You've swept your customers off their feet with a dazzling email creative and message. To help you give them somewhere equally stunning to land, we at the eec Email Design Roundtable have added a Landing Page Checklist to our Email Checklist Series. With so many details to think about, our checklist offers a collection of ideas that you can easily apply to your program.

Landing pages should feel like a continuation of the positive experience initiated by your email so that the motions from opening the message to clicking through to responding to the call-to-action (CTA) feel like one fluid movement. Brush up on your landing page best practices to increase conversion:

● Audience and Goal. Thinking about your intended audience and the actions you want to inspire were your primary foci in creating your email, and they're also the core of the landing page. Construct your landing page to propel your audience toward1s the next step. Anthropologie landing pages like this one often add an extra step between the message and the product pages, but their whimsically artsy landing pages are on-brand and engaging to their particular audience.

● Design. To facilitate the unity of the experience, the creative elements must stay consistent with the email—use similar graphics, text and imagery. Keep your designs quite simple—consider losing the navigation and extra links that will distract from the primary message. Use images if they can earn their keep by relating specifically to your offer—steer clear of distracting, generic imagery. This Horchow message shows a nice progression from email to landing page design. The landing page picks up the basic creative elements of the email but shows larger and more compelling imagery and CTAs to move the viewer to the next step.

● Main Copy. Best practice is to use a white background behind text. Keep your copy brief, and start it off by stating the benefits of the offer concisely and in manner consistent with the email copy. This Land of Nod landing page repeats the headline from the (very cute!) email but includes more detailed information about the features. It often works well to use bullet points and a large font for readability, listing the benefits in order of value. Every word should work toward getting the visitor to act.

● Forms. If you need to gather customer information with forms, hold interest by keeping them short and sweet. Ask only for the most necessary information, clearly indicate required fields and pre-populate those fields whenever possible. Include all forms and CTAs necessary for conversion on the landing page. Which brings us to the big whammy…

● Call-to-Action. Your landing page's great love, its reason for existing: the big CTA. But don't stop at one: repeat your CTA multiple times to maximize clicks. The initial CTA should live right after the summary of the offer details and needs to fall above the fold. The CTA copy must be direct and obvious and pack a punch that inspires action. Be careful not to drive your sale to soon—let the CTA match the subscriber's place in the decision-making process. If you're a retailer, consider using an "Add to Cart" button as opposed to something like a "Buy Now" button, as Crate & Barrel does in this focused landing page from this message.

● Other Tips. It may also be a good idea to create multiple landing pages so that they can get as specific as possible to different customer segments. Keep your landing pages live for longer than you'd expect. You don't want people who read their messages later than the rest of the crew to be sent flying with nowhere to touch down and act.

A solid landing page that attends to best practices offers customers a memorably smooth experience with your brand while effectively increasing conversion. For even more tips and tricks, check out the new addition to the eec Email Checklist Series.

Comment below to tell us about some of your own smooth and rocky landings.

–eec Email Design Roundtable co-chairs Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon and Megan Walsh of Williams-Sonoma

Are you happy with the structure and performance of your email program? If you wish you could just blow it up and start over, we dare you—no, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for Silverpop:

Start your email program over from scratch. Shut the door, turn off your phone, IM and Twitter, and get out a plain, old-fashioned sheet of paper or clean off the office whiteboard. Ask yourself these questions: What would I do differently if I could start our email program over? What am I doing purely out of habit or because everybody else is doing it? What do I wish I could do but I can't because I don't have the budget or backing from management?

As you stare at the blank page or whiteboard, ask yourself these questions:

