The  question "How do I write effective subject lines?" with all its variants is the No1 FAQ in email marketing, despite the fact that subject lines are probably the most frequently A/B tested variables in email marketing. Most email marketers A/B split test subject lines on a regular basis so why hasn't anyone come up with the answer yet?

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I think it's because most email marketing departments do not have enough resource to test more than 2 or 3 subject lines at a time. At that rate it could take several years to gather enough results to develop a truly effective methodology for subject line writing. Which leaves no other option but to keep A/B split testing.

But relying on relying on A/B split testing to tell you which of the 2, 3 or more subject lines you come up with is like expecting someone to give you a fish every day for the rest of your life. we think it's time to learn to fish; so we're launching a unique new research project.

Our aim is to conduct the first ever subject line study to evaluate the impact on ROI of language - grammar, syntax and word choice. In association with digital copywriting agency Sticky Content, we're analysing the results of hundreds of subject line split-tests conducted by us and participating clients over the last 18 months to find answers to such questions as:

• Which work better in subject lines - questions or instructions?
• What are the most effective words to use in subject lines - and what are the words to avoid?
• Does mentioning your brand name in a subject line really make a difference?
• Does personalisation in the subject lines improve performance?

Send us your subject lines - get a FREE advance report

Have you run A/B subject line tests in the last 18 months? If so, we would like to invite you to pool your test data with ours to create the largest collaborative subject line study ever run (and get a free copy advance copy).

Send us your subject line test results by Friday 2nd July and get a free advance copy of our whitepaper.

Find out more >>

 

They say curiosity killed the cat. Apparently, no one is saying that loudly enough to stop consumers around the globe from clicking on spam.

Nearly half (43%) of email users in North America and Western Europe say they have knowingly opened or accessed spam – including clicking on links or opening unknown and potentially dangerous attachments, according to a new global consumer survey  from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG).  Of those who open spam, about half (46%) did so intentionally – to unsubscribe, out of curiosity or out of genuine interest in the products being offered.  This is consistent with findings from the same study’s 2009, but not an increase in such behavior.

The  2010 MAAWG ‘Email Security Awareness and Usage Report’ was released yesterday (March 24, 2010).   Consumers were surveyed in North America and across Western Europe with a variety of questions from computer expertise and savvy, to their preferences of email.

Several of the findings are both shocking and disturbing.  Consumers seem generally unaware of the consequences of their actions, and a painful percentage continue to click on spam, knowingly, instead of deleting it immediately. Such actions help explain the gargantuan increase in botnet presence on the Internet and zombie’d computers continue to steal millions of bits of personal and confidential business information as a result.

Clearly, we as an industry have an opportunity to do more education for end users of email.  Several of us at Return Path will be working with the good folks at MAAWG and other industry associations to develop programs that we hope can be embraced by marketers as well as mailbox providers and anti-spam professionals.  We'll keep everyone informed of ways to participate.

In other findings, four out of ten users responding to the survey do click the report spam button (39%) or move spam to their junk folder (44%).   One in five say they report the message to the sender, if it’s recognized as a legitimate company.   These findings are pretty consistent between North America and Western Europe.  Younger users both consider themselves more experienced in terms of email security, but also more likely to engage in risky behavior like clicking on spam. 

Marketers know full well the pressure on response rates from the excess clutter in the inbox.   However, users who responded to the survey say that they use the senders’ name (73%) and the subject line (67%) to identify spam in the inbox.    Respondents also say that unusual language, the content of the email, the “from” name or address, and spelling mistakes and poor grammar are signs that an email may be spam.  This is true in all six countries included in the survey, although respondents in Spain and France are less likely to rely on these factors.

Email marketing is still a great opportunity and users surveyed do find marketing messages valuable.  They are just not as welcome as other kinds of personal email.  When asked about what various types of email they prefer, one-to-one communications still rule the roost. Messages from friends and family were ranked as ‘extremely or very important’ to 82% of respondents, but marketing email was only rated similarly by 15% of those surveyed.  Another 32% did view marketing mail as ‘somewhat important’.

