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

Last week’s Fast Company article on how to manage your corporate inbox carried a headline, “Email is Dead.” Wow, did that get my gander up! And get me clicking through, which was the point, I suppose.

In fact, the headline is misleading and not at all what the article reports. Email isn’t dead at all in the corporate environment—in fact, it’s so essential and powerful that many corporations are investing time and resources training employees how to use email more effectively. For instance, the EEC has recommended not sending gratuitous “thank you” emails to help reduce the flow of email.

The lesson for email marketers is that B2B subscribers have a LOT going on in their inbox. Our marketing messages have to break through not just the clutter of other marketers, but messages from the CEO, the boss, the team...all of which are likely a lot more urgent and important to the reader.

Try a quick test on your own B2B marketing emails—what chance do you have for an open or response when you consider your message strategy in context of a very crowded inbox and a day that has fewer hours than project deadlines.

Is the subject line about how the subscriber will benefit? Is there urgency? Is the topic a description of your products or is it about how they benefit the reader? Would your messages break through your own inbox clutter? Think like your customer or prospect—and answer that question again. This is why the most successful B2B marketing emails are not long newsletters or product announcements, but succinct, cogent, relevant (a.k.a.: targeted) offers for training, whitepapers or tools that help readers be more productive, intelligent, capable or impressive to their superiors.

Ensure that B2B marketing messages are truly subscriber-centric, and you’ll have a much better chance of breaking through.

—Stephanie Miller

Best practices have taught us that most people naturally migrate to their name in an email, just to check and see if it is correct. But I never realized how many people pay attention to the salutation of a signature as well. Have you?

This may just be a B2B phenomenon, but check this out. Everyone has a pet peeve in life. Mine is people who sign their emails “BEST.” Best? What does that mean? Best what??? Best wishes? This is the best email I ever sent? You are the best? I bested you? I just don’t get it. In conversations with people about this, there is never a consensus on the “Best” way to sign an email, but there are always a lot of suggestions.

I decided to do something different with my email signature line recently after I saw the movie “Meet the Robinsons.” If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a Disney movie for kids and the moral of the movie is, never give up, always push yourself forward. It was a really cute movie. At the end, there is a great inspirational quote from Walt Disney. After seeing the movie, I decided to use “AF” as my new salutation. (You can email me if you want to know what it stands for).

I have NEVER received so many emails in my life asking me what AF stood for. One person even said, “I spent an hour looking it up online. What does it mean?” I guess I never realized the power of the salutation before.

Wonder if this could play into a good email strategy somewhere?

—Jeanniey Mullen

As any good salesperson knows, the best time to engage with a prospect is when they are in market. Dialogue happens and business closes. Email can work the same way—even, in some low-consideration, self-service or low-investment cases, creating a valuable conversation that completely replaces the need for a sales person.

We say "dialogue" but let's face it, it's mostly monologue. A very valuable and targeted monologue, but mostly one way just the same. That's okay if the prospect is truly in market—either self-identified or based on behavior. Many email broadcast vendors and solutions can easily trigger a series of timed email messages along a needs tree, based on prospect behavior. Once I've downloaded your software, requested a whitepaper or abandoned items in the shopping cart, use email to close the deal. The number of emails you need will vary according to your business and prospect knowledge of your brand, but the key is to test for the right timing, cadence and content that will move the majority of prospects along the sales cycle.

Test—that's a key point! Keep testing to keep the material and timing current with market trends and competitive pressures, even seasonality.

Consider the trial software scenario. Technology companies have been using email for years to close from trial to paid subscriber, setting a high bar for success and professionalism in this market. Ideally, the email program would be intelligent, so that when the prospect changes his status, the email program adjusts. Don't keep sending me, "Would you like to try our software" emails after I've already spent five days active in the software. Instead, acknowledge when I've actually opened and used the trial software, when I've provided feedback and especially when I've purchased.

The first key is clear permission. Be sure that the prospects know what to expect and make sure it's easy to get out of the conversation. The other primary keys to success are thinking about both content and cadence. How quickly does a prospect make the decision? Match the email to that. Lots of email bunched up over a few days is rarely the right answer, even if the prospect is highly active. If your email series happens over the course of seven to 10 days or less, be sure that the subject lines are differentiated so that prospects knows there is something valuable in each. Give email a specific purpose and give the prospect some breathing room. Would you take a call from a salesperson every 10 minutes while you are considering? Do you want the sales associate to stand outside the dressing room calling in tips and ideas for color matches? Give the prospect time and be valuable and present, rather than overwhelming.

As with most email marketing, if you don't have the software or technology to do this kind of lifecycle marketing, you can baby step into it and prove the concept. Pull the file of abandoned shoppers or free trial downloaders every week or month and send a series of emails—tracking them closely to watch performance and course correct as needed. If you can't trigger the emails and be intelligent about the file, then err on the side of sending fewer, each with more punch.

Either way, it's critical for prospects to feel like there really is a dialogue. Include feedback mechanisms and actively ask for input (and then act on it). Demonstrate that you've listened. Give prospects options like a telephone number or live chat feature. Even a highly custom email is junk if it's just a one-way broadcast. In any communication, including a monologue, sincerity and relevancy count. Hype is not a dialogue.

—Stephanie Miller