This column is a bit different than my typical column. I won’t share email strategies, bulleted suggestions, or even cool examples. Instead, I’ll give some much needed and well-deserved kudos to those professionals in the email industry who keep the business alive and kicking. Hopefully it will inspire you and make you smile.

I’m going date myself with the next sentence, but don’t care. Do you remember the TV show “Romper Room” from the ’70s? The show was filled with a lot of educational content and socialization skills all communicated through a friendly, fun and socially supportive environment. My favorite part came at the end when the host picked up the “magic mirror” and told TV land whom she saw having a great time along with the cast. As a loyal advocate, I always waited with baited breath knowing she was going to see me and say my name (although sadly she never did).

(You can watch it here. Go to 6:13 to see the magic mirror section.)

Many of the TV shows of the ’70s were like that. They offered us safe and fun social settings where we could learn along with our peers, and not be afraid to make a mistake every once and awhile. Out of that culture and era, it grew a whole big batch of 30-somethings who now have important jobs and make big decisions every day.

In the hard cold world of business, where’s the “Romper Room” for grown-ups? How do we keep growing and learning along with our peers? I think the email industry very well could be the “Romper Room” of our era. As I spend more time with the communities that exist around other industries such as search, mobile, social, online, high-tech, publishing, healthcare, etc., I have yet to find a community that’s as warm and inviting as the email industry.

Over the past five years, I’ve watched this industry grow from a technically specific product-focused world into an industry of fabulous and intelligent people. Anyone who works in the email industry should be assured of one thing: You will not only learn your craft from experts, but this community will be there to support and guide you along the way. You are fortunate to be part of this experience.

People like Dylan Boyd, David Daniels, Loren McDonald, David Baker and Tamara Gielen are priceless. They tirelessly work to evangelize the successes and strengths of email.

People like Stephanie Miller, Chad White, Justin Foster, Ali Swerdlow, Mark Brownlow, Joel Book, Lauren Skena and DJ Waldow selflessly bend over backwards to help anyone who asks them for guidance, statistics or case studies, to ensure email marketing remains respected and credible.

People like David Atlas, Kay Cavender, Deirdre Baird, Lana McGilvray, Kath Pay, Des Cahill, Skip Fidura, Richard Gibson and Lisa Harmon push us to strive to reach the next level of excellence in everything we do with email.

And I would be remiss to leave out people like Matt Blumberg, Al DiGuido, Bill Nussey, Bill McCloskey and Rob Fitzgerald, who aren’t satisfied with email being considered a siloed channel and have dedicated years and years to ensuring the level of respect and reach for the industry is broadened into the realm of “digital.”

My list could go on for days. (Apologies to anyone not listed). If you haven’t yet run into at least one of these industry icons (and Email Experience Council members), seek them out and introduce yourself to them—through Facebook or LinkedIn, at a conference, or on the streets of New York, Massachusetts or California. A quick chat, email or even cup of coffee with any of these people will broaden your outlook on email, challenge your thoughts (for the better) and leave you feeling excited, invigorated and proud to be a part of this very tightly woven and supportive community.

—Jeanniey Mullen of the eec

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

eROI: The Cradle and The Grave
Opt-In, Opt-Out & Feedback Loops

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

EROI just released a study called The Cradle and the Grave that shares survey results from over 500 marketers about opt-in, opt-out and feedback loops. I initially read the statistics and found them interesting and was ready to file the stats and move on. And then something struck me. Unlike most surveys with a lot of statistics, this report was much more than a “nice to have,” non-actionable survey. This one really struck a chord with me.

It seems this report could actually be sending us a warning: Change or die. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic over this, but statistics like “only 30% of respondents offer confirmed opt-in” and “only 23% enable consumer-driven frequency settings to maintain a relationship” scare me. I mean, haven’t we, as an industry grown at all? Twelve years since inception of email marketing, have email marketers turned into “snobs” who have forgotten their roots as consumers?

Before you post a comment and tell me I am insane, think about it: In this report I learned that 90% of people who click on an unsubscribe link or button never hear a word from the company they unsubscribed from. WOW. If your best friend got up and said, “Please don’t speak to me or call me ever again” and walked out of the room, would you just shrug your shoulders and move on with life? I don’t think so. So why are we acting this way with our customers?

