“The only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life email experience that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then—then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!”
—Holly Golightly

We are all searching for Tiffany’s, where “nothing very bad can happen.” Holly Golightly finds calm in taking her morning coffee window shopping; we search for solace sipping Starbucks over our inboxes, browsing emails, the windows into websites. As email marketers, we have the chance to create email programs that feel like Tiffany’s. Let’s leverage the strengths of the email channel to take care of our subscribers: inspiring calm, building loyalty, and (heck!) maybe even driving a furniture purchase.

I get in touch with my inner Holly Golightly via Netflix. I feel well cared for by their email program. Netflix employs powerful email strategies—including social commerce, enhanced transactional messaging, customer ratings and surveys—to provide great customer service via email, as illustrated by the four-message stream captured here.

(1) Movie Notes are smart social commerce. They enable Netflix members to send movie recommendations (and criticisms!) to friends. (I should have listened to Holly’s warning about “Material Girls.” OMG—bad! Don’t rent it!)
From: Holly Golightly
Subject Line: You've received a Movie Note
-->See the Movie Note

(2) Shipping Notifications not only communicate an almost-always accurate estimated arrival date, but also make category-relevant recommendations and upsell membership upgrades.
From: Netflix Shipping
Subject Line: For Thu: Breakfast at Tiffany's
-->See the Shipping Notification

(3) Receipt Notifications allow a recipient to instantly rate a movie they’ve just returned. (Obviously this one gets a five-star rating.)
From: Netflix Receiving
Subject Line: We've received: Breakfast at Tiffany's
-->See the Receipt Notification

(4) Mail-Back Date Surveys enroll members as partners in the rapid-receipt process. (Yes, Kozmo.com was too good to be true. Still, Netflix rentals ship scary-snappy.)
From: Netflix
Subject Line: When did you mail “Breakfast at Tiffany's”?
-->See the Mail-Back Date Survey

Darlings, let’s use this Netflix example to inspire us to sieze the awesome opportunities we have to deliver “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” via email. I’d love to hear about the email programs that make you feel simply marvelous!

I mean, a girl just can't go to Sing Sing with a green face.

As ever,
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

I spent the second week of February in Palm Desert at the eTail conference and participated in a panel discussion focused on advanced segmentation strategies. Unlike in previous years, the team at eTail set up channel-specific tracks that preceded the usual conference—email and search each had their own rooms, and sizeable crowds looking to learn more from experts in the space.

The search room was especially well attended, with nearly double the number of conference goers as the email room. Now I have done some SEM work in my day, and have the utmost respect for search professionals and the business value they provide. But, as the recent Datran 2008 Marketing & Media Survey illustrates, email often delivers stronger ROI than search. In fact, 55.3% of the survey respondents expected email to outperform all other channels on the basis of return on investment in 2008. Additionally, when asked “which advertising media buys perform strongly for your company,” 80% identified email as a strong performer, compared to 70% for paid search. For this reason, 82.4% of respondents said they will increase their use of email marketing in 2008.

Again, don’t get me wrong here—I am a big search advocate (especially when it’s well integrated with email and other channels), but why were so many more people at eTail interested in search than email?

The reason, I believe, is that most organizations are still missing the boat on resource allocation and shortchanging email. Though email is often more effective at delivering near-term ROI, search still gets a bigger share of budget. Many of the advanced segmentation strategies we discussed at eTail require relatively significant investments of time and resources, and while they deliver excellent returns, it seems as if many of the people I spoke with were facing major resource constraints that prevented them from taking their programs to the next level.

It is our responsibility as email professionals (and evangelists) to ensure that our organizations realize the tremendous value a sophisticated email program can deliver. We need to craft email marketing performance dashboards that are designed for executive consumption—they must be clear, succinct and engaging. We need to keep our managers up to date on developments in the space and the opportunities they present to our businesses. Share the results of the Datran 2008 survey with your senior management. Leverage stats from EmailStatCenter.com in your quest for more budget. And do not take “no” for an answer.

All that is easily said. But I am still feeling a little like Rodney Dangerfield. Will the facts alone earn email the respect (and budget) it so richly deserves? What do you think? What can we in the email world do to get the resources required to drive more sophisticated and profitable programs? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

—Nicholas Einstein of Datran Media

During a recent eec Clients-Only Roundtable meeting we got the discussion going with a very simple question: “What keeps you up at night?” We hope the vendor and agency side is listening because what we said—and heard—speaks volumes for unmet needs. Here are our top three issues:

Value Proposition of Email
With marketing dollars being stretched across more investments than ever, virtually all of us have a crying need to re-justify spend on email programs and infrastructure. For some companies, email is still ramping and its value is still not fully established against more traditional media. For others, the need is to reframe email as a great ROI investment against the newer and sexier Web 2.0 capabilities that are diverting attention and budgets from email. And finally some companies need to update or expand aging systems or databases just to keep the lights on.

