In last week’s newsletter, Jeanniey confessed that she’s no deployment expert: “I am notorious for sending emails with typos, links that don’t work, image hosting paths that only work on my PC, messing up segments and more.” She shared her favorite oopsy and said that the mistakes that she’s made have all taught her phenomenal lessons. And then she asked if anyone had a “disastrous email story” to share—and many brave souls stepped forward to share their lesson-learned.

My two-cents on this is that mistakes in emails are difficult to avoid because of the complexity of the medium and volume involved. All you can do is try your best and learn from your mistakes—and the mistakes of others. That’s why I started the Oopsy Hall of Fame (I’ll be inducting the 2007 class in January). It allows marketers to see what kinds of mistakes are prevalent and try to avoid repeating them. It also touches on apologies—when they need to be made and when they don’t. I also just recently did a post on apology emails after I heard David Baker say that apology emails have higher open rates than even welcome emails.

Anyway, without further delay, here are the oopsies that our subscribers shared with us.

—Chad White

You are definitely not the only one! I have an arsenal of ‘oops’ but I’ll share my favorite of all time. I was adding the physical mailing address and associated contact details to the bottom of an email for a B2B campaign. The phone number I needed to add was spelled out and as I was translating the letters to numbers by looking at my phone and using my keyboard (forgetting that the layout of the numbers are different) – I inadvertently transposed two numbers. The correct number would have pointed someone to a help desk for product support; the incorrect number pointed to a phone sex line. There were only a few reports of people actually calling that number. I believe one was a CEO.

Naturally, I learned from this and physically dial all of the phone numbers on anything I ever send out! (And I learned that phone sex lines are not limited to 900 numbers!)

—Amy Gabriel, BT

We develop our clients’ newsletters on a development server and then switch them to the live server before deployment. We have individual user names and passwords for the development server. We once sent out a “live” deployment to our client’s entire list from our development server, which means that everyone who received it would have been prompted for a user name and password before they could read the email! Oops!

—Jenni Fox, Miles Media Group

You are not the only one who sends email disasters! I work with volunteers and was sending an email to a large group to arrange a conference call, including several I had never worked with before. I listed the possible dates/times, including “am” and “pm” options. My email was set up to spell check before sending. I wasn’t paying attention, and instead of clicking ‘ignore all’ on the am & pm options, clicked ‘change all.’ They were all changed to “Pam”—unfortunately, that’s also my name! We’ve had a good laugh about “Pam time.”

I frequently request bids from vendors via email. I usually copy and paste the details, and just change the greeting. One day a message to “Mike” began with “Hi Brian”—his main competitor!
Needless to say, I’m not responsible for hitting “send” on the real campaigns!

—Pamela Asfahani, Oncology Nursing Certification Corp.

I sent out a weekly article alert on a Monday not knowing that the URL structure for the articles linked from the email was going to change on Tuesday. The old URLs were not redirecting to the new URLs, so none of the links in the email worked. I now double check every link before the weekly alert goes out and make sure that there won't be any changes affecting those links taking place.

—Kari Rippetoe, GoWholesale

Well, I'm not sure it was a *disaster*, but it wasn't good. Within a regular monthly update we do on our virtual learning classes, we were also announcing our first digital download product created from one of our most popular teleclasses.

I had just started inserting links a bit differently than in the past. I had gotten out of the habit of checking every link because they had always worked, but when I added tracking codes to the 4 links in the email that had to do specifically with the new product, it broke them all - every single one.

For whatever reason, I thought to check them just *after* I hit the send button (of course). Another 20 minutes later and I had the links fixed and a new email sent out. I think everyone got the fixed-link email before they had a chance to find the broken links in the first. And, this email went to our most loyal customers, graduates of our programs, who tend to be very forgiving. But still. . .not my favorite moment! :-)

—Sara Avery, Newfield Network Inc.

Your post about email goofs is timely. I wrote an email promotion yesterday [Oct. 24] in which I used my own experience being evacuated due to SD fires to promote a teleseminar about legal issues and how we can’t be too prepared or cautious. Two people responded they thought it was a bit insensitive. Maybe the fires are too hot to talk about yet in a marketing context. So I blogged an apology.

—Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Love it! Struck a note in my world….. I’m also supposed to be an expert and every time I try to do tactical things, I screw up too…..

—David Baker, Avenue A | Razorfish

My worst flubs are pretty much the garden variety; once forgot to change the old link to a sale page (very woops), and a few typos...