We should be looking into ways to find out why people are opting out and offer solutions. Maybe give subscribers the ability to opt-out by message type (i.e., events, special offers, etc.). Maybe we give them the ability to receive updates through a different electronic channel, like RSS or mobile alerts. Or maybe we simply just ask, “Are you sure you want to leave?” and offer the ability to call a human being to discuss it. I am not suggesting that anyone keep emailing people who opt-out, but I am suggesting that we try harder to understand and save these relationships.

Over the years, email marketing has become increasingly challenging both strategically and technically. As an industry, shouldn’t we turn our collective focus on addressing some of the elements (like ISP deliverability issues) that cause us to devote countless hours of our time so that we can return to paying attention to our customers?

Reading this reader survey and report made me realize how simple is can be to take our biggest assets (our customers) for granted and just let them walk out the door. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you download it, take a look at the stats and think about how your current company’s efforts may actually be reflecting on the future stability of your customer relationships. My guess is that if we stopped acting like we didn’t care when people opt-out, we could very well win back the loyalty of 40% of those people, or more.

—Jeanniey Mullen of the eec

The recent grounding of American Airlines flights affected in excess of 250,000 consumers. Among the complaints, they didn’t receive their travel alerts in a timely manner. American Airlines, CEO Gerard Arpey said, it "certainly has not been perfect, but we in good faith have done the best we can." Unfortunately that’s not good enough anymore.

Consumers have grown from accepting email as a viable channel for communication to relying upon it in their daily lives, personal and business. I have heard complaints about broker communications resulting in the loss of thousands, missing and duplicated pizza orders, missed flights and late bills—all of this a result of missing emails.

Email is much more valuable than it has ever been before, so much so that consumers are taking it with them on their phones and PDAs so they can always be in the know. Men’s Health Magazine recently offered that you should ALWAYS keep your smartphone or PDA at your side to be “a person with influence and access to valuable information”.

—Charles Stiles of Goodmail Systems

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

Chad White: Sender Line Branding Tactics In Retail Emails
Solid Branding in the Sender Lines of Promotional Emails; Less So in Welcome Emails

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

We’re star-struck! As websites roll out customer reviews, marketers are rolling them into their email programs. Here are three tips for integrating ratings into email with blockbuster performance.

(1) Show Your Stars (or Paws, or Produce...)
• The Home Depot uses a classic gold star motif, the most obvious customer ratings visual cue. (A Chiminea!? You learn something new every day!)
• PETCO.com shows puppy love with pawprint rankings. (To be sure they didn’t come from my pets, who don’t love Frontline.)
• Betty Crocker cooks up fun with spoon and strawberry star systems. (Super-cute!)

(2) Create Context
• Discovery Channel shows only 5-star items, which can feel over-edited. (Although how could a Dino DVD be anything less than awesome!?)
• Pillsbury mixes it up by including recipes with as few as 2-and-a-half stars, lending the ratings more authenticity and empowering higher-ranking content. (Mediochre Cherry-Almond Coffee Cake, anyone?)
• Macy*s increases accuracy and creates context by
showing ratings to the decimal point, as well as the number of reviews from which the rating is calculated. (Who doesn’t adore that mixer? It’s like a national icon.)

(3) Encourage Participation
• Chefs’ email program makes heavy use of customer ratings. To kick off the effort, they sent a dedicated email incentivizing review creation. (I like the instructional component of this one.)
• Boden recognizes reviewers by including quotes from those who’ve “been there and bought the t-shirt.” (Scooter’s mom is famous! Sweet, Johnnie!)
• Netflix acknowledges DVD returns with a simple email featuring 5 dark stars just begging to be lit up. (Check out my Netflix email experience review, too!)

Superstar Bonus!: Our team of in-house scientists conducted an enormously complex astronomical survey, studying the email galaxy to determine which brands have enough star power to get VIE (Very Important Email) status. Using a secret formula devised by a team of MIT mathemeticians in Vegas, we paired the top 10 VIEs with 10 VIPs. Our findings:

Edmund Hillary: 4.5 stars, REI >
The Princess and the Pea: 5 stars, Brookstone >
Jimmy Buffett: 20 stars, Chefs >
Mr. Wizard: 20 stars, Discovery Channel >
The Best Grandma in the World (Mine!): 25.5 stars, Bisquick >
Scooter’s Mom: 26 stars, Boden >
The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man: 26.5 stars, Pillsbury >
Tim Allen: 42.4 stars, Home Depot >
Martha Stewart: 43.7 stars, Macy’s >
Team Beckham: 74.5 stars, Sports Authority >

My stars!

