Email Campaign Best Practices | Email Experience Council

3 Questions for Eloqua's Dennis Dayman

Friday, November 5, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

This week at our European Email Marketing Conference in London, we caught up with Eloqua's Chief Privacy Officer, Dennis Dayman.

Read on for his predictions for 2011 as well as some information on Canada's new anti-spam law, C-28.

1) What are some of your top takeaways from this week's conference?

This year's European Email Marketing Conference (EEMC) was a great success! Marketing and email professionals from all over the world came together to discuss issues and challenges they face.

For myself and others, one of the known mountains we have to climb in the European Union (EU) is required permission for marketing. Marketing itself is the same throughout the globe, but in the EU, collection, processing and transferring of marketing information can be much more "difficult" at times due the privacy requirements that surround it. This means to many here that new things like social media sharing have to have a new and different way of thinking when the uses are for marketing purposes.

Many companies like Eloqua are global in nature and when launching marketing programs across their brands and customers, they have much more to think about than just hitting the "send" button; for example, explicit opt-in.

This week's conference really helped expose these known - and sometimes complicated - matters for global companies and how to solve them. Lots of stories and examples were shared freely at the event, allowing others to get an idea of how to properly run a campaign no matter where you do business.

Thanks to all the participants for being so helpful to each other and participating at such a personal level. I am certainly looking forward to the Email Evolution Conference in Miami!

2) What are your predictions for compliance and privacy changes in 2011?

There are some major changes coming to the world of marketing in 2011. Today, most of the world has some sort of privacy data protection in place, but many of the laws are being updated to keep up with changes in the industry and ways in which data is used.

Here are some items to keep on your radar:

In the EU, starting in May 2011, dropping and accessing a tracking mechanism like a cookie will become illegal without explicit permission to do such.
US legislators might attempt another go at federal privacy legislation in 2011 which would require an opt-in to collect and process data.
By the end of this year, Canada is looking at putting into place an anti-spam law that will make the sending of "spam" illegal and prosecutable.

Over the next few years marketers can expect to see more privacy requirements imposed on marketing processes. Much of this is due to the sheer volume of information being kept on individuals and this isn't something that shouldn't be feared as most of today's marketing best practices already ask you to obtain permission to collect and use data on individuals.

As these issues come up, be assured that we in the industry along with the eec/DMA will look out for your best interest.

3) Can you please provide an update on the recent anti-spam legislation in Canada?

As a quick recap, anyone sending commercial email from Canada or to someone in Canada will be subject to C-28 (formerly known as Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act - FISA). FISA requires marketers to get permission, either implied or expressed, before sending commercial email to Canadians.

While at EEMC this week, there was some good news that came from Canada. Canadian anti-spam bill C-28 passed through House of Commons Industry, Science and Technology committee in 48 minutes (WOW!). One objection was made to the short title (FISA) and it was removed from the bill. The bill now goes back to the house for a 3rd and final reading and a vote which means Canada might have anti-spam legislation by end of the year.

For more information about what is coming in the law, visit:
http://www.theemailguide.com/email-marketing/canadas-new-law-restricts-“spam-haven" and
http://www.thindata.com/aboutus/resourcecenter/fisa/pdf/The_Marketers_Guide_to_Applying_FISA.pdf

- Dennis Dayman
Chief Privacy Officer
Eloqua

Our New Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable

Monday, October 11, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

Thoughts from the first meeting of the Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable
co-chaired by Jeff Chamberlain of Aprimo and David Hibbs of Responsys.

The charter of the Roundtable is to explore cross-channel integration to provide education and/or information that would help eec members and the larger email marketing community in pursuing this goal. Here are the themes to what we are trying to accomplish:

Address the needs to “get started” by helping marketers understand the initial steps that might lead to integrated marketing leveraging an existing email channel.
Utilize email marketing best practices to help inform what we decide to provide to the community.
Look at simple tools that are easy to apply rather than just focus on deep insights or case studies that are interesting but don’t inform clear action for marketers.