I'm writing because I thought it was very ironic that the very first link after your article (the one to update my profile) didn't work! I was very entertained, nearly fell off my chair in fact.

Thanks for brightening my day :)

—Rachelle Johnson, iSpectrum Marketing

[Rachelle was one of three people to catch that intentional error. We like to keep you on your toes. :) ]

Yesterday's eec email drove quite a response! If you didn't read the introduction which talked about the realities of errors when you work with email, and the positive learnings you can extract from a not-so-good situation, you missed a good article and should read it when you have a chance.

For those of you who read the intro, we were thrilled to receive lots of replies from people in the eec community who shared their stories of disasters, recovery plans and QA policies. Chad will be blogging about those collective learnings next week.

========

Being the eec, and always approaching our efforts with a test to learn/push the envelope strategy, in yeterday's email we specifically put an invalid link in our main call to action ( update your profile). We wanted to see who would catch the ironic messaging (and who is clicking through).

We would like to congratulate Dylan Boyd from eROI, Rachelle Johnson from iSpectrum Marketing, and Denise Chenier from Relevant Communications for taking the time to email us about the profile link. The three of you deserve a round of applause for helping us to research the impact of certain types of errors in emails. We plan to include the impact of errors in next week's blog posts as well.

Have a great weekend!

Jeanniey and the eec Team

How do you value and report your email channel ROI to C-level executives? Some companies have been very successful in reporting how email channel initiatives generate incremental revenues—such as the average ecommerce business with 10%-30% of annual sales revenues from its email marketing program (i.e., for a large retailer that is $25-35 million per year). However, most organizations have still not accounted for the many cost-savings email breeds nor do they include, for example, hold out groups to demonstrate the impact on Lifetime Customer Value when email is removed.

How can we come together across media channels to report a more complete picture to C-level executives (CPA, Revenue, AOV, Satisfaction, LTV)? Thoughts? Ideas? Comments? —Barry Stamos, senior director of strategy, Responsys

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Chip House: This, I believe, is all about human nature. We all gravitate to the things we know—to our comfort zone. So when the DMA reports the latest in a string of statistics that shows higher ROI for email, it doesn’t really surprise me. It also doesn’t surprise me that C-level execs (often even CMOs) seem to forget email when it comes to doling out marketing spend. Their comfort zone drives their marketing spend allocation, and unfortunately their own CFO’s aren’t calling them on the disconnect. Ultimately, shame on both of them.

Direct marketing, and online marketing specifically, is inherently very measurable. Take keywords; you can easily track impressions, clicks, conversions etc.—and choose from multiple tools with which to do so. Banner ads—same thing. In fact, with banners, your media buyer/or network takes care of most of the targeting hassle. Perhaps offline media, as well as other online media, get more respect from the CMO simply because they are easier to grasp and don’t require the strategy, planning, list-building, deliverability expertise, etc. that a successful email campaign requires. So, not only do we gravitate to our comfort zone—we do what’s quick and easy. Email marketing often isn’t quick or easy, and to many it carries a stigma.

So how do we value and report the high ROI of our email channel in a way that resonates with a C-level exec? First, you’ll need to show him the stats. Show him all the stats. The DMA number above is just the starter. Another showing the disconnect for online vs. offline spending, from the folks at Forrester, shows that though people spend 29% of their time online, it gets just 8% of the marketing dollars. Disconnect? Umm, yeah!

Second, prove it to your CMO yourself. Monitor your own spend on a handful of offline and online media and see it for yourself. If you’re not tracking ROI individually yet, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Stephanie Miller: Good for you, Barry—this is exactly right. We as marketers have hidden behind the “email is cheap” myth for too long. We've dug ourselves into a budgeting hole. We promoted email as cheap, so it got a small budget. When we were charged with making the channel earn higher return, we just sent more email—not better, more targeted, more relevant email, just more email—because there was no significant budget hit. Now, when revenue expectations for the channel are growing, we find that we have to apply our marketing skills again—inventing and optimizing compelling subscriber experiences in order to generate growing revenue. This requires a budget for creative, testing and analytics in addition to the commoditized fees for delivery and list hygiene. It requires that we consider the email channel for more than just broadcast promotions, but as part of a multichannel experience that includes web and offline experiences and direct sales and education touchpoints. That means we need to measure it and budget for it just like other direct channels. All this should be welcome for both marketers and subscribers.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

-->Read other Reply to All posts

I’m sometimes asked what it is that inspires me to focus on email creative specifically. Why attempt to perfect an ephemeral digital communication that most all recipients eventually delete?