Consider these findings in context with our shared goals:  To ensure that valued messages reach the inbox and unwelcome messages – especially the dangerous ones – do not.   Marketers, email service and technology providers, mailbox providers and security vendors all share this goal.

Please take a look at the full survey, and share your reactions and thoughts in the comments section below.

(Thanks to Neil Schwartzman of Return Path for his co-authorship of this post!)

The preference center is a highly intriguing, untapped resource for Email Marketers and could be used in a variety of ways.  It has the potential to establish critical ground rules with both newfound and dormant subscribers.  When subscribers are awarded mission control to continuously manage their preferences, the amount of information that marketers can glean is truly unlimited.  During last week’s Email Insider Summit, Greg Cangialosi spoke about a “master preference center” which, in essence, puts the subscriber in complete control of different online messaging streams.  Additionally, subscribers would be able to divulge their social media and mobile credentials within the preference center.   By adding social media and mobile to the preference center, users garner an added benefit: they can proactively engage with your subscribers within the “online” marketing channel they prefer.  As Jeannie Mullen points out in her recent Web 3.0 column, subscribers now receive emails through a plethora of online channels. Optimizing the preference center will make for a more satisfying subscriber experience.

Balanced Online Messaging

When it comes to email, we understand the basics. How often do you, the user, wish to receive emails?  What email format do you prefer? However, to get to the next level of online messaging, we need to move beyond basic queries and product of interest questions.  The key to reaching the next level lies in adhering to your subscribers’ wishes and preserving a “balance of online messaging.”  To achieve the goal of balanced messaging, give subscribers social media and mobile preferences as well.  For example, subscribers may prefer to utilize Twitter for customer service inquiries, while other subscribers may choose to receive more “entertaining” messaging via Facebook.  I envision a preference center design, where subscribers can populate a matrix of radio buttons or checkboxes and choose the type of messaging and preferred online channel.  Tweetdeck's latest version is a good example, where the "notifications" tab allows clients to choose the level of detail on each type of message stream.  Perhaps in the future, we'll see more formal messaging dispatched through email instead, which underscores why the vision of a master preference center is so significant.    We’ve learned that subscribers engage with brands through various different online and mobile channels.  Engaging them through their preferred method will pique their interest and ultimately entice them to orbit your brand successfully.

Mini Surveys in the Preference Center

If we continue to explore the potential of a well-structured preference center, we will discover a way that marketers can induce a higher level of participation, intimacy and engagement.  To do this, marketers can devise a “mini survey” (just one or two questions) that updates regularly with relevant and timely questions.  The survey would be integrated into preference center itself.  By adding a mini survey to poll your subscribers, you’ll increase the attributes for a given record in a database, and thereby allow future messaging that is more detailed relevant to your subscribers’ needs and interests.  We learned last week that FedEx has 144 attributes associated with each subscriber.  FedEx utilizes this wealth of information to tailor their marketing to the needs of individual subscribers, which will increase intimacy and engagement.

When your subscribers develop their profiles via the "mini survey," they become "active" subscribers.  In doing so, they give you permission to ameliorate their experience with you even more.  By asking leading questions that will result in a more profound relationship, you will allow your subscribers to modify their behavior and attain a greater degree of engagement with your brand.  Leading questions can invoke a higher level of brand awareness, and the use of time sensitive questions will enable you to increase that level of engagement with your brand sooner rather than later.  For instance, pose questions such as, "How likely are you to purchase from us the holiday season?"  Or, something along the lines of "Do you anticipate making a purchase from use within the next 90 days?"  (Make sure to phrase questions in a sensitive manner, so that they will not alienate your subscribers!)  Questions like these effectively create a sense of urgency and may give you greater insight as to what types of promotions you can successfully "initiate" with each active subscriber.  