Our initial group (still welcoming new members) had a discussion on cross-channel integration. I’ll introduce the team through the discussion summary. eec Vice Chair Stephanie Miller of Aprimo kicked off the call and started us down the road to group discussion.

Challenge #1 – What is Cross-Channel Integration??

Jeff Chamberlain of Aprimo suggested that cross-channel integration spoke to presenting a marketing message via multiple communication channels to address the different needs driven by preference, buying cycle stage, etc.

Sheryl Biesman of Pharmavite pointed out the channel also refers to distribution from a CPG perspective so we need to be clear about integrating communication channels or distribution channels.

Dwight Sholes of Sholes LLC offered the perspective to focus on direct channels (those designed to directly influence action or response such as email marketing or direct mail as opposed to awareness like print ads or signage). We accepted the fact that there is a large definition of cross-channel integration and that we would narrow down our target as we come up with different projects…which led to some discussion/brainstorming on possible projects we could do to pursue our charge as a group (trumpets blaring charge heard in the distance…).

Here is a sampling of the ideas discussed:

Focus on nuts & bolts…how to get started…benchmarks…how to get it done.
Provide metrics for how to measure success and case studies on how it has been successful.
How to get it done easily. Much of the material out there is intimidating on getting the resources (people, money) to get going.
Create a checklist to help people know they are addressing the right issues - a Cross-Channel Maturity Audit
Help people learn how to unify a single communication piece & communicate it across multiple channels. Keep in mind how a message differs for different channels.
Help people test. How to choose the right channels. How to choose the right campaigns for testing cross-channel integration.
Focus on how to best combine traditional and new marketing channels (e.g. email marketing and social media, blogging and events)
Since we are doing this for email marketers, maybe we should investigate whether one channel (e.g. email marketing) should be the hub of your cross-channel marketing strategy.

This would force us to think through the aspects of cross-channel marketing and define some logical next steps. It could be a good way to gather status and thoughts from others. Let's do it!

And so there you are…our first challenge…define the aspects of a Cross-Channel Maturity Audit. We’ll dive in at our next meeting in November.

Intrigued and want to join us? Contact Ali at the eec.

- Jeff Chamberlain, Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable co-chair
VP, B2B Solutions Marketing
Aprimo

Time for a Better Discussion Around Best Time to Send

Tuesday, October 5, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

Despite some of the buzz you might be hearing, don’t think the “best time to send” discussion can be tabled as no longer relevant. To maximize your email marketing ROI, you must still discover the day and the time that give you the highest response rate and return on your investment.

Are you already operating off of some “best time to send” assumptions? As marketers, we want to default to industry best practices and well-publicized case studies. But as email marketers, we are able to—and must—test, not take for granted. Rather than rely on the results of others, we must discover our own. And there’s a real danger in following the crowd. When they say Tuesday is the best day to send and then everyone sends on Tuesday, then what? Tuesday leads to crowded inboxes.

The fact is, the industry doesn’t determine your best time to send; your audience does. And you can only learn that by testing.

Beyond knowing it’s the audience who decides, you must also be clear about what you’re measuring. Number delivered? Opens? Click-throughs? Conversions? Total revenue? Then instead of asking “What’s the best time to send?” the question could be, “Which day and time gives us the highest (insert metric here)?”

Know what your metrics really mean. If your metric is revenue, remember that an email opened is not necessarily an email acted upon. The recipient might be curious enough to look beyond the preview pane, but not ready to buy.

This is especially true with mobile devices. Sure, mobile means 24x7 access to email but that probably doesn’t impact your optimum send day. Just because people see their email 24x7 doesn’t mean they respond to it or even really pay attention to it. A relatively safe assumption is that people are less likely to respond to a marketing email on their PDA or BlackBerry. They’ll wait until they are back at their computer to actually respond to—or buy—something.

Also keep in mind that depending on how your audience is segmented, you might have more than one best time to send. For example, the stay-at-home mom can get your email during the day because she’s online and checking her inbox while the kids are at school. But the working mom has to get it after the kids are in bed and she’s catching up on personal email before she turns out the lights.

