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

eec Reportlet: 7 Tactics for Driving Traffic to Stores With Email
How to Leverage Your Store Base in Your Email Marketing

Email Checklist Series: Email Design
What to check to maximize your email creative’s performance.

Email Checklist Series: Code QA Testing
What to check to make sure your email looks and acts exactly how you intended.

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

Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Stephanie Miller of Return Path:

If you include your website navigation bar in your emails, test to see if it’s truly worth the real estate. I find it fascinating that many marketers have intense loyalty to including their website nav bar in their email templates, even if they have never actually done any analysis on the nav bar to see if it’s (a) relevant and interesting or (b) ever clicked on. This is definitely worth testing, especially as so many of them take up a lot of key real estate in the preview pane. If the nav bar in your emails isn’t driving significant clickthroughs, then I dare you to cut it.

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

-->Consider more Double Dog Dares.

The answer…
38% --> Direct mail and catalogs
19% --> Blogs/RSS
17% --> SMS (text messages)
10% --> Social networks
10% --> Internet ads
4% --> Search
2% --> Television and radio

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

Also, visit the eec homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
What is the primary metric by which you measure the success of your subject line A/B tests?

-->See more Two-Click Survey Results.

Hitting “send” on any email campaign always leaves us with a small feeling of dread in the pit of our stomachs. “Did I forget something? Did I double-check EVERYTHING? Will my message render properly? Will I have a job in two hours?” We feel your pain.

Ever wish you had a buddy to rely on—someone competent, steadfast and efficient who would remember to help you double-check all the key elements of design and QA success? Well, now you have one—in the form of two email checklists from the eec’s Email Design Roundtable.

The first is the Code QA Testing Checklist, which covers what to check to make sure your email looks and acts exactly how you intended. The second is the Email Design Checklist, which covers what to check to maximize your email creative’s performance.

Both checklists are available in the eec’s Whitepaper Room—and all this week you can download them for free.

As part of the creation of these checklists, the Roundtable members discussed their value, their own send-button “feelings of dread,” and even some mistakes they’ve made. Learn how their real-world experience contributed to the checklists and about some trouble spots to avoid:

Brent Shroyer of Listrak: When you put together a web page, you can always go back and fix it later. But in an email you only have one shot. You have to be perfect. The importance of a checklist is critical for email more so than any other online effort, since it is once and done.

Chad White of the Email Experience Council: Subject lines are so important. Subject lines are right up there for the most frequent spot for mistakes. We tend to put writing them off until the end.

Stephanie Miller of Return Path: Yes, and then the result is that messages go out with TBD or “subject line goes here” or misspelled words or missing words. Instead, view it as a critical part of the content and spend time making it relevant and engaging. Oh, and that there are no errors!

Raj Khera of MailerMailer: Test different subject line lengths to see what garners higher open rates. In studying our customer base, we found that subject lines with 35 characters or less had a significant boost in opens.

Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon: One essential that often gets missed is that the primary link shows up just below the preview pane, so it’s not visible without scrolling. Oh, I think to myself, ouch! If they had just looked at it and moved it up 30 pixels, it would improve response so much!

Joanne Carry of DMG World Media: Always check the rendering. Ignore Lotus Notes! It’s increasingly important with Outlook 2007 not supporting CSS and Gmail being a growing part of many marketers’ files.

Brent: Be sure that everything that can be HTML text is actually HTML text. Avoid unnecessary images so that your message is completely visible even when images are turned off.

Chad: Image suppression is like a philosophy—a new way of constructing the message and approaching design. This needs to be adopted by email marketers.

And here’s one that is so fixable, and yet happens all the time: I so often see dead links. I know it seems silly to say that we would double-check the links, and it’s tedious, but it must happen frequently that this step gets skipped. I know what I do, when the link doesn’t work—I just abandon it and go on with my life.

Lisa: Oh, yes! And then what happens is that follow-up and conversions are down and no one can figure out why. Well, it was because the links were not working. Another important step is making sure not just that the link works, but that it goes to a place that is logical. Optimize your landing page as part of the overall email experience.

Stephanie: Isn’t it true that whenever response is down, the first thing we do is blame the creative? But it’s often the case that deliverability was poor, the message was not mailed at the optimal time for subscribers or there were back-to-back messages from the same company, or even that the list was not segmented properly. So many things that are not a function of design.

Brent: Make sure the price in the alt tag text matches the pricing in product imagery. If the price changes during the production cycle, then you can get caught with an old alt tag. Also make sure that the landing page matches as well.