Detailed Information: A Prerequisite for Customized, Detailed Messaging

Now, if a newly active subscriber has been dormant since immediately after answering your leading questions, you should take steps to re-engage that subscriber.  When this situation arises, you have a valid excuse to send a re-engaging or “reminder” email with a single survey question that will lead the subscriber to a preference center landing page, without necessarily prompting a smattering of complaints.  A strategy you might consider is utilizing  the preference center as the landing page of choice when formulating re-engagement campaigns. In that case, installing follow up questions there can help you in your mission to engage subscribers.  Using these methods should significantly reduce your spam complaints in the event that the subscriber chooses to end your relationship.

Inevitably, preference centers will get more sophisticated over time, and as Morgan Stewart of ExactTarget quoted Amazon’s chief scientist, who opined, “The future of marketing is based on how we enhance the digital experience of a subscriber and provide more detailed messaging by asking the subscriber for more detailed information.”  You may wonder, “How can I ask my subscribers for more detailed information without seeming intrusive and drawing spam complaints?”  If that is your question, preference centers hold the key to a successful mission with your subscribers. 

 Fred Tabsharani

 Port25 Solutions, Inc.

@tabsharani

Popular opinion states that an unopened email means your subscriber is disengaged and uninterested in making a purchase - we disagree. Unopened email communications have a tangible impact on brand awareness and can lead to purchase activity across all channels.

How? That's the subject of an article in published the latest edition of Email-Worx our weekly newsletter, on the phenomenon known as the Nudge Effect.  At Alchemy Worx we have spent the last 12 months or so looking at what we as email marketers can learn from behavioural economic theory in general and more specifically how behavioural architectural techniques – the Nudge Effect can be utilized to drive sales both on and offline.  

What is the Nudge Effect?

Essentially it's a way of influencing people's behaviour without telling them specifically what to do. You may be frustrated with unopened emails and low click-through rates, but be reassured that even if your subscribers don't open your email, its presence in their inbox leads to a tangible impact on brand awareness and sales via online and other channels.

The complete article which includes a short video clip is definitely worth a read and covers the following:

• Why the Nudge Effect works for email marketers
• How to make an unopened email sell
• How to optimize your emails for the Nudge effect
• How to tell if your unopened emails are impacting sales or conversions in other channels

Find out how to create emails that sell - whether they are opened or not.

Additional research

For an amusing and thought provoking insight into how the Nudge Effect works in daily life, watch this video from the entertainer and master of suggestion, Derren Brown.

You can also learn more about the Nudge Effect from the book that explored it in detail - Nudge: Improving Decisions About, Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Recently I’ve had occasion to do a fair bit of testing to see which mobile email client has the sexiest email rendering out there. After staring at lots and lots of screenshots through our eDesign Optimizer and tracking the prevalence of these mobile clients via our new MailboxIQ I think I’ve narrowed it down to a triumvirate: iPhone (so far the leader among the three), Palm Pre & Google Android. As a matter of fact I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the latter two devices rendered as beautifully as the iPhone, which I always assumed, was light years ahead of the competition.
   
After looking a little closer and somewhat under the hood it’s become clear that these rendering heavyweights have something in common: they are all using the Webkit Open Source browser engine. What’s Webkit? It’s the stuff that gives Safari its mo-jo and makes us go ooooooh and aaaaaah when we stare at emails on our smart phones.

Although the phones mentioned here all share a common rendering engine not everything is 100% identical. Let’s talk about some of the differences to better understand what’s going on here…

The Palm Pre has come the furthest—the evolution between the Garnet and the Pre could be thought of as a quantum leap. The previous device’s native mobile email client had limited HTML support that wouldn’t even render nested tables properly and had no support for CSS. The new model is a leap forward with really gorgeous rendering which reproduces email as your design department intended it to be seen regardless of the smaller screen. In addition there’s wide support for CSS and a cool feature that highlights subject lines on a blue background.

The Google Android phone has a few characteristics that make it seem like it’s trying to bridge the gap between the mobile and web/desktop email client world by choosing to incorporate an option to enable images. An onscreen button is displayed when email with images arrives prompting the user to take an action in order to enable and render the images.