To determine your own best time for sending by testing, first be clear on your goal. Which metric are you aiming to improve? Then test to that metric, segmenting as much as you can to optimize the delivery day and time for each of your different audiences.

One of our clients is a national home builder. Through testing they’ve learned Friday is the best day to send emails about open houses because they know their audience is planning to spend Saturday touring new home models. Or consider the outdoor equipment retailer that also sends their promotional emails on Friday afternoons. They’ve learned their young, male audience doesn’t plan their weekend activities until Friday afternoon, so the retailer times their emails to coincide with when their audience is beginning to think about Saturday’s fun. If these two companies followed the crowd, imagine the negative impact on their email marketing ROI. They’d be emailing on Tuesdays…and getting totally ignored.

The success of these email campaigns is testament to the importance of knowing when your audience will be most likely to respond to your promotional email. Maybe it’s time for a better “best time to send” discussion, not an end to the discussion.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

The Very Real Risks of Aggressive List Growth Tactics

Wednesday, September 15, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

We all want a big email marketing list, but we also want to respect subscriber interests, protect the assets of our email program and maintain a solid foundation for revenue growth. There is a bit of a high wire balancing act sometimes when our organizational goals include having *both* a large and active file.

At this month’s meeting of the eec's List Growth & Engagement Roundtable, a group of industry practitioners discussed a common – and often uncomfortable – situation of email marketers everywhere. The boss says in that big, growly voice, “Get me a big file of email subscribers - now!” Yet, the types of tactics that grow a list aggressively can have real risks for response, loyalty and inbox deliverability – which puts your entire program in danger. No level of growling will change that result. Here are some ideas from the group about how to approach this somewhat tricky balancing act.

“I remember a million member push program from one of our clients that was successful in building a big file, but created inbox deliverability and sender reputation problems for many, many months,” says Nancy Harris, Sr. Manager of Deliverability at Fishbowl. A restaurant wanted to get one million subscribers in their restaurant e-club (a loyalty program). The promotion was intended to encourage current members to invite lots of friends in order to win a big cash prize. The new member would receive a free meal for joining the program. “It worked on one level,” Nancy says. “It was successful in reaching a lot of people and they did reach their goal of one million subscribers..

“The problem was that the list quality was terrible. We immediately saw blocking and blacklisting due to unknown users (bounces) and complaints, which took us more than a few months to correct.   Not only did this client have ongoing inbox deliverability issues, but there were also questions about the quality of the people who became new members. They were not really interested in dining at this restaurant regularly, or receiving ongoing email communications from them.”

If that restaurant did the math, they may find that this program was successful in the short term. It cost them some number of tens of thousands of dollars to set up and run the promo and they got a million new members. Remember, too, that email is a lot cheaper to send than printed postcards – and it’s very efficient in terms of time to market, so this ROI was returned quickly. The cost per new member was very small.    Short term, that could make sense. However, long term, they destroyed their sender reputation and did not receive revenue from the majority of the new members – these people were not committed to the restaurant and did not frequently dine there.

This business cycle issue haunts many an email marketing decision, says Stephanie Miller of Return Path.   “Short term, you can broadcast to your file and you earn revenue. Long term, however, you may see serious consequences, all of which have a real cost.”

Consider these factors in determining the cost of the new subscriber acquired through a sweeps or promotion like the million member push described above:

Depressing your sender reputation due to high complaints (which limits your email marketing opportunity for all subscribers by limiting access to the inbox) – this could be a drop in inbox placement of 10% - 50% of your file every time you mail;
Churning your file – people who leave by complaints, unsubscribe or filtering – and need to be replaced at some cost per subscriber;
Lower loyalty of good customers by bothering them with irrelevant promotions – the cost of this could be a penny a person or it might be higher depending on the type of brand relationship you need for your business;
Losing the opportunity for future email marketing because they unsubscribed, complained or are just ignoring you from now on.

“When you calculate the true cost of the aggressive list growth program, factor in these costs as well. And then make a business decision based on long term customer value and satisfaction,” Stephanie says.