● List growth: Are we focused on quantity rather than quality? Are we using questionable acquisition methods just to hit some arbitrary list-size targets? Are we still using pre-checked boxes and single opt-in because my boss couldn't care less about spam complaints, list hygiene and delivery rates?
● List churn and inactivity: Do we understand how active our database is? From one-third to three-quarters of our list is likely inactive; so, what are we doing to reactivate those subscribers that have tuned us out? What programs do we have to deliver greater value to our loyal customers? What can we do to minimize unsubscribes, spam complaints and bounces?
● Design and format: Are our image-heavy emails with lots of administrative information located above the fold still the right approach? Is it time to start from scratch and have an email-design professional create a template that renders well on mobile devices and in preview panes with blocked images? Should we redesign our masthead and navigation links to better correspond with the actions our subscribers want to take?
● Welcome program: Is it time to chuck the text-only confirmation email for a well-designed, multi-message welcome email program?
● Message types: We've been sending the same basic emails for the last two years—our "Weekly Specials" email and monthly "Close Outs." Should we blow this up and let subscribers select different categories and frequencies? Can we add a slew of new email types—birthday specials, reminders, surveys, refer-a-friend promotions, geographic-targeted messages, educational or tip-oriented emails, etc.? Can we wrestle the transactional emails away from IT and design them to cross-sell and up-sell?
● Batch-and-blast: Is it time to stop whining, "How can I move to a lifecycle-, behavior- or trigger-based approach when it's all I can do to get the weekly batch-and-blast emails out the door?" Could I swap one or two batch-and-blast emails a month so I can start testing some more targeted approaches?
● Metrics: Are we tracking the right performance metrics? Our open and click-through rates are doing well, but my boss doesn't seem to care and wonders why we spend so much time on email marketing. Is it time for me to tackle proving the contribution of email to lifetime customer value, cost savings and direct ROI?
● Incentives: Have we gotten hooked on incentives —free shipping and 10% off? Should we test some targeted emails sent only to people that clicked on specific links and use no or reduced incentives to see if we can improve our margins?
● Preference centers: Our unsubscribe page is so ugly and doesn't offer any alternatives. Can I get some design and Web resources to create a worldclass unsubscribe/preference page? Speaking of preference centers, can we continue without one?

If you take up this dare: Let us know by commenting below. Did you overhaul your email completely or just tweak it here and there? What's the first thing you would change about your program if you could? Finally: Which of these changes, if any, could you actually make in your present program? And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that, too.

–>See more Double Dog Dares.

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

TailoredMail: Connect 1:1
In today's world, email marketing is no longer a simple strategy. Marketers need to make their message stand out with personalization and relevance by communicating effectively with customers and prospects to promote dialogue. Check out this great whitepaper from TailoredMail for some great tips and information.

Welcome Email Checklist
What elements to include and to consider for a high impact welcome email. Compare your welcome email design against this checklist before approval.

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

The holiday season sends everyone into a flurry. It should be a fun flurry for email senders, giving us a chance to mix up our typical creative. But accompanying this potential for uniqueness and experimentation is the potential for the sort of holiday clichés that cause consumers to cringe. Bring freshness to your holiday approach this year by indulging in a percolation period before starting in on your design work.

Start now: Allow time to gather inspiration that embodies the holiday attitudes you want to convey. This first stage of the creative process can take the form of a physical bulletin board or a digital archive—anything that lets you store and revisit images and other touchstones. Whether you find yourself digging through old boxes at the back of the closet or clicking through internet collections of ads from years past, look for anything that might make your emails sparkle.

(1) Consider new ways to use traditional imagery: Look through old childhood holiday photos and stills from favorite movies. Sift through magazines and online ads. Seek fresh stylistic choices: unusual backgrounds, unique croppings, interesting camera angles.

(2) Envision inventive color palettes: Browse ads and emails from past years or try out combinations of wrapping paper scraps and ribbon. If you're stuck, visit your local hardware store and peruse paint swatches, or browse the Adobe Kuler site to see what color palettes others have used.

(3) Focus on fonts: Consider the effects of different font treatments you come across in holiday cards or magazines and how they might fit into your creative scheme.

(4) Eat chocolate: Get in the holiday spirit with a piece of the good, dark bittersweet stuff! I have become no less than obsessed with Theo's Madagascar Dark Chocolate Bar.

Looking around early with an eye to inspiration will give you a storehouse of options when it comes time to actually build your holiday email design library. By focusing on the creative process upfront, you discover the tone and style that dresses your brand in its own holiday best.

As ever,
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

–>Read other Make it Pop! posts.

Welcome messages show some of the highest open rates in the email world. We're surprised by how many senders neglect to even send a welcome or, almost as bad, send lusterless messages that feel downright unwelcoming.