There’s a Japanese term—mono no aware—that describes beauty as the awareness of the transience of things. It’s also referred to as the “ah-ness” of things, the “ah!”s marking passing moments of instinctual feeling. These are the “ah!”s of a baby’s first words, random acts of kindness and falling autumn leaves.

I like to think of every email as an opportunity to evoke an “ah!” While we can probably count the number folks who actually save our work forever on one hand (Chad White and I being two of the five), each email we send holds within it the chance to surprise and delight potentially millions of recipients, even if for just a moment. I think that’s brilliant.

For my first EEC blog post, I’d like to share a couple of these email “ah!”s with you. This fall, Kate Spade has been sending out the sweetest little inbox haikus. Enjoy!

From: katespade.com
Subject Line: key shoes for fall
Date: Tuesday, September 25, 2007

From: katespade.com
Subject Line: dress up for fall
Date: Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Until next week,
Lisa Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Chad White: Website Relaunches and Email Redesigns Should Go Hand in Hand
Branding and navigation should be in sync across these channels.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Before DMA07, we solicited questions from our members and subscribers, promising to post them in our booth at the show and recruit email experts in attendance to answer those questions. We got some great questions and tons of great answers:

1. How important is it for email creative to match the same look and feel as the order page/landing page?

Marc Pitre, Wampower.com: It’s critical to keep the branding consistent between emails and landing pages. Both the creative and the message itself must be consistent to be impactful to the end viewer. It’s too easy to dilute your message, so keep it consistent.

Andrew Osterday, Premiere Global Services: Landing pages are often ignored or an afterthought, but can have a strong impact on conversion. The flow from email to landing page should be seamless in both messaging and look and feel. Consider custom landing pages rather than linking to the site.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Very. Especially in promotional messages and prospecting. Be sure that the offer in the email is front and center—don’t make me scroll. Using a custom landing page can improve conversion rates up to 50%. Definitely worth the investment in optimizing landing pages—they are the fulfillment of the promise created in your email message and it should be a seamless experience.

Michael Fishers, Alterian: It is very important—lack of matching in look and feel produces confusion, feels uncoordinated and impacts response accordingly.

Joel Book, ExactTarget: Providing creative continuity between the email and the associated landing page is vital for driving response and conversion. According to Forrester Research, “92% of business decision-makers go online to research products and services before buying offline.” By using email to deliver relevant offers to customers, marketers are accelerating the buying process. The key is to make it easy for the customer to buy—having consistent look and feel for email and landing page achieves this objective.

2. Do the same elements found in traditional printed letters (salutation, closing, signature, p.s.) work for emails?

Melinda Krueger, Krueger Direct: Yes, to the extent that they reflect a personal, one-to-one approach to communication. Corporate “billboards” are easy to ignore; personal correspondence is not. Consider the “voice” and use the personal pronoun!

Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso: Yes, depending on personalized and relevant the message is. Personalization doesn’t necessarily mean name, but rather actual content.

3. What do you consider best practice when it comes to accessing and changing email preferences? On one hand, it has to be easy for subscribers to go and edit their subscriptions. On the other hand, no one else than the subscriber should have access to change the subscriber’s information. Do you recommend a login, a verification email with required action before changes take effect, a notification email notifying the subscriber that changes have been made, etc…?

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: The simplest means is to include a link in the subscriber’s email so that only they can click through to the preference center/update profile page. For sites that link registration (e.g., an ecommerce site), you can link the two processes. A notification email that confirms the changes is always a good idea.

Jeanniey Mullen, Email Experience Council and OgilvyOne: The preference center is a critical element of a successful email program. It can increase the life and engagement of your consumer. Keeping access to preference centers secure is critical but so is keeping access simple. Most companies offer encoded links to preference centers that allow you to bypass the logon elements. If you are using a secure center, password retrieval features are key.

Joel Book, ExactTarget: The key to using a preference center to gather customer needs and interests is to ask for only that data which is needed to deliver relevant and timely information through email. It is critical that you explain why you are asking for this information, how it will be used, and how the customer can update his/her profile. Remember, you are building trust.