“We run into this balancing dilemma when we suggest a list hygiene or list cleansing audit,” says ExactTarget's Nate Romance who is also co-chair of the Roundtable. Most clients see value in doing a re-engage and send a win back campaign to the portion of the file which is non-active, Nate says. “However, many will opt for reduced frequency as opposed to suppression of those subscribers who have not responded in a long time. That allows them to keep a big number for list size.”

Nate says that when he starts to discuss these issues with marketers, some see the value in keeping “dead” or “nearly dead” records on the file because with a baseline of zero, any interaction will be a rise in response. However, usually it takes more than just continued hammering at the inbox door, he says. “Sometimes sending the best of the best offer that month rather than weekly will increase response rates,” he recommends. The rest of the group agreed, however, that dialing back frequency has not ever significantly improved response rates. “The risk to your sender reputation is real when you keep non responsive records on the file,” adds Stephanie of Return Path. “I never think that risk is worth the small chance that a couple people will respond at some future point.”

Nancy from Fishbowl adds that a similar practice is common when marketers try to build a list quickly – they sacrifice quality for quantity. “I see a lot of what I call ‘deceptive list building,’” she says. This is when a marketer does a sweeps or promotion with vague email permission just to build the file quickly. “That lack of express consent can be a problem for deliverability and response rates and has a real cost for determining the value of such a venture.”

Such practices often are not well measured, and so it’s hard to determine the impact – good or bad. “When someone gets more aggressive they might do campaigns that are intended to build the list quickly and then they don’t track by source so that we can’t always associate the promotions with complaints and response (or lack of),” Nate from ExactTarget says. “I always recommend that we tag these folks or track source so that in six months we can check the quality of the list and the real success of the campaign.”

“It’s so interesting that we marketers are good at thinking about LTV of a subscriber when we pay for them – as in a media buy or PPC search campaign,” Stephanie adds. “But when we acquire email subscribers through these “organic’ measures, we don’t always track by lifetime value, we track by the initial sign up.”

Nancy agrees. “The value of someone when they are new to the file may be different than the same person six months down the road. We often see that there comes a point, especially for smaller files, that the file stabilizes at a certain number because of loss. New subscribers come in at a steady pace, but subscribers are also lost due to list aging and fatigue,” she says.

That is a very good argument for making sure that list growth is an ongoing commitment, and not a onetime promotion.

What are you doing to consistently grow your email file with active subscribers? Do some of these points resonate? Please comment below, or join the eec List Growth & Engagement Roundtable to participate in future discussions like this.

- Stephanie Miller
Vice Chair, eec
VP, Global Market Development, Return Path

Managing Your Email Reputation

Monday, August 30, 2010 by Daniel Dreymann

When it comes to creating a successful email campaign and achieving the best possible delivery rate, your reputation is your key component. A good reputation will keep you in the various ISPs' good graces, and a bad one can get you banished, blocked or blacklisted.

Your reputation is what determines whether your email messages are reaching inboxes or if they are being blocked. For email marketers, one of the toughest challenges is figuring out how to improve their reputation as part of enhancing their overall sending practices.

First, it’s important to understand the key factors affecting your email reputation. These are:

Number of spam complaints generated – too many complaints lead to being blocked by ISPs
Volume of email sent – dramatically boosting frequency can cause your reputation to plummet
Method used to process bounces – invalid email addresses need to be removed promptly as part of essential list hygiene
Sending to invalid or old email addresses – could cause your campaign to be caught in a spam trap at some ISPs
Appearance on any blacklists

Now that you are aware of the issues, the next step, naturally, is to figure out ways you can improve your email reputation. First, to cut down on the rate with which receivers click the “spam” button, it’s important that your email messages clearly identify who you are in the messages’ “from” line and provide an easy way to find the unsubscribe link.

Second, it is important to respect your email recipient by sending content that is relevant to that consumer and sent with a frequency that is aligned to their engagement with your brand, product, or service. Having an email preference center will help determine the frequency of emails for your customers and will help you retain more customers in the long run.

