The Big Australian Report signals a significant rise in the volume of marketing messages sent to Australian consumers. For example, Australian companies sent three times as many mobile messages, ten times as many social messages and one third more emails last financial year in comparison to the previous financial year. Despite increased use of mobile and social channels, email marketing remains the central and most used channel, and the highest volume by a considerable margin. Of the marketers surveyed, not surprisingly 100% are sending emails to customers and members.

Also noteworthy is the massive increase in the number of companies using data to understand and segment their customers, ensuring that marketing messages are increasingly targeted and relevant to their audience.

Other key findings include:

• More than three quarters (77%) of large Australian companies are using social networks for lifecycle marketing activities, with 63% “significantly increasing” focus on social, primarily with Facebook and Twitter.
• Nearly one in three (30%) companies is sending mobile messages to customers, primarily alerts such as reminders and confirmations. There was also a 300% increase in number of emails opened on mobile devices.
• For the first time, the majority (62%) of Australian companies are tailoring their campaigns and messages according to preferences or behavior of their customers.
• As companies better understand their customers, they have moved from broadcast to targeted campaigns meaning that emails are sent to fewer people for whom the message is relevant. For example, the number of campaigns increased 115% while number of emails rose only 33%.
• 42% of direct marketing campaigns include a social element.

Responsys Asia Pac Vice President, Simon O’Day, believes the past financial year was a watershed for Australian companies in terms of digital direct marketing.

“As Australian companies face the threat of online sales from overseas, they have woken up to the tactics used by these competitors and sought to implement them here,” Mr. O’Day said. “As a result, capturing and using data to understand the customer has become a priority for most marketing departments. It’s no longer enough to send the same message to all your customers and see if any of them actually care or respond, while other companies are creating genuine relationships through a cross channel approach.”

Mr. O’Day added, “Social media has also evolved from experimental to a genuine marketing channel that’s targeted and measurable. This coming year we expect a growing shift from email to cross channel campaigns that leverage mobile, social and the web. And, segmentation and targeting will continue to be critical to achieving dramatic increases in ROI.”

The study undertaken by Responsys analyzed more than one billion emails, mobile and social messages sent by large Australian companies between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011, as well as results from a survey of 350 enterprise marketers in Australia.

Obtain a copy of the complimentary 2011 Responsys Big Australian Report.

The DMA UK’s Email Marketing Council maintains a blog featuring Council members writing about a wide range of topics relating to email marketing.

This month’s highlights:

• How misspelled common domain names (eg Hotmail) in email addresses can impact a marketer's sender reputation.
• A collection of recent mobile email statistics - what is essential to consider before developing a mobile email strategy?
• A guide to help marketers estimate the test cell sample size needed for email split tests.
• Social strategy, rendering in all platforms and dealing with inactive subscribers - here's how to meet seven of today's inbox challenges.

The eec members have spoken wisely – our new roster of Member Roundtable co-chairs is an impressive list of email marketing industry luminaries.  Please welcome our 2011-12 Roundtable and Advisory Committee Leadership:

• Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable: Colleen Petitt, Aprimo; Dwight Sholes, Sholes LLC
• Deliverability & Rendering Roundtable: Dennis Dayman, Eloqua; Matt Rausenberger, Return Path
• Email Design Roundtable: Lynn Baus, Responsys; Garrett Ryan, Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide
• List Growth & Engagement Roundtable: Ryan Phelan, BlueHornet; Nate Romance, ExactTarget
• Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee: John Caldwell, Red Pill Email; Luke Glasner, Glasner Consulting
• Member Initiatives Advisory Committee: Joel Book, ExactTarget; Stephanie Miller, Return Path
• Speakers Bureau Advisory Committee: Lana McGilvray, Datran Media; Dori Thompson, Information era marketing + consulting

Thank you to all who voted and congratulations to our winners!  We look forward to another great year of productive and useful work on behalf of the industry.

eec Members: Want to join our initiatives?  Check out the Roundtables and sign up today by emailing Ali - ali@emailexperience.org.

We're looking for email and digital marketing rockstars to present at the Email Evolution Conference 2012 in Florida!  Your proposal(s) must be submitted by Monday, August 1st in order to be considered.

Check out the sessions from EEC11 to get an idea of the types of submissions we select.

Contact Ali with any questions or if you're interested in exhibit or sponsorship opportunities.

The DMA UK’s Email Marketing Council maintains a blog featuring Council members writing about a wide range of topics relating to email marketing.