Melinda Krueger, Krueger Direct: Consider a 1-2 punch. First capture the impulse to subscribe, then, as an optional second step, ask for more information. Consider offering an incentive (tied closely to your email value proposition) and explain that you are asking to avoid sending irrelevant emails.

4. Is there a proven happy medium between images and text in an email? Do too many or not enough images reduce response?

Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso: Email marketers today need to design their emails with the assumption that their recipients’ have their email clients set with the images turned off. This means that the recipients should be understand the gist of the message without its images. Images should be used to enhance text, not replace it.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: The “happy medium” is per industry and depends on both your content and the reader in which the person will be viewing the email. For example, a B2B email that’s likely to be read on a Blackberry should be all or mostly text. But retail emails where product images are so vital should be mostly HTML.

5. How can you tell if an email is being read in a preview pane only then deleted?

David Daniels, JupiterResearch: If someone clicks in a preview pane, can you hear them? It is all about behavior. If there are no clicks, there’s no engagement, so attempt tactics for reactivation (survey, sweepstakes, etc.). The only real way to determine if an email has been read is by clicks.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Great question! Technically, there is probably not a way to get 100% pure data unless you put a “pixel” that is triggered by the scroll. However, you could track performance by proxy in one of two ways: (1) by putting a “morse type” link at the top (visible even when images are suppressed) that promotes the offer and “opens” the email, or (2) by analyzing clicks on text links below the fold which are not visible when images are suppressed. Frankly, I’m not sure why this measure is valuable if your preview pane is optimized, it will drive engagement, not a deletion.

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: Open rates are tacked via a tracking 1-pixel image. So if images are enabled and a reader “views” the email (whether it is opened or not) it will count as an open. If images are blocked and the email is viewed in the preview pane (or fully opened), it will not count as an open. As a result, click-through rates are a much better gauge of email activity.

6. Can a newsletter sell or is it better for branding?

Jordan Ayan, SubscriberMail: Email marketing is about building relationships. If you approach it as a sales medium, you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Can you sell with email? Absolutely, but for long-term success, you have to focus on delivering relevant content that highlights your brand and keeps recipients wanting more. Then they will give you permission to sell them electronically.

Kara Trivunovic, Premiere Global Services: A newsletter can sell if it is done right. The newsletter should be editorial in nature, with a majority of the content being relevant, value-add information. If sales copy is going to be included, it should be done as a soft sell, wrapped in editorial when possible.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Yes! Optimize to do both: (1) Educate customers about the full benefits of the products. (2) Engage subscribers to interact with your company, website, sales team, blog etc. (3) Lead prospects down the sales cycle by educating and asking questions.

7. Is it practical/realistic to budget for file growth from viral marketing? Can we count this as a tactic, or is it just "either."

Michael Salin, M.J. Salin & Associates: Yes! Emerging marketing genre are heavily based in viral practices…word of mouth, social networking. You should test and quantify viral programs – consumer talking to a consumer is the highest/strongest marketing communiqué. Quantify the send and free creative is a way to promote the idea.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: You can definitely budget for viral growth. In general, you can expect pass-along rates of 1%-2%, but it depends on the prominence of your send-to-a-friend links and how often you encourage readers to forward your emails. For instance, some retailers have “friends and family” event emails where part of the messaging encourages recipients to forward the discount offer to others. Doing emails like that will boost your pass-along rate.

8. If no legitimate ESP will allow the use of purchased lists in their system, how do data brokers and email appenders who focus on this market stay in business?

Craig Swerdloff, Postmaster Direct: Our experience has been that top-tier ESPs will send for lists that offer list rental, assuming certain requirements are met. They include explicit permission from recipients, proper list hygiene, good reputation scores, and compliant/unknown user rates within allowable thresholds.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: The owner of the data sends the message on your behalf—so the initial mailing is from the data source inviting the subscriber to opt-in for email from you. Many marketers who send mail in-house, use internal append very successfully. There are best practices to ensuring your sender reputation is protected.

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: List brokers manage the email databases for companies whose list members have agreed to receive third-party offers. The emails are sent “from” the list owner to the list member. Once the subscriber opts in to specific a marketer’s program, they have given permission to the marketer. At that point, ESPs will allow the company to send to the subscriber.

9. What is the single most popular offer that drives people to register and share their information? We are desperately trying to collect emails from our customers and it's been very challenging.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: As is true in all direct marketing, offer something perceived value for free. But the question should really be around how you can construct a powerful email experience that will entice and engage your prospects. While many will sign up for something that is free, your response and ROI will only come when the email program itself has consistent value.