Until next time,
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

Campaigning online has shifted the political fund-raising paradigm significantly, and forever altered the strategies candidates employ to feed their machines. When we read news stories about this phenomenon, however, we rarely learn exactly what online channel is driving the donations—search, email, social networks, etc. The headlines usually credit “the internet.”

Peter Greenberger who runs the Elections & Issue Advocacy group at Google was kind enough to make some time for me recently, and indicated that each of the campaigns is dedicating over 50% of their online marketing budgets to search—with some dedicating well over 50%. What I find most interesting, however, is that the candidates are primarily leveraging paid search to build their email lists.

Barack Obama is, hands down, the most successful online fundraiser. He often raises over a million dollars a day online, and has certainly forced the other candidates to get more sophisticated about how they approach the web. His online strategies definitely seem to be working. So how exactly is he soliciting donations?

Type “obama” into Google and click on the top link, a paid search listing. Where do to you land? The link takes a clicker to a page that features a simple opt-in box asking for name, email, and address, with an adjacent video window featuring a message from the candidate. There is no “donate now” button, or form with various contribution levels, just a simple opt-in box to register to receive updates from the campaign. Mr. Obama realizes that your email address is the most valuable donation you can make, and that with it he can more effectively induce you into making larger, more frequent donations, or solicit your assistance in making phone calls and otherwise promote the campaign. Obama may be spending the majority of his money on search, but it seems from this example, that he may very well be raising most of his money through email.

—Nicholas Einstein of Datran Media

The answer…
95% --> Yes, the eec should start a campaign to differentiate between spam and permission-based emails that are no longer wanted.
5% --> No, the eec shouldn’t get involved and focus its efforts elsewhere.

Now that that’s settled, we need your ideas on how we can build an awareness campaign to differentiate between spam and email that’s no longer wanted, and can lobby the ISPs for the adoption of unsubscribe buttons. Clearly we already have some ideas, but we need more, much more. Since we’re all marketers, I suspect that you have some killer ideas. So please share them, either here or you can contact me directly at chad@emailexperience.org.

Also, visit the eec homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
How much do you segment your emails?

-->See more Two-Click Survey Results

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

Listrak: Improving Relevancy of Email Campaigns
Simplify Data Capture with Dynamic Profiling

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

Throughout the years, email has always has good intent, and gotten a bad rap.

At its beginning, email was accused of being a questionable mode of communication…and then became spam…then grew to the point where it was accused of overwhelming and overtaking our lives…and now the latest—“Email addles the brain.”

When you think about it, email has been battling for respect since day one, like one of those little toy soldiers battling their way through the real (and very large) world.

I received this photo of an Army man from someone who is believed to be slowly taking over the world. And it was this photo that got me thinking. Why is it that email has had such a long hard battle?
Why can’t people see its virtues and provide it the “props” it deserves? Why is it always a knock-down, drag-out fight to get the press and media to respect email and understand it has become more valuable to consumers today than almost any other mode of communication?

After all, email is kind of like the protector of the digital message. It acts as a buffer for all other modes of communication. As consumers, we can easily provide our email address to verify that the message is secure, provides us relevant information and is able to speak to us and delivery on the expectations we have set. And when the emails we receive don’t live us to those standard, we can easily opt-out, unsubscribe, or change our email address, without having to give out any other information like home address, phone number or other demographics.

Thank you email, for keeping other communication channels safer, and for never giving up!

If you are someone who doesn’t like to give up, I throw out this triple eec challenge to you—Get a free year of eec platinum membership if you can email me these three items of information:

1) The name of the photographer of the pictures above;
2) The location where these photos were taken; and
3) A new photo of these army men somewhere other than these locations.

—Jeanniey Mullen of the eec

During the eec List Growth & Engagement Roundtable's most recent meeting, we discussed an email challenge common to members and email marketers everywhere: What do you do with subscribers who have not responded to your emails in six months or more?

Initially we had a good discussion over what really defines “active.” Because of image caching by the ISPs and the reading of emails on mobile devices or text-only readers, it was decided that you can’t only look at opens as an indicator of someone being engaged. The best definition was any person who opens, clicks or makes a purchase (any purchase from any channel) from your company.