One other nuance with the Android phone is the default size of rendered emails: Unlike the iPhone & Pre—which resize emails to fit the screen and effectively shrinks them down—the Android phone enables a left to right scroll bar for emails that may have formatting that exceeds the viewable screen size. What does this mean for marketers? Well, I think the same advice we’ve been giving out on how to handle preview panes applies, here, keep your branding and calls to action high up and to the left so that they don’t appear “off” the screen. 

A recent report from Gartner predicts that Symbian (the current world-leading OS) and Android will be the number 1 and number 2 market leaders by 2012. This is going to be an interesting race to watch as the speed of innovation and diversity in terms of handsets is like nothing else email marketers have ever had to deal with before—although there are numerous laptops out there, you can hardly tell them apart, but that is far from the case with mobile handsets and operating systems.

Although there seems to be a bit of convergence happening in terms of how these handsets are rendering emails, the details and capabilities are distinct enough to make consumers really have to think about what kind of capabilities they want out of their smart phones. The key takeaway is this: the smart phone is moving full-steam ahead and our future as marketers will definitely be tied to the “smaller” screen.

By Len Shneyder
Director of Partner Relations & Industry Communications | Pivotal Veracity

This report, based on Pivotal Veracity’s meetings with top ISPs, provides an overview of  the ISPs moving to domain-based reputation, their authentication plans, and critical insights and changes to white listing, volume throttles, and use of clicks and opens in filtering algorithms.

Its now available for download from their site (free, no registration required)

Key Take-Aways:

• Reputation is and will remain of your own doing & not that purchased from a 3rd party! Reputation is still within your control and will remain so. You do not need to pay someone to have a good reputation (nor will it do any good) and paying someone won’t save you from a bad one. Almost universally, your reputation is driven by Spam Complaints, Unknown User Rates, and Spam Trap/ Honey Pot Rates (mailing to old expired addresses). 
• 

Domain-based Reputation is here! A number of top ISPs including Yahoo & AOL are moving to augment IP-based reputation systems with portable Domain-based reputation systems for those mailers using DK/DKIM authentication.  This is a hugely important development and one that will be welcomed by legitimate mailers. This means, ISPs will “attach” (compute) your Spam Complaint Rate, Unknown User Rate, and Spam Trap Rates to your Domain (this will be the domain you are authenticating which for most mailers will be the friendly from domain)  in addition to your IP.   Switching IP addresses? With domain-based reputation ..you get to keep (for good or bad) your reputation. 

• Authenticate with DK/DKIM! With the exception of Hotmail which is still sticking to its proprietary “Sender ID” authentication model, the authentication method of choice by all the other leading ISPs is DK/DKIM.  If you are not already ..authenticate !  You need to authenticate in order to take advantage of domain-based reputation and other ISP services such as Yahoo’s feedback loop.  You’ll find extensive resources on authentication within the Pivotal Veracity knowledge base.

-Dennis
Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

Not to big of a surprise in terms of a stat headline, but Return Path today released a new Email Deliverability Benchmark Report that shows marketers may not be still not getting it or that some just can't get a break no matter what they do right.

Return Path looked at more than 500,000 campaigns to determine what percentage of email is delivered to the inbox versus being diverted to the bulk folder or completely undelivered/blocked/dropped.  What's interesting in this report is that they also reveal that MSN, Hotmail, and Gmail Are The Toughest U.S. consumer inboxes to reach for marketers and Primus.ca, Shaw, Aliant, SaskTel, and Inter.net in Canada.

Commercial, permissioned emails reached only 79.3% of inboxes in the United States and Canada during the first half of 2009 (January through June), according to the report. With the undelivered email, 3.3% is routed to a "junk" or "bulk" email folder and 17.4% is not delivered at all - with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery.