10. What is the right frequency for retail email programs? It seems like many retailers are at 2x+ per week. Does not mailing at that frequency hurt my chances?

Austin Bliss, FreshAddress: Unfortunately, there is no “right” frequency. You should send on a schedule that provides value to your recipients—e.g. if you have daily sales, you can send daily. But if you have nothing to say 2 times a week, you shouldn’t mail at that rate because you will have incurred complaints/unsubscribes.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: There are lots of factors to consider here, including the frequency at which your products tend to be purchased, the content of your email (both promotional and service-oriented content), the length of your email, etc. For example, Blue Nile emails once a month, recognizing that jewelry is not a frequent purchase. Home Depot, on the other hand, sends once a week, targeting subscribers’ weekend projects. And then there’s Neiman Marcus, which emails 7+ times a week, engaging its fashion hungry subscribers with info on new products, store events, discounts and video and article content.

11. If you send five or more emails to the same recipient and they aren't opened, does your domain/IP get reclassified as spam by the ISP? This obviously isn't standard across all ISP's. If this is in practice by some, which ones are they?

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: List quality is definitely a factor in sender reputation. Having a large number of non-responders on your file could reduce your “score” among ISPs/receivers. ISPs generally don’t publish the “rules” that they use, as publishing them would expose them to abuse by spammers.

HAVE SOME INSIGHT TO ADD? Please comment below, just be sure to include the number of the question that you're answering.

The answer…
91% --> Yes, email is a digital application and is very much a digital platform.
9% --> No, email is not innovative and not even considered digital by most consumers.

Are you surprised by this collective wisdom? Share your thoughts below.

Also, visit the EEC homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
Do the benefits of list rental outweigh the risks?

-->Read more Two-Click Survey Results

As email marketing continues to evolve, the way we think about email must also evolve. Email has become the way that almost every one of our consumers not only communicates, but manages their lives. This means that as marketers and advertisers we must create email communications that not only facilitate fantastic relationships, but also integrate seamlessly into the lifestyle and personal management choices our customers employ.

Email is more successful when it is not used in a vacuum. Even if the integration is as simple as acknowledgement and awareness of other media elements the consumer may interact with (social networks, blogs, search, display, print, TV), email is much more powerful when it can generate engagement with other modes of communication.

With that said, at the eec, we want to practice what we preach, and do a better job at integrating our emails with the other ways and places people interact.

Please join our founder, Jeanniey Mullen, on LinkedIn or on Facebook to engage in real time conversations about email, and help us keep our email content as relevant as possible. (Don't forget to add Ali, Chad and your other eec friends to your friend list!)

On Facebook, join the "unofficial" eec group and definitely take a second to rsvp to the first eec event (coming in February).

Enjoy!

The eec team

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

GoldLasso: Finding Value in an Email Marketing Service Provider
Important things you should know about your ESP.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Help impact and improve the industry’s usage of email metrics by taking 5-10 minutes to participate in EmailStatCenter’s State of Email Marketing Metrics Survey. Share your two cents on how you use email metrics and your challenges for 2008, and see what your peers have to say. All participants receive the results before they’re officially released.

--> Help move the industry forward by taking the survey now.

The Email Experience Council’s charity project this year is the Women’s Bean Project (WBP), a nonprofit that helps women break the cycle of poverty and unemployment by teaching workplace competencies for entry-level jobs through employment and by teaching job readiness skills in the gourmet food production business. More than a dozen eec members have been working on building the WBP an email marketing program basically from scratch since July. We’ve been really busy, as you can see from Stephanie Miller’s September update.

My major contribution to this initiative is competitive reconnaissance, so the WBP could learn from other organizations similar to their own. I’ve shared some thoughts at various points in our discussion, but wanted to put together a more comprehensive report and post it here so that more people could comment and get involved.

Competitive Set
The WBP is nonprofit that uses retail sales to support its activities, so we wanted to look at other nonprofits and particularly those with a clear retail angle. I looked at Aid to Artisans, Dress for Success, Habitat for Humanity, Newman’s Own, Ten Thousand Villages, The Enterprising Kitchen and World of Good.

Sign-Up Process
World of Good and Ten Thousand Villages used a double opt-in process, while the others used a single opt in. The subscription process at Dress for Success and Newman’s Own failed, as I never received any emails from them, so it’s possible that they use a double opt-in system as well.