Lisa: I’ve seen renewed interest in text files because of mobile, thinking about its importance being slightly renewed. Although I confess that it’s easy to never look at your text files or to bother matching them to the current offer. How many times I see that the copyright is last year, or the copy is outdated or is last week’s promotion.

Share your own pre-send jitters or advice by commenting below.

—eec Email Design Roundtable co-chairs Lisa Harmon and Julie Montgomery of Smith-Harmon

My little brother got tinted windows and rims on his sage green Chevy Malibu. (Sweet!) Just as he tricked out his transportation, so must we trick out our transactional emails, leveraging the opportunity to move the meter on the messages that generally enjoy the highest open rates (excuse me—render rates!) of almost any we send. Let’s get to it with 10 top tips and several outstanding order confirmation examples.

10 WAYS TO TRICK OUT YOUR TRANSACTIONAL TOUCHPOINTS:

(1) Brand! Include your company logo and colors to make transactional communications feel consistent with your other marketing materials. Apple, Coach, Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma all do this. A metallic paint job and alloy rims produce a similar effect.

(2) Include navigation items relevant to the transaction, especially a link to the "Customer Service" section of your website, like Williams-Sonoma. (BTW— that is the best rice cooker ever. It plays an aweseome little song when your tasty rice is ready to eat.) This is the basic equivalent of vanity plates.

(3) Use text treatments, color and graphics to maximize usablity and legibility. This is just like hanging plush dice from the rearview.

(4) Add an upper-right “key details” module, making it easy to locate the most critical account and order details. Both Apple and Crate & Barrel pop the most relevant information up top, well within the preview pane. It’s like...the opposite of tinted windows.

(5) Include customer service contact information...and not just a URL, but a phone number with hours of availability, like Williams-Sonoma. This is not unlike the famous bumper sticker: “How’s my driving? Call 1-80…”

(6) Say “thank you.” Don’t forget your manners! Pay attention to tone and consider a letter format, which can feel more genuine and personal. Coach offers flowers with their thanks, which I find cute. They also get early-adapter points, as this particular order conirmation is from 2006. OMG...ancient! (Mariah Carey and I go way back.)

(7) Show product photography and link product names back to your website to reinforce excitement around the purchase. This is not unlike the sensation we experience when cranking up the bass on a souped-up sound system.

(8) Cross- and up-sell relevant products to already-engaged buyers. Apple does this brilliantly. (Not that I would ever listen to Bon Jovi! Must be a glitch in their recommendations engine, right? Ha ha ha...)

(9) Add valuable content and offers. Coach includes an option that allows belated gifters to send recipients an email announcing the soon-to-arrive prize. Just like triple tailpipes!

(10) Protect the primary purpose of the message—to communicate a transaction. Follow guidelines regarding transactional-to-promotional content ratios and offer placement. For instance, while Crate & Barrel does a lovely order confirmation, one wonders whether it isn’t light on the confirmation and heavy on the order. Melinda Kreuger, "The Email Diva", wrote an excellent article about transactional email guidelines just this past Tuesday.

Plus, Email Marketing Reports has culled an exceptional collection of resources and articles around tricking out your transactional email.

A bobble-headed hula dancer isn’t a bad idea, either.

As ever,
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

I rented a car from Enterprise for the May 2008 Email Insider Summit on Captiva Island in Florida. Enterprise has been my vendor of choice for the past 5 years because of their incredible customer service and comparable prices. As far as I’m concerned they are ozone layers above the rest.

However, as an email marketing account manager at Bronto Software for the past 3 years, I’ve evolved into a consumer with a critical eye toward marketing—email marketing specifically. I think about email all the time and am always fascinated on how companies communicate and execute on their email marketing campaigns. Enterprise was now on the clock. So...sit back, buckle up, and read on to learn more about my Enterprise email experience.

Half asleep due to boredom, I muddled through the normal car rental stuff—license, car model/size, etc. Then, after I signed away my life (and declined the optional insurance) the Enterprise guy asked me for my email address. Suddenly, he had my full attention. Of course, I asked why he needed my email and what he would use if for. Very politely, Mr. Enterprise informed me that they send out occasional updates on Enterprise specials. Sign me up!

I was immediately impressed that not only did he overtly ask for my permission, the salesman also began to set some expectations (frequency). It would have been hard to set content expectations in that particular venue, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

When I arrived at my bed & breakfast on Captiva Island and found a wireless connection, I checked my Gmail for the Enterprise welcome message. D’oh. Strike one. No email from Mr. Enterprise. Good thing my expectations for welcome messages were pretty low. A recent study by Return Path showed the dismal results on welcome messages (60% of companies surveyed didn’t bother to send one!).