Hey Matt Verhout! The US deliverability rates are slightly better than Canada with an average of 82% inbox placement rate, while Canada's inbox placement rates are lower with just 75%. :P

As I said in the beginning though I wasn't surprised by some of the stats in this report i.e. Business Inboxes are even tougher to reach or Deliverability rates vary by ISP. As they said in their report and that many should already know today is each ISP has a unique recipe for determining what is appropriate for inbox placement, much of which is based on feedback they get from their customers. Understanding deliverability at this granular level is important for marketers who want to optimize their email marketing efforts.

As my good friend Sam Masiello just twittered. "Goes to show that permission is not necessarily king. Content and relevancy are still key factors to good deliverability metrics"

You can read more here on Return Path's blog as well

-Dennis

Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

Wow, we really will buy anything that is one to a customer...

I had the pleasure of working on a study (beware large file) that was just released today by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working group (MAAWG) titled, "A Look at Consumers' Awareness of Email Security and Practices" which includes graphs, detailed findings and analysis. The report is free.

MAAWG's press release

I, like many others reading this report or who helped create it, was SURPRISED at the outcome of what some people will do when they get an email. Eight hundred (800) consumers in the U.S. and Canada were asked about their computer security practices habits as well as awareness of current security issues.

A few highlights:

• 48% said that they have never clicked on a spam email (doesn't that means the other half has clicked on or responded to spam?)
  
• 1/3 said that they were interested in the product or service being offered and admitted to responding to a message they knew was spam (WOW - that's 1 in 6!)  
• 17% said that they made a mistake when they responded
• 13% said they simply had no idea why they did it (anything that is one to a customer perhaps?)
• 6% wanted to see what would happen
• between the ages of 24 and 44 are more likely to use email for banking and bill statements (my always right wife and I do)
• 80% of users doubted their computers were at risk of ever being infected with a "bot" 
• 2/3's of the 800 polled felt they were somewhat experienced in Internet security. RIGHT!... not by what I read :)

So as many have already noticed, the number of people who still respond to spam is scary because it's an economic incentive to spam per this report. I can't imagine me wanting to respond to the crap in my junk folder just from today!

Take some time to read how people use email today. Down the file and find yourself a nice quiet corner. Let us know your thoughts about this or if you dare let us know if you have ever responded to a spam message.

-Dennis

Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

One of the key points in the report that’s worth thinking about is that people still have misconceptions about their true delivery rates; don’t account for blackholing and junk foldering in calculating the delivery metric. Is that their ESP giving them that mis-notion? or that companies are just still batching and blasting and not caring about their metrics?

The complete Goodmail/Pivotal Veracity Q1 2009 Email Deliverability Benchmarks report is available for complimentary download at http://www.goodmail.com

Twenty Percent (20%) of Business-to-Consumer Messages to Qualified Email Addresses Don’t Get Delivered

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. & PHEONIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Goodmail Systems, the creator of CertifiedEmail™ and CertifiedVideo™, and Pivotal Veracity, the industry leader in cross-platform email deliverability and optimization solutions, today released co-authored research that found 20 percent of legitimate marketers’ email messages were routed to spam folders or blocked entirely in the first quarter of 2009. Five percent of messages were found in spam folders, with even more – 15 percent – unaccounted for.

“Deliverability remains a major barrier to email marketing success. A study we conducted with Forrester Research last year found that fifty-two percent of marketers called deliverability one of their top five challenges,” said Peter Horan, CEO of Goodmail. “This data confirms that their concern is justified – legitimate marketers across a variety of industries, even those who adhere to best practices and follow the law, suffer widespread junk folder placement and instances of missing or blocked email.”

--MORE--

http://www.businesswire.com

-Dennis

Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

I have just read yet another prediction of the death of email. Mostly I just ignore them, but today’s eMarketer Daily with the subject line: Social Nets and Blogs More Popular Than E-Mails is so shocking in its (mis)use of research and gratuitous brownnosing of social networking; that I felt forced to respond immediately.