After a spirited discussion, we decided that a double opt-in system would be best for the WBP, as it would increase list quality and reduce some of the list management needs for the nonprofit.

Welcome Emails
Only Aid to Artisans, Ten Thousand Villages and World of Good sent welcome emails—none of which were very good. They mostly missed the opportunity to use their welcome email to reinforce their brand positioning, communicate their mission statements and get the new subscriber involved.

Ten Thousand Villages and World of Good both had a strange sign up system. First, they sent a text-only subscription confirmation email (double opt in), then an HTML email confirming the successful subscription, and then a text-only welcome email that had less information than the previous HTML email. The only new information that it had was an unsubscribe link. Upon a successful opt-in confirmation, the WBP should definitely just send an HTML welcome email and forgo any kind of opt-in confirmation email.

None of the welcome emails included whitelisting instructions, which was a huge missed opportunity.

For those that didn’t send welcome emails, they were slow in sending their regular emails. Since many only send emails monthly, if you subscribed right after they send one out, you’d be waiting nearly a month to receive anything from them.

Aid to Artisans had the best welcome email of the bunch (see below), since it had HTML branding and links to its store, donation page and events listing. But it lacked whitelisting instructions, an unsubscribe link, and any kind of statement of mission. Also, the centered text was a bit hard to read, especially since there were no blank lines or special typography to break up the text into more easily scannable bites.

Regular Emails
There are several things worth noting with their regular emails. First, only Ten Thousand Villages make good use of navigation bars. Aid to Artisans’ nav bar is at the bottom of most its emails, just like it is in its welcome email, although sometimes it’s on the left-hand side in column form. And Habitat for Humanity (see below) has a listing of “More Ways to Get Involved” at the bottom of their emails, but no nav bar.

Second, World of Good and Habitat’s emails featured a modular design that made it easy for them to add items to the newsletter. As you can see in the World of Good email below, it’s a little unsophisticated, but when you don’t have many people to manage your email marketing this kind of design can simplify email construction.

That email is also a good example of my third point, which is that some of these marketers make a point of highlighting the people that their activities help. Obviously the people angle is a lot of why people purchase from or get involved with these organizations. I think that profiles of the WBP’s workers, messages from staff members and pictures from events should play prominent role in the WBP emails.

All in all, Ten Thousand Villages’ email design (see below) is the closest to what we’ve developed for the WBP so far. It includes a personal angle by featuring an artisan and combines it with product images and descriptions.

If anyone has any recommendations or thoughts on any of this, please comment below. If you’re an eec member and you’d like to get involved with this project, please contact Ali.

—Chad White

We are engaged in email in New Zealand, where due to relatively low internet usage, and recent law changes, list growth is quite a challenge. We do have one particular challenge which I would welcome any input on, as follows:

We publish an email newsletter for the police. They aim to reach community stakeholders, but are unwilling to allocate budget to traditional media to spread awareness and generate additional sign-ups. Their website drip feeds a certain number of new recipients —approx 1% increase per month, although half of that is eliminated by those who opt out each month —so growth is slow. They believe that using the existing list, a viral campaign can help. Does anyone have any inspirational input? —Jerry Flay, managing director of Inbox

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Stephanie Miller: Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. It’s difficult to predict what sort of viral campaign will have a meaningful impact. Without knowing anything about the program I’m hesitant to offer a specific idea, but consider a simple trivia quiz about the community like “how many miles of roads are there” and “how long does the chief of police serve in office.” If the quiz is challenging but also surprising, it will get forwarded. Even without some special content, certainly test just asking every current subscriber to forward an invite to two friends. Perhaps offer some recognition in the community for doing so. But at the end of the day, the program has to be worth signing up for—if the goal is to build awareness and support, then the messages must be interesting and relevant. If they are, then subscribers will engage with them and share them.

Chad White: Sounds like you should communicate how the police and community stakeholders have been working together with great results. Some inspiring success stories may cause folks to forward the email along and spur greater involvement. So tout your greatest successes and undertakings. Also, how about providing tips and advice that would be useful to the community? Or doing a survey or fundraising activity that would leverage your email program? If you provide the right kind of information and clearly prompt your subscribers to share the information with friends, you should be able to exceed the average 1% to 2% pass-along rate.

Jeanniey Mullen: Viral marketing can be one option, but only if you have something to say that your readers will “bond” with and share with others. In other words, if you want something to be passed along, ask your current readers to help you determine the content.