Next, you want to reduce your bounce rates from invalid addresses. This most often occurs when you start working with new partners or change your sign-up practices. To make adjustments you can add list error checking or require addresses to be entered twice. You also need to be aware of spam traps created by ISPs, in which you may get stuck when using old and inactive addresses.

Finally, it’s important to obtain as much feedback as possible from ISPs, your ESP and your customers. This feedback will help you make important adjustments to maintain the highest reputation score possible. Key feedback data should include:

The delay between senders receiving a complaint and unsubscribing the complainer
Repeat complaints
Complaints tracked to ISP/mailbox provider

Additionally you can also help maintain your reputation by always knowing your numbers (open rate, click through rate, and delivery rates); authenticating your messages with DKIM signatures; using CertifiedEmail, and making sure your infrastructure is secure.

- Daniel T. Dreymann

President and Co-Founder

Goodmail Systems

Ben & Jerry’s Drops Email in Favor of Social Media: Industry Reactions

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

Two weeks ago, Ben & Jerry’s announced they were “giving up” on email marketing in favor of social media. Note: Later that day, the @cherrygarcia Twitter account reported that this was a UK-only change.

Update: Our friends over at The eMail Guide took the time to email the PR folks at Ben & Jerry’s. Here’s what their PR Director, Sean Greenwood, had to say – personally, I don’t think it changes the story dramatically.

As you can imagine, the email marketing industry was up in arms. There was a collective “Noooooooooo” followed by “Are they kidding?” The Inbox Insiders – an email marketing list created by Bill McCloskey that boasts some of the sharpest marketers from many of the largest brands in the world as well as a host of vendor side (email service provider) folks – decided to weigh in. Here is what a few of them had to say…

    21st century brands need to ‘behave’, not just tell stories, as behavior is tangible and real, and empowers Consumers to shape their own brand experience. That shaping is what drives advocacy and rampant love of the brand. Ben & Jerry’s clearly has heard what their customers want, and currently do not want, and are behaving accordingly. Sweet, creamy customer-centricity!

Andy Goldman*
SVP, Strategy & Integration
RAPP

————-

    The same discussion now about social vs email took place decades ago regarding radio vs newspapers and TV vs radio. History repeats itself. Of course some social evangelists and fan boys/girls will hoot about this vindicating social as better than any other medium, but comments such this are not motivated by any kind of insight. At this point they are driven by wishful thinking and personal agendas. In other words, this recurring discussion is more political than practical. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are proprietary platforms controlled entirely by their owners, while email is a standard supported globally and that sets it apart.

Jim Ducharme
Editor
The eMail Guide

————-

    While Ben & Jerry’s UK marketing department is listening to their customers, which is always applauded, this is shortsighted from a business perspective. Email and social media are significantly more powerful when used together versus independently. Further, with email marketing, you own your email list, whereas Facebook and Twitter followers are owned by those respective properties. Rather than replacing email with social media altogether, Ben & Jerry’s should focus on improving the value of their email programs for their subscribers by integrating social elements and exclusive offers (e.g. use a 24 hr. “flash” discount to drive traffic into retail stores or use email to launch a social word of mouth campaign.)

Kristin Hersant*
Director, Corporate Marketing
StrongMail

————-

    Facebook and Twitter may be working well for them now, but will that hold true into next year? The year after? Five years from now? And if they disband their email program now and decide they need it later, how easy will it be to resuscitate those email relationships? I’m not anti-social media. It’s just that I’ve been on panels where the topic is “Email is Dead, Long Live X” where X = RSS/Blogs/MySpace, etc. And none of them have actually, to date, replaced email.

Jeanne S. Jennings
Consultant, Email Marketing Strategy
JeanneJennings.com, Inc.

————-

    The “inbox” – defined as a destination for content from both people we know and brands we like – has fragmented. It’s online, on my device, in Facebook and Twitter and at a business address. Great email marketing has always been about great content, and that is more true today as email marketers compete for budgets and customer attention with social, mobile and even offline marketing. Why keep your investment in email? Frankly, the question must be, How can we best utilize email to connect with customers and prospects in ways that help achieve our business KPIs?

    If you can’t come up with a strong strategy to answer, then you are either missing a big opportunity or won’t find ROI in the channel.