The article begins as follows: “In the US and several other countries, more people use social networks and blogs than use e-mail. Does that mean the days of e-mail as an effective marketing tool are numbered?”

WHAT? More people use social networks and blogs than use e-mail!!!

My BS meter sprang into life immediately - for starters it is impossible to sign up for any blog or social network without an email address. Then you have to factor in the fact that all social networks and blogs etc. use email to reach the people (most people in the world) who DON’T spend every minute of every day reading blogs or their Facebook page.

So how can there be more users of Social media than email?
  
I decided to take a closer look. The article is based on a piece of research by Nielson entitled Global Faces and Networked Places and shows a chart as evidence of this staggering claim.

I found that the research:

-         does NOT claim that more people USE Member communities than email
-         does not define active reach
-         does not define email
-         does not equate active reach with unique users
-         shows that email use is growing faster than search

Even if “active reach” was a measure of the number of unique users does anyone truly believe software manufacturers sites are more popular than all social networking sites and blogs put together?

Apart from that, what I find most irritating is how lazy commentators become when they see something that panders to their emotional beliefs; especially when it comes to the flavour of the month!

To quote Warren Buffet “it's wonderful to promote new industries because they are very promotable. It’s hard to promote investment in a mundane product. It's much easier to promote an esoteric product, even particularly one [that doesn’t make money], because there is no quantitative guideline.”

Dela Quist
CEO Alchemy Worx
The Email Marketing Agency

George Bilbrey over at ReturnPath blogged about a new white paper published on the conversion and delivery rates of three symbolic spam campaigns. Since he always has great insight to the analytical nature of email, I had to read it.

Disclaimer: this is a very technical and empirical overview of the lower level protocols measured when sending email. You could probably just skip to the conclusion if you want to bypass the framework of the experiment and get to the point, although I would highly suggest reading the entire paper to spur ideas on how we in the email industry can measure the affect of spam on our email at ISPs. While none of us reading this blog presumably send blatant spam, we are directly impacted by the defenses ISPs put up and constantly change to thwart new spam attack vectors. This directly impacts email deliverability.

A few thoughts:

• The team who executed this test explained how their approach was ethical. By only acting as a proxy, not originating any new spam email (but rather capturing mail already in flight) and rewriting URLs to be benign, they side stepped a potentially dangerous situation. From my experience, granted it's nothing compared to the researchers who have a lot more education than me, punishing recipients or introducing a punitive bias doesn't work in the business world. It just pisses people off if and when they find themselves at the receiving end of an experiment they didn't opt in to and can run afoul of the law in this case.



• No authentication was tested as an additional variable to the spam delivery rates. It would be interesting to see how the presence of DK/DKIM/SPF/SID would affect this.



• No open rates were measured. It would seem that if links could be rewritten in the message body, spacer images could be inserted to indicate an upper bound of emails being rendered on client email programs.



• The CBL (Composite Blocking List) was heavily monitored during the time frame to see when blacklisting occurred and at what rate. It would be interesting to measure other RBLs as well to show the efficacy of one v. another.



• Finally, the presumption that the TLD (or ending extension of the recipient's email address such as .au or .com) shows where the recipient is actually located is a bit limiting. I'm not sure how you could avoid this, other than some sort of geo IP mapping with the calling IPs for links/images, but there are definitely recipients who get an email address at one regional ISP but take that with them when they move to another region. For instance, in my experience with EU addresses, there is a tendency for recipients to get a .com (usually US) address regardless of where they are located. Although a small segment, this would directly correlate to the causation of the spam education affecting lower spam conversion.

Net of the paper is that while spam might be a revenue generator, the amount of profit derived from the spam campaigns tested (pharmacy, post card and April Fools) is driven down by the amount of expenses associated with keeping an email infrastructure in place. The cost of hosting bad domains over a period of time and setting up/maintaining alternate routes of detection is considerable.

This is good news for legitimate senders in that spam doesn't directly cause one to become rich and thus decreases the appeal to entering into the business in the first place. Or at least I hope.