Even at that though, the pass along rate will be relatively low, so you should look for ways to integrate email with, for example, a blog or social network in order to assure success.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

-->Read other Reply to All posts

I am in Montreal to speak with eec members Chris Carder from ThinData and Greg Cangialosi from Blue Sky Factory at Infopresse on Wednesday. And with that said, this even began like all others: Typical business trip travel plans. You probably know them well.

- Work late two days before leaving to wrap up loose ends at the office and get all work covered.
- One day before leaving, ensure all work is covered "in case of disaster."
- Day of travel, check voicemail and email right before plane takes off to see if unplanned disaster has occurred.
- Sit on plane trying to figure out why the plane cannot land any faster—in order to get to disaster
- Turn on cell and email as soon as possible and begin typing to mitigate issues.
- Short-term success! But need to get to hotel to get online ASAP to finalize items.
- Get to hotel, go to room, plug in all devices, logon to internet.

Yes, it was all a standard trip until the logging on part.

And then... I received the fastest spam email EVER! Less than 10 seconds after logging on, I received the email below.

I travel quite a bit, and usually after I am in a foreign country for a day or so, I will start to receive local spam—but never this fast.

Has this type of thing ever happened to you?

—Jeanniey Mullen

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

BlueHornet: HTML Rendering in Outlook 2007 - Top 10 Questions & Answers
How to code and design HTML email templates that render effectively in Outlook 2007.

Chad White: Retailers Gravitating toward Single Sender Addresses
Managing multiple sender addresses and getting them all whitelisted is proving tough.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

When reviewing subscriber reply mail to email newsletters, what action is recommended for responses that aren’t specifically unsubscribes, like various automatic bouncebacks, account no longer exists, “I have left the company”, etc. Heard discussion that one should just unsubscribe these people since they are unable to receive the newsletter and why send to them if they won’t receive, however I would think that skews the stats a bit, as these people aren’t actually requesting to be unsubscribed. Curious as to what the EEC audience considers best practice in these cases. —Meaghan Peters, UnitedHealthcare

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Stephanie Miller: This sounds like a bounce management issue. Proper bounce management should be handled by your IT team or your ESP—and be sure you understand what your processes are. Poor processes can result in deliverability failure for all your messages.

There are two kinds of bounces—hard and soft. Hard bounces are “user not found” errors and should be immediately taken off your file. Soft bounces include the types of messages you describe above, and depending on your mailing frequency, you can remove these records after a certain number of bounces. If you mail weekly, you might try three more times, then consider the account dead and remove the record. If you mail monthly, one more mailing is probably appropriate. This approach will quickly remove any accounts like “I no longer work here,” which you don’t want on your file anyway.

Jeanniey Mullen: This is a tough one, especially as you are in the healthcare market. Many pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations have a policy that does not allow them to review or respond to replies from an email as it may put them in a legally challenging situation. If you do not need to worry about the legal issues, the next thing to consider is the amount of replies you receive. If your list is small, it is worth reading through the replies and makings edits to manually unsub people who have left their jobs or have email verification services turned on. This process becomes very time consuming if your list get larger. In this case, some companies have built “bots” to help pull these types of emails out, but many just let them go and have rules set up to move them to a “bounced” status after three unsuccessful mailings.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

-->Read other Reply to All posts

Based on what I saw at the ClickZ Specifics: Email Marketing conference yesterday, deliverability remains the hot topic. They had a packed session dedicated to the topic and it also came up during the closing 5 Experts/5 Minutes session, where five experts were given 60 seconds each to answer a question from the audience. Here is some of the wisdom that I jotted down:

Regarding first steps…
Stefan Pollard of EmailLabs said to start by knowing your metrics—your delivery rate, bounce management, spam complaints, etc. You can make improvements if you don’t know where your program stands currently.

Deidre Baird of Pivotal Veracity said that you should get on ISPs’ whitelists (which is free) and take advantage of spam compliant feedback loops.

Regarding list rental/buying…
Baird also said to avoid spamtraps by not buying lists and harvesting addresses from the web. Only use opt ins, she said.

Jordan Ayan of SubscriberMail said flatly, “Don’t ever buy a list.”

Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ said that they were very close to advising readers to never rent or buy lists, but that they hadn’t quite reached that point yet.