The good news? The very next day, Enterprise sent me a confirmation email. Yay! The from name was “Enterprise Plus” (okay) and the subject line read “Activate your Enterprise Plus membership” (love)—clear and to the point. The message with images off was not so great, but that’s a post for another day. Images on was pretty good, not great, but at least it gave me a few opportunities to activate my account. Not bad, Enterprise. My faith in their email marketing program was returning.

I figured I’d put them to the test...see what happened if I did *not* confirm by clicking “Activate Now.” So I opened the email, but didn’t confirm. In fact, I didn’t even click on a link. Lo and behold, one week to the day later, Enterprise sent me another email. I know what you are thinking (and what I was hoping): A reminder to confirm my interest in their email marketing campaign. Nope. This one came from “Enterprise-Rent-A-Car” (makes sense) and the subject read “David, speed your way to savings from Enterprise” (okay), but the content (Enterprise Regular Email.jpg) had nothing to do with activating my account. It was just the normal Enterprise email. Actually, the call to action offered me at 15% discount on NASCAR.COM Superstore. Okay, I’ll admit, I am going into year #2 in a Fantasy Nascar league, but come on Enterprise! You didn’t really know that. Then...on June 10th, another Enterprise email. It was the exact same email - same subject line, same copy, same offer (Nascar.com), with a different From Name (Enterprise Plus). In case you forget, at this point, I have still not confirmed my opt-in.

TAKEAWAYS:
1. In order to grow your email marketing list, take advantage of all opportunities to ask future and current customers: Enterprise nailed this one.
2. Send a Welcome Message immediately (set proper expectations around content and frequency). Enterprise bombed this one.
3. If you are going to send a confirmation email, make sure you receive an opt-in BEFORE sending more email. Enterprise was so close, but missed it.

—DJ Waldow of Bronto Software

*Earlier this week, Enterprise sent me a reminder email about my reservation for my Connecticut trip. Hmmm.

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

2008 Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study
Message Integrity & Email Design Issues in an Images-Off Environment

Women's Bean Project Case Study
The Results of the eec's 2007 Nonprofit Project

FreshAddress: Build or Buy?
Real-Time Email Address Validation

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

Over the past four weeks or so, I have been playing with a free outlook plug-in that has transformed my inbox into a much cooler place to be. It’s called Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) and I can now report with conviction that it is one of the more useful pieces of software on my PC. It fundamentally changes how I use Outlook, and actually increases the value of the email I have stored there by providing me with far easier access to it and the specific information contained within. Besides being very cool software, I believe Xobni and other new products out there on the horizon will be altering the landscape of the inbox in the near term and fundamentally changing how consumers interact with their email.

Xobni indexes all of one’s Outlook email and makes it easily searchable—an extremely useful feature. What is most interesting, however, is how Xobni extracts data from ones emails and analyzes it. For one, the software examines the “To” and “CC” lines of emails, combines it with frequency information, and makes inferences about personal connections, featuring these connections as a “network” of contacts. It’s interesting to note in the screenshot below that both ‘Marketing Daily’ and ‘MediaPost Publications’ are featured right at the top of my network.

The software extracts phone numbers from email signatures as well, and displays this information for convenient access. It also aggregates access to all of the files exchanged between certain senders—very useful stuff.

One of Xobni’s coolest features is called Xobni Analytics—the interface provides a fascinating view into one’s email patterns. It features “time to respond” information by recipient, as well as email traffic by hour, domain, type, etc. For someone who eats, breathes, and sleeps email, this information is fascinating.

I believe the development of products like Xobni and others on the horizon will absolutely change user behaviors around the inbox. For me personally, it has vastly increased the value of my archived newsletters, as I now can search them all by keyword and quickly access all of that stored information. For example, a quick search for “deliverability” in my mail account yielded 148 relevant results—most listings were from saved newsletters.

I believe it’s probably too early to adjust email marketing strategies to accommodate these new products, but exciting developments in email clients are definitely coming down the pike, and I believe they will only increase the value of authentic, relevant email.

Check out Xobni and let me know if you think it’s as cool as I do. And if you’ve seen other inbox plug-ins that you think may help shape the future of the email inbox, please share.

—Nicholas Einstein of Datran Media

Image blocking has become pervasive, with approximately half of all email users suppressing images by default. However, email marketers have not fully adjusted to this reality and reflected it in their email design.

The two strongest weapons in their arsenal in the fight against image blocking, HTML text and alt tags, aren’t used nearly enough. Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.

Consequently, emails from 23% of the retailers reviewed in this study were completely unintelligible in an inbox environment—and there were some significant shades of gray among the 77% that were intelligible, because of lackluster HTML text and alt tag usage.