Everything you read and hear about in today's marketplace is how bad the economy is.  People are getting laid off, revenue  and profit forecasts are dwindling and of course, marketing budgets are shrinking.   Many executives will now look at more cost effective ways to interrupt the consumer with marketing messages and one of the mediums will be email marketing.  Email marketing is looked at by many as cost effective with a potential for a high rate of return, so there will be an inevitable push by many in organizations to either start emailing or ramp up to do more email.

The other day, I was in my local coffee shop and I overheard one person was talking to another about how her boss came to her and said something about wanting to do email marketing.  He told her that he wanted her to research how they can get their customers email address so that they can start to send email to them to tell them about there products.  She was complaining that she had no idea what he was talking about since she was only in IT and she didn't know how she would find the time to figure out how to get emails and then send out emails along with doing her full time job.

Then, the other day as I was driving home I heard a radio spot on a local station from a well known ESP touting that email marketing was the next biggest thing and that companies should try their solution risk free for 30 days to see what the results are.  All I kept thinking during this spot is that the fact the email marketing is being touted as a near free, easy and out of the box thing for companies big and small to engage in.

Rather than pontificate in this post about the value of email and how companies should be engaged in doing email the only thing I can say is that I think we are staring at a glorious mountain here.  People are going to look for cheaper ways to communicate with their customers and email will be one of the ways for them to do so.  As a person that has been on the client side of email for 8 years, I am here to help and offer advice anyway I can.  When I don't know something or want to learn, I reach out to those that know more than me to be that sponge to do it right rather than cobble it together.

If you are an email professional, take a pledge with me.  Take a pledge to help those who want to get started in email and do so in some cases without the thought of financial gain.  By doing so, we can make our industry do great things and we as a community of professionals can hold our head high in knowing that we care enough about what we do to spread the gospel of good email practices.

Lets be the Jedi's of email and take as many paduan's on as we can.

Bill McCloskey from Email Data Source has released a video demoing their new Search feature. It lets you search over their large database of email marketing from top brands, online retailers, and online marketers. The focus of the tool is on seeing what your competitors are sending and who they are working with. It looks like a very useful tool at a reasonable price of $3,500 year.

(click here for the full screen version)

A few suggestions Bill... how about giving us some CHARTS? Every screen of the demo looks the same - big lists of email messages. Also, I wouldn't necessarily agree with your comment that you can identify effective, best practices just by watching what everyone else does a lot of - lots of big brands do stupid things in their emails! Finally, let me sign up to get a weekly report by email so that I don't have to log in and run searches.

Still, it's a great product that fills an important need. Don't send email with your head in the sand. Open your eyes and pay attention to what your competitors, your partners and your industry is up to.

Having an interesting conversation with a close work colleague who stated that a particular companies email's were more focused within in the content towards B2C than it was B2B?

Is there REALLY a difference in how you create/generate the HTML of an email to reflect whether it's a B2C email or B2B targeted email? I know the relevancy of the message might be different, but the coding of it? Colours? Images? Buttons?

I'm thinking that either has to win the end user over to make them perform a certain action?

Would love your thoughts.

-Dennis
Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

I recently wrote a whitepaper for the Email Experience Council (EEC) with some GREAT contributions from Michelle Eichner of Pivotal Veracity, Andy Goldman of Ogilvy, John Alessi of SocketLabs, Tim Chase of Goodmail Systems, Chris Harris of Blackbaud, Stephanie Miller of Return Path, and Aaron Smith of Smith-Harmon on How to Revive a Stale Email List And Why You Should Avoid "Soft Touch" List Cleaning Services. I did this based on a question that was raised on a call where a certain college, who is a major sender of email, wanted to use a list that hadn't been touched in OVER two (2) years.