Regarding offline sign-ups with incentives…
If you’re offering incentives in order to collect email addresses offline, be sure to “deliver the incentive to the email address,” said Austin Bliss of FreshAddress. The customer is more likely to give you their real address and to write legibly if the incentive is being delivered this way.

Lieb told a story of a major apparel retailer that gave in-store customers a 20% off coupon in exchange for their email address. Well, people wrote down bogus addresses in order to get the discount and those addresses lead to the retailer being blacklisted. Ouch!

Pollard recommended using double opt-in for offline sources of acquisition.

Regarding B2B filtering…
“B2B filtering is more whimsical than B2C,” said Bliss.

Baird said that companies rely much more on spam lists like Spamhaus and SpamCop.

Regarding authentication…
People were universally proponents of authentication (DKIM and Sender ID), which makes it clear that you are who you say you are, thereby fighting spoofing. But they also all said that it currently doesn’t lead to better deliverability, as very few ISPs give authentication serious weigh yet when deciding which emails to filter. However, some of the experts thought this would be given more weight in the future.

Regarding cleaning up old, dirty lists…
Pollard told marketers to look at the date of subscription—the older the date, the more likely you should just cut them. He also advised people to remove role addresses like sales@domain.com.

Al DiGuido of Zustek said you should cut people who haven’t opened an email in the past 6-12 months.

But Ayan said not to assume that your emails are going unread because the subscriber could have images turned off. He said it’s best if you send a series of emails asking if they want to continue receiving email.

—Chad White

The ExactTarget User Conference unveils the dawning of a new technological day, and re-inspires the market with email.

I attended Day 1 of the ExactTarget user conference (Connections 07) today and ... Wow... is the best way to describe the event. With over 650 people in attendance (some were turned away), including over 75 agencies, the conference was a big hit.

Eec member Chip House, from ExactTarget, can do a much better job than me of giving you the details of the event, but I will say this: The commentary on ExactTarget’s new partnerships, technological features and approach to email was inspiring.

I was personally involved in a panel on deliverability, which Chip moderated, and he deserves a big bottle of gin for dealing with all of us. After a fantastic opening, the panel was turned over to Craig Spiezle from Microsoft, David Daniels from JupiterResearch and me. We discussed the key issues everyone needed to know regarding the technical side of deliverability and reputation, the marketers’ view of relevance, list hygiene and reputation, and the agency/consumer side of how to take all the knowledge and do something productive with it (like increase funding for email in your organization, or integrate delivery into the planning process). The content was top notch and even included, at no additional cost, a very nice improv from the three of us. Let’s see, there were jokes about how Craig just never stops talking :-P, how David Daniels not only loves his Bloody Mary Deliverability cocktails, but how he is also God and controls the lights, just to emphasize his points. This was probably the most fun I have had on a panel in awhile—and the content was good too.

I’ve asked a few of the conference attendees to write me on Facebook and let me know how the next two days go. And I’d like to shout out to the ET team and ask them to share as much as they can from the conference with the eec community. It’s great stuff!

—Jeanniey Mullen

I work at a five-person education nonprofit as the marcom/grant writer and we are SO having problems with some of our emails not being delivered to our subscribers within the school districts. Our webmaster thinks it’s because the district spam filters are out of our control. I know we paid extra a while ago for a fixed DNS to get around AOL problems. What can we do besides posting instructions as we’ve done at this website, http://clms.net/resources/leaguelinks.htm? —Katie Winchell, California League of Middle Schools

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Stephanie Miller: This is a difficult issue. District system admins set up filters to protect their subscribers from unwanted email, just as AOL and businesses do. That is a good thing! Unfortunately for you the sender, often these filters are stricter than the major ISPs so mail that makes it to AOL still gets blocked by the district system.

There are two recourses for you: First, identify the top 10 districts to your business and make phone calls to subscribers or contacts there and encourage them to ask their system administrator to allow your email messages. When you commit to a certain frequency and to using the same from address (and domain), they may be willing. Typically, it takes their subscribers (also your customers/subscribers) to ask on your behalf. This can be cumbersome, I know, but it does work. Second, you could make it clear at sign up that subscribers are more likely to actually receive your email if they use a personal address rather than their district address. Alerting them right up front will help ensure more of your file is deliverable.

Jeanniey Mullen: This issue is too important to not seek professional advice. I would recommend that you make the invest to check your sending IP’s reputation with a professional organization like Return Path or Pivotal Veracity. They can diagnose the issue for you.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we’ll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

-->Read other Reply to All posts