Since this is the same No. 1 pain point we talked about a year ago, it’s disconcerting that we are still struggling to find a good answer to this key question: Why invest in email marketing over other tools in the marketing mix?

Every one of our agency and ESP partners have a vested interest in helping us get this value proposition right. It’s clear that they all work hard to create evidence to support an investment in their point solution. But that’s simply not enough anymore. The question mark is higher up “in the stack,” as we technology marketers like to say.

Upgrades to Aging or Outgrown Systems
A couple of us are looking to expand beyond our first generation ESP partnerships to support growing use, while other companies need upgrades to their aging or inadequate systems. This forces email marketers to put on their IT hats: writing RFPs, assessing vendors, justifying internal IT projects and all the rest. It’s messy, time consuming and distracting work and in some cases we don’t have the skills we need to get it done. Vendors and suppliers who can make this easier get an inside track to the business. But look back at Item 1 above—if you can’t demonstrate that your solution supports a clear value proposition for email marketing, you might still lose out.

Email Governance
Even smaller companies are complex organizations with unclear boundaries regarding who “owns” various audiences, and especially the data about them: “the house list.” Drawing up business rules for appropriate use of the audiences in our house lists is becoming increasingly complicated and urgent. Fear and greed are driving the big challenge here: Don’t chase off valuable and hard-to-acquire prospects on the one hand (opt outs), but make sure they don’t simply loiter in our database either. This is as much art as science: balancing business needs with the desire to nurture and woo customer and prospects. Here we’ve seen some good work from our outside partners helping to develop and refine contact strategies, but we still need in-house leadership to create protocols and policies that stick. Otherwise we risk falling into frequent debates which can stop campaigns in their tracks.

How would we measure success? A new top three list a year from now!

—eec Clients-Only Roundtable chair Brian Ellefritz of Cisco Systems

Earlier this month a federal judge ordered a Las Vegas-based company to pay a whopping $2.5 million fine for making false advertising claims and sending illegal email messages in violation of the FTC Act and the CAN-SPAM Act. The company was sending unsolicited email to people promoting human growth hormone (HGH) related drugs (you know, the stuff that Roger Clemens never took).

The judge found that the defendants violated the FTC Act (which outlaws fraudulent and deceptive business practices) because their ads falsely claim that the drugs cause rapid, substantial and permanent weight loss, in addition to having anti-aging qualities.

But what makes the case most interesting for our Roundtable’s members, of course, is the CAN-SPAM component. The violations cited by the FTC are very basic; they’re not “high-tech” offenses such as using open relays or forged headers to physically distribute spam. What this particular company got hit for was, in large part, three very simple CAN-SPAM violations: (1) using misleading subject lines; (2) not including a valid postal address in their emails; and (3) not including—or facilitating—opt-out functionality.

So for anyone who ever doubted that the CAN-SPAM Act had “teeth,” make no mistake about it: The FTC can and will make use of the full scope of CAN-SPAM to bring cases against offenders, and it ain’t hard to do so.

Our advice: Never overlook the basics. Check, check and check again to make sure that your email programs are 100% compliant. Make sure strict governance and procedures are in place. Because all it takes is one untrained new email marketing associate to click “send” without including a postal address and the FTC will come knocking on your door.

You can wag your finger at the camera and claim “misremembrance” all you want, but regardless of whether you’re pushing HGH in baseball locker-rooms or email inboxes, no one’s going to believe you.

—eec Advocacy Roundtable co-chairs Jordan Cohen of Epsilon and Robb Walters of Costco

-->Read other issues of the The Email Advocate.

EROI has built a mobile RSS reader that’s preloaded with feeds from all the best email marketing blogs, including this one—and they’re giving it away to all comers. Learn more about the app and request the download link here.

The answer…
51% --> Yes.
49% --> No.

Are you surprised by the results? Share your comments below.

Also, visit the eec homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
Which is more important to generating opens: the sender name or subject line?