Stephanie Miller*
VP, Global Market Development
Return Path

————-

    Ben & Jerry’s made a bold move and now they are getting the media benefit of that decision. In the short run, I think they will benefit from this move. However, in the long run, they have made a decision that abandons a lot of paying customers that may have wanted to hear from them, but don’t actively engage in social media. In our research on how consumers engage brands through Email, Facebook and Twitter we see consumers layering these activities to get closer to brands. Consumers don’t operate in silos and marketers shouldn’t either.

Morgan Stewart*
Director, Research and Strategy
ExactTarget

————-

    Part of me has to think (hope?) that Ben & Jerry’s UK has run the numbers and determined that forgoing email marketing in favor of social media is the best option for them. I don’t understand why they’d abandon email marketing altogether. Why not give their subscribers a choice?

DJ Waldow*
Director of Community
Blue Sky Factory

————-

    Such a shame that brands can’t think “one to one” in the digital age and have to kiss goodbye to a fantastic relationship-building channel. The skills needed to make a success of social media are not that different to email marketing, so I fear that B&J may be running away from email to an equally unforgiving world of Facebook and Twitter. Lucky for them that the ice cream’s so good.

David Hughes
Founder
The Email Academy, Ltd

————-

    Most CPG brands struggle to create robust CRM programs with very tiny budgets. It sounds as though B&Js has simply made a budget-related decision to move to the least expensive channel available so they can reach out more often to their customers. Email will still have a place in their communications arsenal despite the announcement – after all, how do all their Facebook fans know when they have a message from B&Js? Email. Of course, it’s an email that doesn’t cost B&Js anything to send – though it goes to a much smaller audience than they could likely send to directly.

Gretchen Scheiman
Partner, Associate Director, CRM
OgilvyOne worldwide

————-

    I applaud Ben & Jerry’s for getting customer feedback before making a very strategic decision. However, I think the mistake is that they abanonded email rather than letting customers choose their preferred communication channel. After all, this is a company that offers 108 flavors. Since many customers prefer chocolate to vanilla, are they going to eliminate vanilla now too?

Simms Jenkins
CEO
BrightWave Marketing & EmailStatCenter.com

————-

    Email is a core driver of many successful social marketing programs. I’m just not sure if anyone has articulated this to Ben & Jerry’s or showed them an effective way to integrate email & social into an effective program.

Chris Baggott*
CEO/Co-founder
Compendium

————-

    Their decision certainly seems shortsighted. Are they completely overlooking email as a coupon distribution channel? If their subscribers were getting high-value coupons exclusive to being on the list, maybe they’d have liked the program more. Although B&J doesn’t have quite the same distribution model as ColdStone Creamery, they could take a few lessons from their competitors in the retail ice cream space (I’m thinking of Rita’s Ice too).

Karen Talavera*
Email & Digital Marketing Coaching, Training & Strategy
Synchronicity Marketing

————-

    Each year Ben & Jerry’s kills 8 to 12 ice cream flavors. In 2010, at least in the UK, it looks like Email Marketing has gone to the ice cream Flavour Graveyard just like Peanut Butter & Jelly did more than a decade ago. But Ben & Jerry’s decision in the UK to pull back on Email Marketing and focus on new marketing flavors like Social Media speaks to their unique customers and marketing approach, not to any decline in email marketing’s popularity and effectiveness. After all, while Cherry Garcia is Ben & Jerry’s top seller, vanilla is still the most popular ice cream flavor in the world.

Loren McDonald*
VP, Industry Relations
Silverpop

————-

    Totally abandoning email in favor of social is short sighted and antithetical to Ben & Jerry’s efforts, since email marketing can be and is one of the most powerful drivers of social media participation. A survey conducted by Harris Interactive last year found that 96% of Americans were willing to provide companies with their email addresses in order to receive offers and discounts, compared to just 12% that were willing to provide their social media “digits” to do the same (e.g., their Facebook handle). Smart marketers are using email as the gateway to social — acquiring customers’ email addresses first, and then directing them down the funnel towards social media channels.