In addition to our observational study of retailers, the Email Experience Council and SubscriberMail, the sponsor of this study, surveyed 472 marketing executives in March. When it comes to designing for images off, only 47% of the survey respondents said that their company had taken action. Those actions ranged from adding alt tags or a “click to view” link to minimizing images above the fold.

Of the 38% that had tested to see whether the changes they made produced results, 32% have seen more opens, 32% have seen more clickthroughs, and 17% have seen more conversions—with 47% seeing at least a 10% improvement.

“Email marketing currently generates an estimated return on investment of $48.29 for every dollar spent on it, according to the Direct Marketing Association,” says Jeanniey Mullen, the founder and executive chairwoman of the Email Experience Council and chief marketing officer of Zinio. “We conservatively estimate that if all marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, email’s ROI would jump to $52.69. Not paying attention to rendering impacts revenue directly.”

“The results of this study underscore the importance of proactively designing email to compensate for image suppression,” says Jordan Ayan, the CEO of SubscriberMail. “Specifically, email marketers must design emails to work with and without images present and test to ensure optimal image rendering. Marketers whose design accounted for image suppression reported impressive lifts in key performance areas—the results speak for themselves. Still, a significant percent of email marketers realize this issue, yet fail to take action to address it.”

Other key findings from the study include:

• 14% of retailers compose their navigation bars with HTML text rather than images.

• 3% of retailers used HTML call-to-action buttons rather than images.

• 88% of retailers include a “click to view” link in their preheader text.

• 63% of retailers include whitelisting instructions in their preheader text.

• The emails from only 21% of retailers displayed meaningful snippet text.

*Please note that this report does not cover rendering on mobile devices, a subject that is worthy of its own separate report.

Get the Full Report
Visit the Whitepaper Room to download the full 41-page report, which is free for eec platinum members, available at a discount to eec gold and silver members, and available for $219 for non-members. Not a member? Learn more about becoming a member of the Email Experience Council.

A recent review of practices by top brand email marketers makes me think that there is something really wrong with our collective ability to follow best practices when it comes to creating compelling subscriber experience for new subscribers. Return Path just released the results of a study of 61 companies on this topic, and I tell you, the findings were pretty disappointing.

Below are some highlights from Great Email Experiences - Is Your Brand Relationship Worthy. I’d love your feedback. Does this synch with what you find in your own inbox? In your own marketing programs?

The biggest shocker for me is in the depth of the missed opportunity. Relatively simple and firmly proven best practices were NOT followed by some pretty large brands—Best Buy, Nike, Sony, and Disney, to name a few—all with smart email marketers in house. Does that suggest we have the wrong best practices? Or that sending relevant email really takes THAT much more work than just spitting out broadcasts? It shouldn’t, right? Yet, maybe it is that much harder, which is why so few of us actually spend the time to do it well.

We were rather surprised by the findings:

1. A majority (60%) of the companies in our survey did not send a welcome message. Of the 40% that did send a welcome message, only 33% sent it within 24 hours. The remaining 7% took anywhere from two days to three weeks.

2. The shock of the missing welcome messages was compounded by the astonishing number of companies—30%!—who didn’t send any email within a month of sign up. While the majority did start sending email soon after subscribe, engagement—which is key in the first 30-days—was lacking.

3. 70% of companies asked for a lot of data (name, address, birthday, and so on) at subscribe, and the bulk of them (75%) never used it. This “just in case” mentality is not a good experience for subscribers that are forced to complete long forms and preferences when the potential benefit is never realized.

4. Even across four very different industry verticals, the marketing offers (Free Shipping! Discount! Sweepstakes!) were surprisingly the same. Often these types of offer strategies are self-fulfilling and addictive. Why not use valuable content to drive readership and stand out from the crowd?

Look forward to your comments!

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

I was inspired by ExactTarget’s recently published whitepaper, Subscribers Rule. “Subscribers Rule” is—in ExactTarget’s words—“acknowledgement that we, as marketers, bear a responsibility to deploy one-to-one marketing technologies in ways that put subscriber needs first.”

I went for a jog yesterday in my “Subscribers Rule” t-shirt and contemplated great ways for marketers to begin empowering individual subscribers. My starting-point pick: the Communications Preferences Center. This is the landing page on your website that allows your subscribers to control what, when, and how you communicate with them.

FIVE WAYS TO MAKE YOUR COMMUNICATION PREFERENCE CENTER POP!:

(1) Let subscribers decide what information they want to offer.
Tommy Bahama asks only the most basic details upfront, then layers in the opportunity to identify optional detailed preferences. This allows subscribers to decide how much information they want to disclose—and how much time they want to invest in the sign-up process. Asking for too much upfront can result in a lost email address.