Here are this month’s highlights:

• An example of how to use email and social to drive both list growth and sales. 
• A recent Return Path study confirms that a marketer’s sender reputation is the key to achieving high inbox placement rates and avoiding the spam folder.
• ISPs have been announcing various types of inbox filtering – here’s a look at how they might impact marketers.
• Frameworks are used in many different industries to structure thinking, people and processes effectively – here’s how they can be applied to email marketing. 
• Email marketing produces a huge volume and range of metrics; using a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed,  Realistic, Time Bound) approach will help marketers measure their specific ROI.

Email marketers should own Social Media!

If you’re an email marketer and you’re not making social marketing part of your toolset and service offering, you’re making a big mistake.  They are really not that different, although social (in my opinion) has a higher man-hour need than email.

Social media marketing is not unlike email marketing.  We share many of the same strategies:

• You need to build an interested base of fans/subscribers.
• You need to interact with those fans/subscribers.
• You need to publish quality, targeted, relevant content to your fans/subscribers.
• You build your fan/subscriber base though natural and incentive-based growth tactics.
• You need to show the ROI for the marketing dollars spent – those who say social isn’t about the ROI are dreaming.  Eventually the C-suite will want numbers that aren’t a guess.
• You need to identify the uber-fans/subscribers and reward them.
• Both can (and should) be an avenue for customer service.
• Both can (and should) drive traffic to your website/ecommerce/blog.
• Both can help and hurt your reputation, though Social in a more public way.
• Both can (and should) increase revenues. (Again, social tracking for revenues can be a little tricky.)
• Both can (and should) start conversations and keep them going.

There is no denying that budgets for Social are growing each year. Yet they are for email, too.  While social marketing may mean spending time and resources to get up to speed with the social world, it will be time and money well spent.

Many marketing managers have little or no experience when choosing a social marketing company.  And have you ever talked to some of the so called “Social Media Expert?”  Everything is bunnies and kittens and it’s all about just getting out there and adding buttons to your website – WooHoo!

It’s more than that—Much more.

(Note: I’m not talking about REAL social media marketers—those that “get it.” But the majority falls into this bucket. Again not unlike email back in the late 90s early 2000s when a bunch of “Email Experts” came out of the woodwork. I look forward to your cards and letters.)

While there are a plethora of “Social Media Experts” out there who have no idea what it takes to run a successful marketing campaign and tie it all together with analytic data and ROI metrics, for us email marketers, it’s what we do every hour of every day.

Social now is not unlike email was 10-15 years ago: blasting worked for a while, but the subscribers eventually rebelled for something better.  Social needs the experience and knowledge email marketers have developed through many years of success and, yes, failures.  The audience is still king and while social maybe the new darling on the block, it’s still in need of a seasoned hand at the helm. Email marketers were social before social was cool.

Social and email marketing are already married; shouldn’t we take Social on the honeymoon and get a little?

Cheers, Chris


P.S. Mobile should be in your toolset as well, but that’s for another post.


- Christopher Donald
VP of Marketing
Inbox Group (an eec Silver Sponsor)
@inboxgroup

Today the Email Experience Council and Epsilon released the Q1 2011 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks Results, which show a 4.2 percent increase in open rates over Q1 2010 and a 39.2 percent increase in average volume per client from Q1 2010.

The quarterly analysis is compiled from 7.1 billion emails sent by Epsilon in January, February, and March 2011, across multiple industries and approximately 140 participating clients.  The analysis combines data from both of Epsilon’s proprietary platforms, DREAM and DREAMmail.

Read the press release.

Download the free report.

Members of the eec Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee have answered marketers' cry for new best practices around email measurement.  The Email Metrics Best Practices Guide will help marketers move beyond just reviewing render (open) and click rates to gain an understanding of their subscribers' behavior by including additional data available.

Download this document to learn what email marketers should be tracking beyond renders (opens) and clicks, what sources and types of data marketers can use to calculate various metrics, how to define key success indicators and finally, how to use them to reach marketing goals such as increased revenue, customer lifespan, engagement and more.  Get your copy from the eec Research Store today!

Guide Contributors:
Adam Holden-Bache, Email Transmit
John Caldwell, RedPillEmail
Luke Glasner, RedPillEmail
Loren McDonald, Silverpop
Stephanie Miller, Aprimo
Fred Tabsharani, Port25

eec members can access all eec research including whitepapers, best practices guides and more at no cost.  Find out how to become a member.

Plus, find out more about the eec's S.A.M.E. (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) Project, also developed by the Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee.