When people invite you into their home or office, you know whether you feel welcomed even if it's tough to pinpoint exactly why. Do your hosts reach out to you with a handshake or hug? Do their tones and expressions tell you they're thrilled to see you? Several subtleties contribute to welcoming you into a new place—why should welcome emails be any different?

To help you make the most of your welcome, we at the Email Design Roundtable have added a Welcome Message Checklist to our Email Checklist series. With so many details to think about, our checklist offers a collection of ideas that you can easily apply to your own message style.

We drew our inspiration from emails we received that delivered the most on that warm and welcomed feeling:

Stephanie Miller of Return Path loves Sephora's welcome email, which does what a welcome message should— confirms the sign up, makes the subscriber feel delighted to have signed up and gets recipients shopping. And it does this all in a well-designed format that is similar to the regular messages Sephora sends. Sephora gets bonus points for their touch of personalization: adding a first name here makes the email feel like a visit to a store where the clerk knows you. Omaha Steaks adds the same personal touch to their message, and they also throw in a special offer that shows the recipient that they're now on the inside track.

Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon: First of all, I love Virgin America.
Second of all, I love this eleVAte welcome email for at least two reasons:
(1) It includes all the details I need to revisit the site, which inspired me to actually keep and file the email away.
(2) Welcome emails are sometimes made to do too much, which turns into a law-of-diminishing-returns, over-messaged mess. This one is super-simple, which makes the three icons and buttons to book, edit preferences and view routes POP!

Chad White of the Email Experience Council: When I did the data collection for my Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study last year, I saw a huge range of welcome emails in terms of engagement. Unfortunately, I saw a lot of emails that looked like Foot Locker's welcome message—boring, text-only, weak branding, and almost nonexistent calls-to-action. Fortunately, there were some retailers that recognized the engagement opportunity that a welcome email presents. For instance, Circuit City's welcome email focused on making sure that subscribers had indicated their preferences and were signed up for the newsletters that were most relevant to them. And HPshopping's welcome message does a good job of covering lots of different bases succinctly. The best advice I ever heard about welcome emails was: "Give them a reason to save the welcome email." Hopefully this checklist will help marketers achieve that goal.

Share your worst and warmest welcome message experiences by commenting below.

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

As we send more segmented, triggered and dynamically populated emails, it becomes necessary to approach email creative design in a new way. Rather than seeing each email design as a separate entity, we need to start thinking in terms of an email creative framework.

An email creative framework is like a set of LEGOs: It is a library of modular, flexible design elements from which we can build an exponential range of message configurations. Think of the components within each email you send—the header, the main message body, the submessages, the footer—as separate LEGO blocks that can be mixed, matched and stacked into different arrangements to build marketing and operational messages, skyscrapers and castles.

THREE STEPS TO BUILDING YOUR EMAIL CREATIVE FRAMEWORK:

(1) Get Serious: Audit all of your current and planned message types to get a clear sense for the kinds of content your creative framework needs to accommodate. Then consider the LEGOs you'll need to support them. For instance, perhaps you send marketing and operational messages. The two different message types might share header, footer and submessage LEGO components, but have different LEGO block bodies. If you are a retailer, you might send product promotions featuring 4, 8 or 12 dynamically generated featured items, for which you would use a stackable 4-item LEGO block to accomodate all three configurations.

(2) Get Creative: Once you've identified which LEGO blocks you need, it's time to have some fun with graphics, type and color. Email creative has always been about extending pre-existing brand attributes appropriately and effectively to the inbox. Now that we are building creative frameworks to accommodate a growing number of segmented, triggered and dynamically populated emails, we have to make our color, font and graphics choices even more carefully. In addition to being "on brand," they have to be "evergreen," working with different types and configurations of information. This might mean choosing lighter colors and graphics to create a more neutral shell, allowing content to pop with blue, burnt sienna or another eye-catching hue. And it defininitely means using more HTML as opposed to graphical text. While we already recommend using HTML text because it appears in images-disabled inbox environments, it becomes doubly important now since HTML text—unlike graphical text—can be auto-generated as dynamic content.