-->Read more Two-Click Survey Results

A few weeks ago, I enrolled in Saks Fifth Avenue Online Customer Care (I wanted to pay down my Saks Credit Card). At the end of the process, I opted in to receive Saks emails. Below is a day-by-day timeline of what ensued from the moment I hit "confirm."

Day 1: Opted-in - Redirect to a thank you page, but...no welcome email

Day 2: One day after sign-up, the welcome email arrived. I would've like to see it immediately, but a one-day lag time is not the end of the world. I thought the subject line - Welcome to saks.com. We have a special offer for you... - wasn't great, but at least was very clear and direct. The body of the message contained a call-to-action that included a 10% discount. Pretty good overall.

Day 3: Not 1, but 2 messages from Saks in one day. Oops?
—Message #1: Subject Line - SAKSFIRST Double Points + From the Heart, received at 10:31AM EST, Valentines Day call-to-action
—Message #2: Subject Line - Get SAKSFIRST Double Points!, received at 3:53PM EST, Double Points call-to-action

Day 4: Subject Line - SAKSFIRST Double Points + Have-To-Have Handbags

Days 5 and 6: Nothing (Super Bowl weekend)

Day 7: Not 1, but 2 messages from Saks. Hard to believe that they would make this same "mistake" only 4 days later.
—Message #1: Subject Line - Dior...Take it Away!, received at 10:08AM EST, Women's Shoes call-to-action
—Message #2: Subject Line - Video Exclusive! Days 1 to 3 of Fashion Week, received at 4:51PM EST, "Fashion Week" call-to-action

Day 8: Subject Line - Fabulous Valentine's Gifts

Day 9: Not 1, but 2 messages from Saks. Another "mistake" 2 days after the 2nd one (3rd double email day in past 6 days)
—Message #1: Subject Line - David Yurman Gifts, received at 9:47AM EST, Women's Shoes call-to-action
—Message #2: Subject Line - Day 4 Video of Fashion Week, received at 5:05PM EST, "Fashion Week" call-to-action

Day 10: Subject Line - NEW: Reyes, Wayne... + SALE

Day 11: I clicked on their unsub/change preferences link, fully intending to unsubscribe. But, alas—they did it right! I was able to edit my preferences and elect to receive updates only "Once a Week."

TAKEAWAYS...

THE BAD:
1. Over a 7 business-day stretch, I received 10 emails (including 3 days with 2 emails/day).
2. Call-to-action was one big image—could've easily used a text-image combo.

THE GOOD:
1. Their opt-out allowed me to "receive fewer Saks Fifth Avenue updates."
2. For the most part, subject lines were creative, unique, direct, and consistent with the body of the message.
3. Preheader gave me (some) instructions to add to my address book (see Make it Pop!: The Preheader Express for more on preheaders).
4. While the body of message included one big image, the headers and footers were consistent.

Overall, for as critical as I've been, I applaud the effort of Saks. We all know that most online retailers don't get it right. Saks, on the other hand, does many things well. I'm not a big fan of an average of greater than 1 email per week, but they did allow me to change the frequency. It would have been nice if I had this option up front. Why risk losing a consumer only to try and salvage them when they are ready to opt-out? Kudos to Saks. They've won me over...assuming they honor my frequency preference change.

—DJ Waldow of Bronto

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

ROI Calculator - The Value of an Email Address
Created by the eec's List Growth & Engagement Roundtable

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

If you missed out on the Email Evolution Conference this year you're not completely out of luck because bloggers and reporters were all over it. In fact, during the Wednesday morning panel about email marketing bloggers, there were dozens of people that said they were blogging from the event—and a half-dozen that said they were blogging live during the session! Here’s a list of posts and articles about the show to give you a little taste of what you missed (let us know if you know of others):

Email Experience Blog:
-->Voices from the Email Evolution Conference
-->Inbox Stew: Grandma, Goods, Compadres and Confirmation

RetailEmail.Blogspot:
-->Takeaways from the Email Evolution Conference

BeRelevant!:
-->Update from the Email Evolution Conference
-->Live Blogging from the Email Evolution Conference: Part 1 (LIVE BLOG)
-->EEC Conference: US Legislation and Beyond
-->Live Blogging from the Email Evolution Conference - Part 2 (LIVE BLOG)
-->Live Blogging from the Email Evolution Conference - Day 2 (LIVE BLOG)

The Email Wars:
-->Live EEC Keynote: Bloggers Unite: Passion, Power or People? (LIVE BLOG)
-->Knocked out by the eec