- Luke Glasner
Co-Chair of the Measurement Accuracy Advisory Committee

Sometimes you need a stat for a presentation, whitepaper, article or blog post.  EmailStatCenter.com has tons of email marketing stats.  Here are some recent ones you can use as long as you provide appropriate attribution.

62% of email traffic share to landing pages comes from Yahoo! Mail, while Gmail provides just 4% of referrals.
- Chitika Insights (2011)

US adult internet users subscribe to an average of almost three daily or weekly shopping emails or newsletters.
- Yahoo! Mail and Ipsos OTX MediaCT, "Consumer Pulse" (2011)

Q4 2010 open rates (22.1%) saw little change over the two-year period, increasing 5% from the same time two years ago.
- Epsilon and eec "Q4 2010 Email Trends and Benchmarks" (2011)

Email has been used by nearly 90% of consumers since 2005.
- MarketingProfs, "2010 Digital Marketing Fact Book"

The List Growth and Engagement Podcast is a series of interviews with recognized leaders in email list growth and engagement. Need-to-know insight on growth strategies, deliverability and list hygiene from the field's recognized experts is broken down into focused chunks of easily digested information.

Interviews are conducted by members of the Email Experience Council's List Growth and Engagement Roundtable. Hear directly from the trenches on what to do and what not to do, to grow and maintain a robust email list.

Stay tuned as we'll be adding more podcasts featuring email marketing experts.

You have probably heard about the recent data breaches and have most likely received at least one email on the issue.  We'd like to share more information with you so here are two articles that cover the situation:

• Are you being a hyper-transparant brand? by Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer at Eloqua
• The Security of Customer Data has Become the Defining Issue for our Industry by Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop

This week's events are a good reminder that authentication is one of the simplest things all marketers can do to help protect their subscribers and the email ecosystem.

The eec's Cross-Channel Roundtable is working toward developing a checklist for email marketers to audit their existing email marketing programs or to use as a guide to kickstart cross-channel marketing. 

We started out by defining cross-channel versus multi-channel. Below we have developed 10 of the 11 key principles/steps that we feel will define cross-channel marketing.

1. Establish goals (sales, engagement) - Identify what it is you want to accomplish in specific, quantifiable terms and get buy-in on the goals from across the organization.
2. Determine what programs you need to run to meet your goals - Once you know what you want to accomplish, determine what the best execution methods for these programs should be (mobile, email marketing, social media, direct mail, etc…).
3. Get buy-in (executive sponsorship) - Form an Internal Team of Champions. You may run into resistance knocking down barriers and trying new ways to communicate with customers and prospects.  An executive champion in your company will be critical to getting through these issues.
4. Bridge departmental silos - Get teams working together.  Cross-channel marketing often involves different disciplines and departments; create a new mindset and don't let established silos hinder your progress.
5. Data collection - Identify what data you need to do the segmentation and communication for the communication programs you’ve defined.  See if you have the data somewhere in your organization before you ask customers to provide it.  Consider the value of behavioral data over self reported data.
6. Walk before you run - Don't expect to do full-blown cross-channel campaigns.  Identify certain channels & focus on goals to show quick wins.  Establish meaningful goals within manageable boundaries so you can begin.  Starting small is better than delaying big.
7. Early success for automation and segmentation - Technology is an enabler, not a crutch.  Use success from manual or small tests to show higher ROI, then forecast future success based on those increased levels of performance.  Don’t just go out and buy technology to solve your problem.  Understand your issues and your goals and if you need automation to accomplish them or technology to track progress, then seek out the right product for your needs.
8. Don't force it - Understand the strength of each channel and how it works best in a cross-channel campaign and use it accordingly…don’t try to force fit.  Just because it works for someone else, doesn’t mean it works for your company or business (i.e. social for community engagement and input).
9. Consistently measure progress set up for success - Establish well-defined business rules based on what you’re trying to accomplish.
10. Test, test, and test again - Keep testing for higher optimization and to ensure customer behavior has not changed over time.
11. WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! HELP US FILL IN THIS LAST SPOT

These are the top principles we have defined; before we write them in stone, we want to hear from you!  Is there something you feel is missing when it comes to being a cross-channel marketer?  What do you feel should be the eleventh principle?

Please be sure to leave comments and thoughts below or send one of the Roundtable chairs an email: Colleen Petitt at Aprimo: colleen.petitt@aprimo.com or David Hibbs at Responsys: dhibbs@responsys.com.