(3) Get Practical: After succesfully choosing your LEGO block types and colors, you can begin to create your content library—an archive of pre-built components you can reuse again and again. For instance, perhaps you have a 150×180 right rail LEGO block submessage module with a blue headline, grey body text and an orange call-to-action button. You can now create and cache multiple submessages built to these specs—perhaps a "free shipping" message, a "become a member" message and an "update your email profile" message—to include across multiple emails over time. As you add to it, the content library becomes more and more valuable. It's like having a cache of special LEGO pieces—think traffic lights and pink ponies—on-hand to help you quickly and easily build a more dynamic email experience.

As ever,
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

–>Read other Make it Pop! posts.

As I rolled into work this morning, I logged into my Gmail account to see what random emails came in over the 6-hour window of time I was sleeping. Lo and behold….a message was sitting unread in my inbox.

The message was from "AIM Member Message" and had the subject line "What's New with AIM?" If I wasn't the type of person who opens every email (if only to critique them from a best practices standpoint), I would have "junked" this one immediately. Who is "AIM Member Message?" Why not "AIM" or "AOL Instant Messenger?" If you are going to have a terrible From name, at least wow me with the subject line, right? "What's New with AIM?" Boooooooring.

Two strikes for AOL before I even open the message. But, again, I open everything. Maybe they were banking on that fact. Maybe they didn't really spend any time thinking about the From name or subject line. Maybe they don't have a dedicated team of email marketers who are thinking about email as a strategic tool. Maybe it's a combination of all three or "none of the above." Who knows? Either way, it's not a great start.

Did I mention that I can't remember ever receiving an email from AOL (not in my Gmail account anyway)? So my next question (zinger) is how did they get my email address? Followed by…why the random, seemingly out-of-the-blue email? Oh right, they wanted to tell me "What's New with AIM." Too bad I don't care or more importantly, never asked to be emailed by AIM. Good thing they put the disclaimer in fine print in the footer.

Now…to the message. On first glance, a decent design for images off. Three text links—one "Find Out More!" followed by two "Start Now!" At least the valuable disclaimer/opt-out shows up with images off.

Moving onto the message with images on, I realize there are several key calls-to-action that are now viewable. So much for a nice design with images off. First off, apparently this is the AIM Newsletter. Who would've known? What *is* the AIM Newsletter anyway? A weekly message? Monthly communication? Whenever-they-feel-like-it email? Looks like they want me to download AIM. Funny thing is that I already have an AIM account. In fact, I've had one since AIM first launched sometime in the late 20th century. AOL collects a ton of data (I assume). Shouldn't they have already known that little tidbit? How about segmenting the list…targeting emails?

Continuing down below the fold, it looks like they want me to "start using [my] free AIM Mail Account." Again—been there, done that. My AOL username dates back to the dial-up days of 1995.

Finally, at the very bottom of the email—well below the fold—I get some neat new information: Mobile AIM! Yes. I can now access AIM on my mobile device. I guess it's about time to purchase that smart phone. I've been told they are pretty cool.

Unfortunately, I'm no longer shocked or surprised when a multi-billion dollar company does not understand the basics of email marketing. In the email ecosystem, industry experts often get dinged for hammering "email marketing 101." Marketers shout, "We get the fundamentals. Show us the new stuff!" But then…we get emails like the one from AOL/AIM/AIM Member Message.

Thanks AOL for keeping our jobs easy….

—DJ Waldow of Bronto Software

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.

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

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.

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.

I want to share something inspirational that's happening in the email industry (Oh, and you can learn some best practices too!). It's a recap of the Email Experience Council's current Nonprofit Project. The project originated as a manner to enable peers and competitors in the email marketing industry to put business aside and work as a team to create the best email efforts for a good cause.

In 2007, the eec selected the Women's Bean Project as their project focus. Stephanie Miller, from Return Path, volunteered countless hours to lead this initiative and its team on behalf of the eec. I spoke with Stephanie about this effort to get the inside scoop on the project:

WHO IS THE WOMEN'S BEAN PROJECT?
The Women's Bean Project (WBP) helps women break the cycle of poverty and unemployment by teaching workplace competencies for entry-level jobs through employment and by teaching job readiness skills in their gourmet food production business.