MediaPost:
-->Making Email, Web Analytics Play Nice: Testing Is Key
-->FTC: Data Security Is Top Concern
-->Bad Guys Make Emailing Harder
-->Email Undervalued, Works Best In Symphony With Other Tools
-->Daily Candy Founder Shares Special Sauce

BtoB Magazine:
-->Multichannel marketing highlighted at Email Evolution Conference

House of Email Marketing:
-->Reflecting on the EEC Conference: Relevance drives Deliverability and ROI

Email Insider Blog:
-->The DMA Gets It Right
-->Takeaways From The Email Evolution Conference

Return on Subscriber:
-->Dedicated IP or not a dedicated IP

Denise Cox’s Blog:
-->How recipients and marketers are handling email (eec conference)
-->Some nuggets I picked up at email boot camp (eec event)

Bronto Blog:
-->Netflix Gets Email – Part 1
-->Netflix Gets Email – Part 2
-->Netflix Gets Email – Part 3

The Joeism Blog:
-->Kicking Off the Email Evolution Conference
-->Email Evolution Conference — Day 2
-->Last Day of Email Evolution Conference

Twitter streams:
-->Adam Covati

Constant Contact:
-->Insights from the Email Evolution Conference
-->From the EEC Conference: Email marketing blogs
-->From the EEC Conference: Getting inactive subscribers to engage
-->From the EEC Conference: Creating a VIP email program
-->From the EEC Conference: The DailyCandy story

Ezemail Blog
-->Email Evolution Conference Takeaways, San Diego, February 2008

Smith-Harmon EDM Review:
-->San Diego Zoo

Marketing with Technology and More:
-->Email Experience Conference Kicks Off
-->Good Quality permission and relevancy - data revealed
-->A No-Tan-Line Bikini and 70 Passionate Women

Strongmail’s Email Marketing Insights:
-->LIVE from the Email Experience Conference!

Chris Baggott’s Guide to Blogging:
-->Corporate Blogging Live From the Email Evolution Conference

Visitor Centric Marketing
-->Email Experience Evolution, 2/12/08

While at the Email Evolution Conference this week, I had the pleasure of being DJ Waldow’s guest on BrontoFire, Bronto Software’s lively, unscripted, one-take email marketing debate show. During the webisode, DJ and I discussed the good, the bad, and the ugly of four email designs from Bluefly, All Recipes, PajamaGram, and American Airlines.

>>Watch the debate on BrontoFire

—Chad White

The eec’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable has developed an interactive Excel calculator to help retailers measure the ROI of their acquisition and retention email mailings, including deployment costs, list growth calculations, and more. View a sample of the calculator or download the full interactive calculator from the Whitepaper Room. The calculator is $49 for non-members, discounted for silver and gold members, and free to platinum members. Not a member? Learn more about membership.

At this morning’s kick-off to the eec’s first annual Email Evolution Conference, eec founder Jeanniey Mullen showed a number of “man on the street” interviews with “real people” talking about email.

It was amusing and insightful to hear people talk about their inboxes and how they must actively manage them (you can watch one of the videos here). Better, the comments completely synched with Return Path’s Fourth Annual Holiday Email Survey, where subscribers told us that they mostly just delete unread most of what they get from marketers—defined as “junk from companies I know but is just not interesting to me.”

What really struck me was the video participants’ storytelling. They talked about email as a sort of stew—our marketing messages are mixed up in there with notes from grandma, various lovers and a three-year-old’s parents and even one gentleman’s new job announcement.

Subscribers know intellectually the difference between personal, transactional and marketing messages, but it’s an emotional decision to open or delete when faced with inbox clutter. Subscribers view their inbox holistically—we are not only competing against others in our industry, and transactional messages for purchases and e-statements, but we are competing with grandma’s message, too.

The classic example of defining your competitive marketplace by benefit and not by product is the statement that Amtrak is in the transportation business, not the train business. So too, we email marketers are not just in the retail or travel business, we are in the business of creating compelling and interesting subscriber experiences.

We can’t forget that—and frankly, it’s the secret to all e-marketing success. That is why it’s so hard. This is especially true as we tackle challenges around mobile and SMS messaging. What the DMA is calling “The Digital Lifestyle” still translates to subscriber experiences. The word “subscriber” is important because it’s about permission. The word “experience” is important because it’s about a dialogue and interactivity. It’s direct marketing, so it’s about driving response through targeted and well-timed messaging. And it’s marketing, so it’s about serving customers and demonstrating brand value.