- Colleen Petitt
Aprimo
co-chair of Cross-Channel Roundtable

When LinkedIn hit 100 million users a couple of weeks ago, they did something really interesting: They sent out “Thank You” messages to all of their early adopters. I was not among them (I was still a college student (yes, I’m younger than you think) when LinkedIn came around), but many of my colleagues in the email marketing community did. It even became a competition to see who was the “earliest adopter.”

Good stuff, right? Absolutely. And I’ve always been a fan of how LinkedIn very subtly uses email.

Which is why the message I received today from LinkedIn was very, very surprising. See below:

SUBJECT LINE: Introducing the Student Job Portal on LinkedIn






































Let’s examine this message for a minute. Here’s what’s good:

• The product being announced can and likely will be very useful.
• The social sharing buttons at the top.
• A very simple call to action.
• The “know what you’re looking for? Jump right to it” section.
• The headline and supporting copy gets straight to the point. Nice job.

Here’s what’s not so good about this email:

• First and foremost: I’m not a student or an entry-level grad. And LinkedIn knows that. The message is for these people, not “Hey, if you’re looking for interns, we have this new portal.”
• The guy is clearly too old to be in the demographic they’re looking for.
• The blueprints of the cars, while cool, doesn’t really match the “start blazing your trail” meme in this email. Imagery that speaks to trailblazing and paths would be much more effective, in my opinion.
• A clear-cut CAN-SPAM violation, with no mailing address to be found in the message.

But let’s speak to the larger picture, and why I think this is a miss: LinkedIn has all of the tools to be relevant in their messages, and they forgot that. They have my job history, the types of companies I’ve worked for, the searches I’ve done in the past. All of those could have been used in this message.

At the least, LinkedIn could have sent two versions of this message: one to those in the market, and one to those who might be offering those internships and entry-level jobs.

Those “Know what you’re looking for?” Those could have been targeted to the occupations that the individual was most interested in.

Why does relevancy matter? Because the power of email marketing resides in your ability to provide your recipients with the information they want (and need). Your email program should be about what those wants and needs, and your messaging needs to at least try to hit the right tone each and every time.

The chief takeaway here: Utilize your data and resources to make your messages strike the correct chord with your subscribers.

For a company that usually utilizes email very efficiently (in my opinion), it’s surprising to see this kind of miss. Particularly for a new product that could be very beneficial to many individuals and companies.


- Scott Cohen
VP, Managed Services
Inbox Group (a new eec sponsor!)

The eec applauds the Associated Press for its recent decision to remove the hyphen from "e-mail," making "email" its accepted term.  As reported by The Huffington Post, the AP announced the change at the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society.  "The use of 'e-mail' was seen as a relic of an earlier age, when the Internet was new to most people and the idea of 'electrionic mail' was confusing," Huffington Post said.  "In the last decade, email marketing has grown from a marketing and consumer novelty to a critical lifestyle management and communication vehicle," said Jeanniey Mullen, founder of the Email Experience Council.

"Much of the acceptance, success, and continued innovation in email is due to the passionate community within the email marketing industry.  Four years ago, the eec set out to show how impactful the voices of the email industry could be when we made a move to get the hyphen removed from email.  And, today, we are proud to recognize that change.  This change doesn't symbolize a new spelling, it symbolizes the power of the people of email."

Read more about and sign the eec's Hyphen = Disrespect Petition.

When we first heard about the eec's S.A.M.E. project last year, our minds immediately flashed back to conversations with email marketers from years past regarding the confusion caused by email metrics. The idea that standardization might become a reality was something we welcomed with open arms.

This isn't a knock against those marketers mentioned above, either. With so many elements to consider each time a campaign is sent, email marketing is already challenging enough without the added complexity of "fuzzy" reporting metrics. We've talked to marketers who wondered how their click rates were holding steady even as "open rates" were decreasing. We've talked to marketers who didn't think a message could be considered "open" until it was viewed outside of the preview pane—after all, it's just supposed to be a preview. Then there were the people who asked about improving their "read rate" — a misleading synonym for the already-misleading "open rate" metric. Their confusion was understandable, and frustrating from our perspective because such an avoidable issue was causing headaches for the marketers that power our industry.

By committing to adopt the standards of the S.A.M.E. project, we forced ourselves to reevaluate the way metrics were presented to SubscriberMail users. Even though we offered a pop-up window explaining that an "Open" merely indicated that images had been rendered for a given message, the fact remained that we were still using the term "Open" on our reports to avoid causing confusion/uproar by changing such a familiar label. The S.A.M.E. project gave us the push we needed to take that risk, replacing "open" with the more accurate label of "render."