In this paper we discuss:

• Why and when the issue comes up
• The right way to re-active old subscribers
• Deal with subscriptions issues
• How to keep your list clean on-going
• Remove inactive or unemotionally subscribed
• Some warnings/problems about third party list cleaners

Check out the opening blog posting for the paper... http://blog.emailexperience.org/2008/08/how_to_revive_a_stale_email_li.html

Yes, you have to buy it unless you a member of the EEC, but hey...what's $49.00 for a paper compared to 20o miLLion EMaiL ADDRESS oN a Cd for $99?

-Dennis
Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

Sorry, this is a re-post. The original post broke an RSS feed and I had to remove the code.

yea, sort of a catch your eye Google alert huh?

So I had the pleasure about a month or more ago to attend a Returnpath event here in Dallas where you could gather fresh new ideas and learn how some of the smartest and most adventurous email marketers tackle today's biggest email challenge. They had people from imc2 and Crosstown Traders speak at the event to explain how some of their best common practices changes increased their bottom line.

Bonnie Malone Fry Director, Strategic Services and my newest friend in this fun industry, gave a presentation titled Differentiate or Die. In this presentation they talked about how Information overload can be real, which sort of links back to my Email Bankruptcy post about a week ago, and how we can learn some new bold new approaches to the same old marketing best practices.

She opened with some catchy stats:

• More than 3,000 new books are published every day
• There were 715 new magazines launched in 2007
• 827 movies are being released this year
• A week of The New York Times contains more information than a
• person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century

In this presentation she was basically trying to get all the marketing and email people at the event to think what can you do to stand out in this ago of information overload? Be Different she shouted... Don't do the same ole' thing...

Example:

ReturnPath said for users to turn their homepages into a capture form and the example they used was Barack Obama's home page. First-time visitors to Barack Obama's website see a simple homepage optimized for email capture. It includes a photo of the candidate and his family with the words "Join the movement" and a form field for email address and zip code. There's also a "Skip the sign up" button that takes you directly to the website without having to give an email address. The regular homepage has the email capture prominently displayed on the top left using the copy "Get involved" Aside from the prominence, which we at Return Path have been preaching for ages, the copy is good too. By using language that resonates with the Obama crowd – they increase the chances of getting sign ups. Remember, generic marketing copy never works well.  "Sign up now!" would fall flat, especially when marketing a campaign known for its soaring rhetoric.

I don't want to give all the content away of the seminar's, but I can say I know ReturnPath is on the right track here.

Take a look at:

1. How your capturing information as stated in the example above.
2. Are you writing to much into your bulk emails to people? As ReturnPath said, Less CAN be MORE. Don't force people to move your email to the read
3. later folder.
4. Do something different in your marketing. Free shipping is old news. Give a class or something on products or services.
5. Are customers actually seeing the relevancy they expect in your newsletter? Is this one to one messaging. Take the segmentation a step further. Presumably if you know what shoe they bought, you also know whether or not they are a guy or a girl. Sending separate men’s and women’s versions of shoe marketing can help. You can even hit them up when a certain style of shoe is going out of style and they might want to stock up on that version in case they liked it.

-Dennis
Eloqua

Don't just send, Deliver!

Julie Katz from Forrester Research just released a report titled, "The Secret to Email Deliverability."

"Ensuring that email messages make it to the inbox continues to be a critical challenge for email marketers, particularly as spam volumes increase and Internet service providers (ISPs) change their guidelines for which messages get delivered. Marketers who follow email marketing best practices have a better chance of getting their messages to the right place, especially if they also embrace basic deliverability tools, analyze the return on investment (ROI) of their delivery efforts, and take a handson approach to deliverability management. Forrester also expects that email delivery will become less troubling as reputation management improves."

But don't let the catchy title fool you - it really should be titled, "The Basics of Email Deliverability." This 4 page report provides a high level overview of the most common best practices around building your list, personalizing content and frequency for each subscriber, and list hygiene.

This would be useful for someone who is brand new to email marketing and wanted to get an idea where to start. It could also be helpful to show to an executive who knows nothing about email as a justification for why you want to hire an email service provider.

If you can't afford to pay $279 for a 4 page report, you might want to look at ReturnPath's free white papers.