WHY WERE THEY A GOOD CANDIDATE?
The WBP was sending one-off donor and volunteer announcements from a database created in FileMaker.

The WBP came to the eec with the following needs and goals:

1. Efficiency: Communicate effectively and efficiently with donors, volunteers and buyers (online and offline).

2. Impact & Choice: Retain donors and buyers through a higher number of touch points—ensuring that each touch is meaningful but also reducing costs and the amount of staff time required for each. Also, allow each customer/donor to select the method of communication (online or offline) that works best for them.

3. Cost Savings: Continue to reach every customer, even as the number of buyers increases by 30% each year (raising the costs of printing and postage significantly).

4. Practicality: Launch and manage a program on a very small staff—literally one-quarter of one person was dedicated to email marketing for all three audiences (donors, buyers, volunteers).

HOW DID THE EEC VOLUNTEER TEAM LOOK?
It is a testament to the email industry and the eec membership that very quickly we had 15 talented professionals volunteer to help, and several vendors step forward and to provide tools and services free of charge. ExactTarget provided a free basic sending license and also graciously donated nearly 15 hours of support throughout the project. Return Path donated a free rendering and deliverability account. Other companies represented included Blackbaud, BlueHornet, Future Integrated Marketing, Industry Mailout, Leapfrog Enterprises, Merkle and Wolters Kluwer Financial Services.

WHAT WAS ACCOMPLISHED?
The team focused on six specific areas to create the program—content, design, infrastructure and list growth.

Content Strategy:
● Identified ways that email can support the WBP mission
● Developed a content strategy
● Debated and finalized permission standards (DOI)
● Developed a calendar for promotions around the holidays, including promoting some local events and fundraisers
● Advised on sending an email counterpart for the annual appeal to donors (direct mail)
● Promotional content recommendations: (1) special offers: 10% discount for National Soup Month; (2) developed concept, copy and photography for a Valentine's Day email that would have viral impact; and (3) developed a year's worth of promotional themes based on holidays in order to boost sales during non-peak months (e.g., soup sales in summer are very slow)
● Set up Google Analytics so WBP could measure success of the email program for driving sales and page views
● Helped train the WBP team to review campaign results with an eye toward optimization

Design:
● Developed wireframes for four types of emails
● Designed templates for newsletter, postcards, DOI/welcome and donor appeals
● Loaded the templates into ExactTarget and tested them
● Helped launch an inaugural issue—which included list hygiene and deliverability with an old file, as well as an opt-out strategy for the existing database

Infrastructure:
● Worked with the team to set up an ExactTarget account
● Upload the templates; Access the self-service training
● Testing and mailing
● Course Correction: Aligning with with Yahoo! Store and cleaning up templates

List Growth:
● Starting point: 75% valid records
● Developed organic, offline and viral list growth ideas
● Recommended ways to optimize data capture on the website
● Reviewed the subscription flow for permission clarity and growth optimization

Wireframe Sample:

HOW DID IT TURN OUT?
Here's a quick rundown of the results:

1. We launched a program! It is practical, earns results, garners the praise and kudos of subscribers, donors and the WBP Board of Directors and has legs—the WBP can continue this email program when the volunteer team disbands.

2. Subscribers love it! The inaugural issue of the newsletter generated:
● 32% open rates
● 15% clickthrough rate
● 3.1% bounce rate on new data (25% bounce rate on old list data)

3. Subscribers are great WBP customers! Page views from email subscribers are two times higher than other sources.

For more details on our work with the Women's Bean Project and past Nonprofit Projects, visit the Nonprofit Project page on the Email Experience Council's website.

—Jeanniey Mullen of the eec

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!

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 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.

With the ubiquity of image disabling, the escalation of mobile email viewing and the expectation that recipients will not scroll, email senders have been hot to hop on the preheader train. For those of you who haven't yet left the station, the preheader is the usually small and subdued text blurb at the top of an email that includes some combination of the below:

(1) View with images prompt
(2) Add to address book prompt
(3) Content teaser snippet(s)

Preheaders are meant to inform a recipient of:
(1) Who an email is from
(2) What the email is about and what to do about it
(3) How to view it with images

Below, check out four preheaders pulled from the tops of emails I received last week from Aveda, Blue Nile, Pottery Barn Kids and Stride Rite. The examples are displayed in order of increasing complexity: Aveda's preheader takes the most basic (and common) form, while Blue Nile, Pottery Barn Kids and Stride Rite get fancy, adding additional details and click-through opportunities. Stride Rite gets brownie points for linking to a landing page with "add to address book" instructions for major email providers, but in my opinion rides the preheader express one stop too far. Theirs is epic, pushing the email itself down 122 pixels.