At the center is the subscriber. Wow her, and you win. Good for Jeanniey and the eec for launching today with an engaging, inventive and visual way of showing us that the subscriber is still in charge. I’m looking forward to a great conference where I’m sure to have dozens of valuable conversations about creating compelling subscriber experiences. Look forward to hearing from you as well. Just email anytime!

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

Tomorrow morning, the more than 500 attendees of the Email Evolution Conference will hear from a panel of bloggers that include Chad White of the eec, Dylan Boyd of eROI, Tamara Gielen of OgilvyOne, Matt Blumberg of Return Path, and Madeline Hubbard of Mind Comet. They’ll talk about how they began blogging, why they blog, and the role of bloggers in the industry. We’re hoping that it inspires some attendees to try blogging, so we’re giving them their first chance to be a blogger here.

We’ve asked attendees to share their thoughts, opinions and takeaways from the conference by commenting on this post—and when the conference is over, we’ll invite the person with the most insightful comment to be a blogger for a day and write a post for the eec’s Voice of Email blog. We may just uncover the next big blogger.

To hear the latest from the Email Evolution Conference in San Diego, please read the comments below.

The mobile phone continues to rise in popularity as a primary communications device making email rendering on mobile devices a serious issue. According to data from MarketingSherpa, approximately 64% of “key decision makers” are reading messages on a BlackBerry or other mobile device. Let’s find out why this issue is finding its way to the top of many a priority list.

What is the problem?

Right now, mobile devices only display text emails. Basically, they make a mess of a finely crafted HTML message. They are fussy about font size and the user is often scanning, not reading, the text. Email marketers will also have a challenging time separating their mobile users in email databases from traditional computer receivers. The segmentation will be necessary, however, to ensure proper rendering of messages to non-HTML-friendly email clients. Another snag is that mobile devices also make it more difficult for email marketers to determine the true open rate of their campaigns. Metrics, we know, are key to evaluating success and implementing positive change.

How do email marketers solve this problem?

There is no simple answer to this question, yet. But, there are questions to start discussing with your email design and marketing teams. The first step is to make sure you’ve considered your audience demographics. Are they using BlackBerrys? Why? Many mobile-device devotees are checking email for urgent issues and will pass over anything that looks disposable. Another consideration that will play a key role as email marketers update their strategies for this new medium is the nature of the campaign. For example, if the information is time-sensitive, can the campaign be targeted to mobile users (and not computer receivers) with only text and short, concise messages?

Naturally, we must also consider how we are gathering information in data collection methods such as surveys, landing pages and other tools. Do your sign-up forms include a mobile phone perference? Do recipients have a way to tell you that they use their mobile device as a primary communications tool? Start by addressing these issues and keep mobile devices on your radar screen as the challenges and opportunities unfold.

—Elie Ashery of Gold Lasso

-->Read other posts in The From Line Extended series.

How many hearts does it take to Make it Pop!? I spent the past three weeks reflecting upon this exceedingly serious email creative quandry.

After counting the number of hearts that have appeared in over 50 V-Day-themed communications, I’ve finally calculated the definitive answer: eight.

It takes eight hearts to Make it Pop! Include only seven: you don’t show no love. But at nine you step over the heartbreak horizon—that’s a heart attack.

For your edification, the simplified results of my highly scientific study appear below.

How many hearts does it take to Make it Pop!? (Click the links to view creatives.)

01 Heart: One Love, Urban Outfitters

02 Hearts: Two Timer, Tumi

08 Hearts*: That Pops!, Harry & David

11 Hearts: A Hole in the Heart, Costco

13 Hearts: Unlucky in Love, Kate Spade

17 Hearts: Eat Your Heart Out, Williams-Sonoma

31 Hearts: I Swear I Counted, RedEnvelope

*Tabulations are halfhearted: partial hearts round to the half.

XOXO ;),
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

You may have seen the news today—here , here and here—that I’m leaving OgilvyOne to join Zinio Systems and VIV Magazine as the global EVP and CMO on Feb. 18. I just wanted to stress that while I’m moving on from OgilvyOne—which I’m leaving in great hands—I am NOT leaving (nor will I ever be leaving) the eec. This year we’re going to rock the email world even harder than we did last year, starting with our first annual Email Evolution Conference next week. See you in San Diego!

—Jeanniey Mullen

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

Listrak - Beyond Open and Read Rate
A guide to email marketing metrics that will help marketers understand how recipients are using their email campaigns.

Artegic: 2008 Mobile Email Marketing - German Language Whitepaper
Artegic's latest report. Please note: this whitepaper is in German.

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