Now that you have defined your active email base, it’s time to start looking at the inactive subscribers. Some suggestions of what to look for when trying to determine why they are inactive were:

Deliverability issues. Are your emails not getting to people’s inboxes? Do you have unknown IP issues that need to be addressed? One suggestion is to look at the domain counts for the inactive subscribers. If you look at the domain counts for your active vs. inactive subscribers to see if there is any clustering that could indicate delivery issues. For example, if your total database contains 30% AOL addresses, but your non-responder domains are 65% AOL, is that difference something that indicates email filtering at AOL may be an issue?

Mobile devices. This is probably more of an issue for B2B marketers, but are more of your subscribers reading emails on their mobile devices? One idea is to include something like “click here to read this on your mobile device” at the top of your message. That would link to a short ‘mobile friendly’ version of your email with short body text and links to pages with more details. You could then track clicks on that link so you know who your mobile readers are.

STRATEGIES TO RE-ENGAGE INACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS:

Explore segmentation tactics. One-to-one communication and segmentation are so easy to do with email. It’s highly recommended that you start categorizing your non-responders into various cells, and start testing different content and subject lines for each cell. When you identify a strategy that starts to show positive results (getting people engaged), use that strategy for the remainder of the cells.

Consider a survey. Inviting subscribers to participate in a survey can be an effective tool for re-activation programs. Ask your subscribers for information that can be helpful in providing them content and offers they will find valuable.

Get a new email address. Is the fact that the subscriber is not responding a sign that the email address is going to be invalid soon (abandoned email account)? Should you try to find a new email address for that subscriber? Over the last 6 to 8 months, there’s been an increase in the number of customers that are submitting their “chronic non-responders” for email change of address and email update services. One reason for this trend is because of slowing list growth. As a marketer’s growth rate of their opt-in house file slows down, the loss of emails due to bounces and non-responders start to really show their impact in terms of lost revenue. Therefore, finding a new email address for a non-responder has been a strategy that’s being adopted by more companies.

Is there a risk if you continue to email non-responders? This question came up. The general consensus was that there probably is not a risk that the non-responder will press the automated complaint buttons or report you as spam. However, abandoned emails do sometimes get converted to “honeypots” or “spam traps” by the ISPs. The ISPs don’t tell us good guys which addresses may have triggered a spam trap, so you don’t know which ones to remove from your list. A suggestion on the call was to do a 1-year purge—anyone who hasn’t shown any action (as defined above) could be suppressed from future campaigns.

This is only a summary of the conversations we had. We talked for about an hour and could have gone longer, so there was a lot of good information shared by everyone on the call, which included eec members DJ Waldow of Bronto Software, Luke Glasner of Robin Publishing, and Stephanie Miller of Return Path.

Join the conversation! Do you have any comments or advice to add regarding this challenge? Is there a list growth challenge that you’d like to see discussed at our next Roundtable meeting on April 9 at 1pm EST? If so, please comment below. Thanks.

—List Growth & Engagement Roundtable co-chairs Dan Babb of Walter Karl Interactive and Austin Bliss of FreshAddress

Share your views on email design and rendering by participating in this SubscriberMail survey, the results of which will be used in my upcoming Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study. Participate and you’ll receive a copy of the results and be entered to win a Blu-Ray DVD player.

>>TAKE THE SURVEY TODAY!

Ahh, another April Fools’ Day. It’s the day when people who are prone to losing track of what day it is generally experience an “oh, crap” moment at some point. (You know who you are. You were running an hour late on March 9.) It’s also a day where there are plenty of email and email-related jokes to go around.

The first one I encountered today is my favorite so far. I went to log into Gmail this morning and found their announcement for Gmail Custom Time, a handy service that allows you to backdate an email that you’re sending, and even have it appear as having been opened already. Forget your sister’s birthday. No problem. Needed an extra day to complete that essay for class. No problem. Just backdate those emails and you’re golden. In their explanation, Gmail shares some testimonials that suggest other novel ways to use Custom Time.

While the faux service is hilarious (I kept thinking, “Boy, would the Bush administration have fun with this”), it made me reflect on how much we rely on email to confirm the chronology of past events and to verify that we were or were not notified of a particular event. The reliance and faith we put in email took another step forward last month when Goodmail debuted a new service proving legal proof of delivery for emails—and that’s in addition to the adoption of email authentication reaching the tipping point in January. So barring the introduction of a Custom Time service like Gmail’s, email is on a good trajectory toward being an even more trust medium.