I am absolutely a best practices advocate, but let's test to determine whether we are on the right track or off the rails. How much preheader is enough?! If any of y'all have performance stats to share, I'm sure the eec community would be grateful.

I'd like to get on a train to Cabo San Lucas right about now.

As ever,
Lisa Harmon
of Smith-Harmon

–>Read other Make it Pop! posts.

From: Aveda Online
Subject Line: Top tips for straight hair, plus Free styling brush
Date: Monday, Jan. 21, 2008

From: Blue Nile
Subject Line: Special Promotion for Blue Nile Customers
Date: Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008

From: Pottery Barn Kids
Subject Line: Shop NEW nursery seating - over 50 designer fabrics!
Date: Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008

From: stride rite
Subject Line: New Arrivals, Baby and Cookie Magazine. Find out more…
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2008

David Baker's piece on Zero-Calorie Email is refreshing in the thick of the holiday season, when retailers experience difficulty building slim (even coherent) campaigns. David defined "zero-calorie email" as "a reduced version of the original, with only the necessary things you really need and want." This potential for economy, efficiency—even poetry—is a virtue of email that makes it not only an effective communication channel, but also an engaging form of creative work. I challenge email designers and copywriters to continually strive to find that just-right place where—ah!—form and function meet: where every image, every word, has meaning.

Below I feature recent holiday campaigns from Piperlime, crewcuts, Apple and CB2 that manage not only to stay streamlined but also to achieve a certain level of eloquence—a synthesis of season, text and imagery bordering on an art form.

Please share your favorite "zero-calorie emails" with the eec community!

From one Diet Coke-lover to another,
Lisa Harmon

–>Read other Make it Pop! posts.

From: Piperlime
Subject Line: Get free shipping and free returns.
Date: Monday, Nov. 26, 2007

From: crewcuts
Subject Line: good night (and free shipping)
Date: Saturday, Dec. 1, 2007

From: Apple
Subject Line: Give a gift that's music to their ears. iPod.
Date: Monday, Dec. 3, 2007

From: CB2
Subject Line: mod modern ornaments from 1.95
Date: Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007

Today the Email Experience Council announced its call for entries for its first award competition recognizing email marketing excellence—The Email Performance Award. The award will be presented to an individual or organization that has created an email marketing campaign that demonstrates the full power of the channel.

Entries will be evaluated for their marketing strategy, creative components, and, most importantly, results. Permission-based email marketing campaigns from any industry vertical — including B-to-B, B-to-C, nonprofit, education, etc.— are eligible for entry into the award competition as long as results described have been achieved within the last 12 months.

The Email Performance Award offers email marketers a unique opportunity to showcase the best-in-class strategies, design, and tactics that make them successful. We look forward to recognizing the brands that lead by example, and hope they provide inspiration to others seeking to further leverage the power of the email channel in their marketing mix.

Nominations close on Monday, Dec. 10, 2007. For more details about submission guidelines and entry forms, click here.

The members of the eec will select the winner from among the Email Performance Award finalists, which will be determined by the eec's leadership and announced in mid-January. The winner will receive free admission to the Email Evolution Conference at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego, where the Email Performance Award will be officially presented on Feb. 13, 2008.

The winner of the Email Performance Award will also be placed into the semi-finals of the Direct Marketing Association's International ECHO Awards. Since 1929, the ECHO Awards, which are presented each October, have recognized the world's outstanding multichannel direct marketing campaigns based on excellence in strategy, creativity, and results.

For additional information about eec membership or the Email Performance Award, please contact Ali Swerdlow, the eec's Marketing & Sponsorship Manager, at ali@emailexperience.org or 888.804.4521, ext. 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Chad White