re mailing people who are not responding to normal emails, then:

1. There is little risk from trying something markedly different: the worst that can happen is they continue not to respond.

2. If “best practice” (like a branded subject line) is supporting the habits these inactive readers have formed with your emails, then they are hurting your results, not helping. They are best practice for active subscribers, but not necessarily for inactive ones.

So what counts as doing things differently?

Well, this is still all theory, but what do you think of one or more of these:

• Send a plain text email or drop your logo down out of the preview pane
• Change frequency dramatically, reducing it considerably or increasing it considerably
• Change the friendly from name
• Take branding out of the subject line
• Scrap your usual template and go for a single big image
• Send your email(s) at a different time of day/week/month

If you reaction to any of these is “but doing this is not a best practice so won’t work as well”, remember that you are not mailing active subscribers. It cannot actually work any worse.

For example, altering your friendly from line is generally considered a bad practice.

Here’s what I said just last month:

The from line should normally be the name most familiar to the recipient.

So my newsletter, for example, comes from “Email Marketing Reports”.

After all, a lot of people have real or mental filters in place to sort email by sender, and you’re going to break those filters.

But that’s a feature, not a bug, when it comes to inactive subscribers, no?

These people might be using the from name to identify the email they’ve decided isn’t worth their time. Might a from line that is new get at least some people to give the email a second look?

Now there are four provisos I’d throw in with this theory:

1. Different practices does not mean bad practices. Plain text email is not per se a bad practice. Using a deceptive from and subject line is. We shouldn’t do anything plain silly, unethical or illegal (obviously).

2. It’s a second look you’re going for, so people are alerted to the (new) value of your emails. But you cannot abandon recognition elements entirely.

People still need to know it’s from you so they can look out for your future, normal emails. And if they don’t know it’s from you, you run the risk of spam complaints from people who think you mailed them without their permission.

3. This is all largely theory. I’ve only tested the idea of removing subject line branding (I’ll reveal the results in another post). I wouldn’t try any of the suggestions without running a test first.

4. Any success you have reactivating subscribers is largely a waste of time if you haven’t addressed the reason they went inactive. Otherwise they’ll simply go inactive again.

So, what do you think? Does this counterintuitive approach make sense?

Have you tried any of these reactivation techniques yourself? Let me know in the comments…

Find related articles:

• Channel: Reactivation

Confession time: I only own one mobile phone and one laptop. And neither is made by Apple.

I believe this makes me uncool at best and “old and uncool” at worst (or so my kids tell me).

With all the talk about mobile email, how nice it would be to see how emails look on the various devices and systems out there.

Step forward design preview tools, like those offered by Litmus, EmailReach, Return Path and others.

But how about looking over someone’s shoulder as they fiddle with a mobile inbox?

Step forward YouTube.

Video reviews of new phones and tablets often contain detailed coverage of the device’s email application. So if you want to see email on an iPad 2 or a BlackBerry Bold or an HTC Sensation, videos are a slightly cheaper alternative to the real thing.

Here are videos for some of the newer mobile devices. They bring home some key lessons across mobile email, like:

• Just how important will the from line become? Sometimes that’s often the only thing that really stands out in the inbox
• Look at how big those fingers appear. Are your links large enough and discrete enough to allow easy touchscreen clicking? Can people scroll, pinch etc. without inadvertently triggering a click?
• Inbox previews: watch the HTC Sensation video. What text will show up there for your emails?

What lessons do you take away?

iPad 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTGwaE8sKwE

Blackberry PlayBook

iPhone 4

BlackBerry Bold 9900

Samsung Droid Charge

HTC Sensation

Find related articles:

• Channel: Mobile email design

Removing attention barriers is important: it gets you…um…attention, which has its own benefits (like the nudge effect).

But if you want more direct email action, don’t lose sight of the foundation behind most email-related response: the core value you offer.

Do we lose sight of value’s role? Yes.

What you see when you look at your email:

 
 
What your readers see:

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email strategy