Here are some other April Fools emails and email-related gags that we’ve seen:

-->E-Dialog sent this email, which linked to this “correct” version.
-->Salon’s Farhad Manjoo launched I Google for You. Just type in your search and he’ll email you that one link that you’re really looking for. See the results from us searching for “email marketing association.”
-->CafePress sent this email announcing the launch of their new dating service, CafePress LoveMatch.
-->eROI announced that they abandoned their new offices in favor of solar-powered yurts along the Willamette River.
-->Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports breaks the news that Bluegill Mail has launched a "report subscriber" button.

If you know of others, let us know and we’ll add them to the list. Thanks and happy April Fools’ Day.

—Chad White of the eec (who is celebrating his 2nd wedding anniversary today—no, really)

Some of those business decisions we make every day as email marketers are harder to gauge than others. Are our open rates good enough? Shall we send this fifth message this week? Should I send CTOs the same message as CFOs? Will our best buyers respond better to 15-off-75 or 10-off-50? All these are tough calls that we base on judgment, best practices and any benchmarks we can glean from vendors.

One of the trickiest is making the case for dropping non-responders from our files. Keeping them on is not expensive and seems to do no harm to active subscribers. It used to be a good idea to keep complaint rates down by flooding the denominator with non-responders—and most marketers felt that since these subscribers didn’t open or click, they wouldn’t complain either.

Not so any longer. It’s risky to keep non-responders on the file. First, there are a lot more of them than ever before. We see clients with anywhere from 25% to 65% of their file now “dead.” Second, it is a deliverability risk. Our client data shows these non-responders often do complain and there is a risk that very old records can become spam traps, significantly damaging your sender reputation.. Third, their strong numbers depress your response rates and may disguise more important trends among active buyers.

Our good client Andrew Magpantay, senior product manager at Reunion.com, coined a great expression when he spoke at our client seminar in Los Angeles last week. He said that reconnecting with non-responders on the file is like gathering up the “loose change.” Sure, there is some value there, and if you have a lot of it lying around it adds up to real dollars, but the risks are real, as well.

In addition to the deliverability hit, typically, there is no revenue gain from continuing to email folks who are no longer interested in your messages or who have been bored by them for so long it would take a miracle to get them to finally open another. Yet, we marketers are ever hopeful. We truly do believe that even though the subscriber has been ignoring our messages for a year, that tomorrow just might be the day! The reality is that very few, if any, will actually come around after such a long time.

At the same time, there is always some sort of “tail” for response from long inactive subscribers. Sometimes it’s enough loose change that it adds up! One of our clients, a retailer, did the analysis and found that buyers who were lapsed 15+ months actually purchased a half million dollars worth of product in the past year. (There are also about 5 million of them!) Another client’s “dead file”—non-responsive for 13+ months after receiving bi-monthly (2x a month) email messages for a year—earned a 2% purchase rate. That was small compared to the 15% purchase rate of other subscribers, but still meaningful. That’s real revenue and no one wants to leave revenue on the table. Andrew’s Reunion.com file of non-responders definitely earned some small response. But not a lot and nowhere near the response rates of the rest of the file.

The key is to make sure that you are doing the analysis and balancing the deliverability and cost risks. Maybe you can’t bear (or afford) to abandon all of the loose change. Consider just picking up the highest value segments, the ”quarters” perhaps, and leave the rest on the ground by cutting the records off after a win-back campaign. Try to re-engage through other channels—when they log into the website or call customer service, through your sales team or via postal mail. Match your non-responders to an email change of address service (full disclosure: Return Path runs the largest)—many subscribers may regularly check an alternate address. Be sure to welcome these returning subscribers back with a custom campaign.

The ISPs, especially MSN/Hotmail and Gmail, are getting smarter about using consumer “votes” for separating senders whose mail is welcome from those who keep mailing long after the subscriber has tuned the program out. So it no longer is always helpful to keep a large denominator of subscribers who are not responding (or complaining) to keep your complaint rate down.

Better, be sure to engage with subscribers before they become too far lost to you. At least every quarter develop a win-back campaign or an invite to visit the preference center and re-engage. This is the only way to prevent having the loose change become significant enough to pain you.

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path