Along the same lines, we had long discussed the idea of combining the number of recipients who rendered images with the number of recipients who did not render images but did click a link(s) in a given message. In our discussions with email marketers, we always came back to the issue of image blocking and how open (render) rates did not necessarily indicate how many recipients engaged with their messages. Implementing the eec's "Unique Confirmed Open" metric improved our reports by including this more accurate representation of overall engagement.

Once the S.A.M.E.-related updates were in place and approved by the eec, we were faced with the difficult prospect of rolling out changes to the reporting metrics on which our clients so heavily depended. As email marketers ourselves, we took this very seriously—our system users depend on the metrics provided by SubscriberMail to show the success of their marketing efforts, and we did not want anyone to think those historical metrics had been eliminated or skewed in any way. Through email alerts and phone conversations, we explained to clients why they would soon see changes to their reporting metrics, and what those changes meant. We explained that largely the same data was being presented in our reports, but it was being presented through labels that more accurately reflected the nature of the data collected. And, in some cases, new metrics were available to make our reports even more valuable.

Of course, we fielded a few phone calls post-release, but to our surprise even those inquiries were born more out of curiosity than any kind of panic. In the end, our clients proved that they were ready to embrace clarity over convention when it came to their email reporting metrics. When every email service provider does the same, we'll have done our job of moving the email marketing industry forward with a more knowledgable and better-equipped user base than ever before—and we can finally retire the "open rate" debate once and for all.

— Dave McCue
Marketing Manager
SubscriberMail
@DaveMcCue

You can't afford to miss the eec's free webinar on March 23rd, Using Email Marketing & Social Media Marketing to Drive New Customer Acquisition.  Sponsored by Compendium, this event features Compendium founder, Chris Baggott, and Western River Expedition's VP, Brandon Lake.

You’ll learn how to turn searchers into customers and how simple acquisition can be with the appropriate strategy and execution.


Technology sponsored by GoToWebinar

This year's Email Evolution Conference was a huge success and we had over 400 email and digital marketers join us in Miami Beach! 

If you attended, here's your chance to access the great presentations you saw.  If you didn't attend, these presentations should help convince you to come next year.

Download presentations now.

Presenting companies included:

• Citizens Bank
• uncommongoods.com
• Scotts Miracle-Gro
• PGA TOUR
• Kiehl's
• Kraft
• InterContinental Hotels Group
• ATP Tour
• SnagAJob.com
• BlueHornet
• Yesmail
• StrongMail
• Datran Media
• Responsys
• The Relevancy Group
• Message Systems
• ExactTarget
• Alchemy Worx

and many more!

This week Amazon announced the launch of Amazon Simple Email Service.  Will this change the email marketing industry?  Do you think this will impact your business?  How will ESPs and their clients react?

Share your thoughts with us by posting a comment below.

Multi-channel. Cross-channel. Can we use them interchangeably? Is there a difference and if so, what is it?

The eec's Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable believes not only is there a difference, but it's a significant one.

Here’s our definition: multi-channel marketing refers to sending out the same message to your audience using a variety of different channels (email marketing, direct mail, mobile, etc.).  The channels work independently and are generally not coordinated - more of a silo approach.

When referring to cross-channel marketing, you’re still using multiple marketing channels but you're taking a much more choreographed, orchestrated, personalized approach.  One message reinforces the next message and leverages the benefits of the specific channel by driving your audience to action, as opposed to just repeating the same message.  It's much more tightly integrated and looks at the interactions 'holistically' - not only how the customer is receiving the communication, but also how they're responding to it.  A cross-channel marketing strategy then takes that into consideration before sending out the next communication.

So...what do you think?  Share your thoughts by posting a comment below.


- Eileen Weinberg
ClickSquared
Member of the eec's Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable

This Friday, December 10th, is the last day to submit your nomination for the eec's Stefan Pollard Marketer of the Year Award for Excellence in Creativity and Contribution.

This award will recognize an individual who exemplifies and demonstrates Stefan Pollard's most memorable and loved characteristics and who provides inspiration to others.  It will be presented on February 1, 2011 at the Email Evolution Conference, an event Stefan loved.  We are accepting nominations until Friday, December 10 so please review the guidelines and nominate a deserving email marketer.

Special thanks to the folks at FillAnyPDF.com for their support of the nomination submission process.


- Ali Swerdlow
eec
aswerdlow@the-dma.org