(2) Provide clear descriptions of your content options.
BabyCenter publishes a variety of personalized email newsletters. They make it easy for subscribers to choose which they’d like to recieve by posting descriptions and examples of each publication. Content selection happens at step three of their simple, three-step registration process. BabyCenter includes an explanation around each step to help subscribers understand how providing data is to their benefit.

(3) Allow subscribers to select their preferred message format.
As more subscribers view email on mobile devices, it becomes important to ask them how they prefer to receive their emails—in HTML or Text format. The New York Times follows a three-step registration process similar to BabyCenter’s; however, because they reach out to more business customers using mobile devices, they include a format preference option. I like that they include a “What’s this?” link to explain the difference between HTML and Text; it’s silly to assume that the general public understands the difference.

(4) Give subscribers control over frequency.
While your biggest fans might want to hear from you every day, your sunny-day subscribers might prefer to receive email from you only once a month. If you have the capability to deliver on the promise, offer frequency as an option on your communication preferences page… and, as a way to retain over-mailed subscribers, on your opt-down page, like in this Saks example.

(5) Make the experience pleasant and easy.
I like Louis Vuitton’s Communication Preferences Center for its transparency and conciseness. Options to subscibe, modify and unsubscribe appear within a left-land menu bar, and each page lives succinctly above the fold. As we’d hope for a luxury brand, the pages are well-produced and attractive; the newsletter sample screenshot is a nice touch.

Tommy Bahama also presents a well-branded experience, from the design to the copy. Rather than just picking up default verbiage, they make the text paradise-appropriate: “Tell us what inspires you, and we'll create an email experience that's as perfect as a well-planned vacation.”

Paradise delivered!

As ever,
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

Type the phrase “centralizing email marketing” into a search engine and you’ll be served up an impressive number of results (at this writing, about 247,000). And it’s no wonder—email marketing continues to rank among the most popular tactics that marketers use to reach their audiences.

The arguments for centralizing are compelling: Managing emails through a single platform enables companies to not only more effectively manage their brand and good sender reputation, but it’s also much easier to manage the frequency of communication—no one wants to frustrate their audience to the point of unsubscribing. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

Not so fast. According to JupiterResearch, only 38% of companies have a single department handling email communication—while 24% have six or more. With all the benefits of centralizing email marketing, why aren’t more companies taking this approach?

For some companies, it may come down to resources and priorities. For example, within very large organizations, email is used to communicate with many different audiences—employees, partners, end user customers, and prospects—among others. Each of these audiences has different expectations for how they should be communicated with and likely, a different group managing that communication stream.

Because email marketing was often developed as a grassroots effort within each group, it’s not unusual for larger organizations to be actively using several different email platforms to manage their campaigns. In these instances, transitioning to a completely centralized approach requires almost Herculean effort.

However, in the absence of a completely centralized approach, there are still things you can do to streamline email communications and ensure a positive experience for your audience. Here are three specific tips that are reasonably quick and easy to implement:

1. Develop and share an email marketing calendar.

Wherever there’s a risk of message crossover, establish a marketing calendar to track these campaigns and assign a calendar owner. Although the owner is ultimately responsible for keeping the calendar updated, all groups should participate in the calendar development and notify the owner if campaign dates shift.

My team uses a web-based calendar hosted on our intranet site; however, tools such as Google Calendar or even an Excel spreadsheet are simple, no/low-cost alternatives.

2. Ensure that all stakeholders are on all campaign seed lists.

Whether you’re sending a campaign to a house or rented list, be sure and add the appropriate people to your seed lists. You may want to send test seeds to a smaller group for review and feedback, and then to a larger group for live campaign drops. This is additional insurance that everyone is aware of what messages are leaving the building.

3. Share examples of campaigns and results at cross-functional monthly or quarterly reviews.

At least once a quarter, get together and share examples of campaign creative and results. Even if you’re mailing to completely different audiences, best practices are sure to emerge that you’ll want to apply to your line of business.

If you work for a large organization, the idea of centralizing your email marketing may seem difficult, if not impossible. But by doing a little detective work and implementing some quick fixes that don’t require a lot of administrative overhead, you can do a lot to improve the quality of your email communications and set yourself up for more formal centralization in the future.

—Cheryle Ross, the eCommerce Marketing Manager of Xerox Corp.

*Cheryle was invited to be a blogger for a day after sharing her thoughts in our Voices from the Email Evolution Conference post.