Jordan Cohen
VP, Business Development
Pontiflex

————-

Where do you stand? What is your take. Good (strategic) decision by Ben & Jerry’s or just plain madness?

- DJ Waldow
Director of Community
Blue Sky Factory

Read the original post.

*eec Member

How Social Networking Can Magnify the Power of Your Email Campaigns

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Marco Marini

Are you struggling to increase your in-house email list in order to extend your marketing reach? There is a growing percentage of the online population that does not sign up for emails or newsletters. Instead they get their information predominately through social networking sites and portals. To reach them, one has to get to them either through their contacts, the groups they belong to, or those they follow. But email can be the vehicle to do just that.

Email can enable and even encourage content to be shared with social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. This then allows for an extended reach to those people who haven't opted in to receive emails from you. Plus the marketer retains some control over what specifically can be shared. For example, it might be a video, particular imagery, or a special offer. You as the marketer get to decide.

In addition to getting your content exposed to a much broader audience, sharing email content gives those doing the sharing the opportunity to add value to their respective networks. This is a huge motivator for many social networkers because it puts them in the role of trusted advisor. (Consider how often a tweet from someone in your network is simply a retweet.) This also allows a marketer to enable their audiences to evangelize on your behalf.

This opportunity to reach the previously unreachable, and to simultaneously empower your audience to demonstrate value to their network, can lead to very high conversion rates, especially if your goal is to not only reach new prospects but also to add new subscribers to your in-house list.

The latest statistics indicate that the number of people seeing content increases approximately 24% with social networking/email integration compared to relying on email alone. That's a massive increase for virtually no cost. FTF (forward to a friend) has been considered an email best practice for years, and it's one marketers should keep doing. But social forwarding features blow it away when you look at the extended reach enabled by social networking vs. FTF email.

The typical social networker has approximately 160 connections. When they share something in their network, the message they are sharing is exposed to their whole network. Compare that quantity to the person who forwards an email using FTF: Typically 1 in 1,000 email recipients actually forwards via FTF, and of those that do, the vast majority forward to 3 people or less. And hardly any of them subscribe as the result of getting the forward. It's easy to see that when you provide interesting, valuable and relevant content into a socially networked environment (i.e. content people will want to share), some of the new people you've just reached will sign up with your company directly for future news or shareworthy information.

When you add social networking integration via a tool like Share-to-Social or Social Forward, be sure to provide instructions to your audience about how to share specific offers or content, and help them understand why they should. Language such as "Click the Facebook icon to the right to share these recipes with your network" tells the user the action to take (click to share) and implies the benefit (you'll delight your friends).

All of this, however, is predicated on having information worth sharing. Your content has to have value. It must be relevant, interesting and appealing. Period.

The organic list growth opportunity is staggering too, as the latest research from MarketingSherpa and authors David Daniels and Jeanniey Mullen* show that the typical lifetime value of a new email address is between $120 and $180 each! Growing your list by just 100 recipients would play out to something like a $15,000 lift to the bottom line. Cha-ching.

Email marketing still offers the highest ROI. Imagine what you can achieve when you multiply its reach by integrating social networking features into your email campaigns!

*In their book, Email Marketing: An Hour a Day

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Putting a Face With the Name

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

More than ever, consumers are thinking about the necessity of their purchases before they part with their hard-earned dollars. Adding to the problem, 65% of Americans believe they are bombarded with too much advertising, according to the Art and Copy trailer. This becomes a major issue for email marketers who are trying to walk the fine line between inundating the inbox and delivering timely messages.

So, how do you convert consumers from window shoppers to buyers when there are so many companies vying for their affections? Simply step out from behind the corporate curtain and create a connection that's rooted in authenticity. One way to do this is to put a face with the name.

As the fashion visionary and Creative Director at J.Crew, Jenna Lyons is the ideal voice for the brand. By devoting an entire email to Jenna's Picks and supporting the story in-store, in the catalog and online, J.Crew is inviting people into her office to see what inspires her. Adding the quote from Jenna is yet another way to personalize the content and up the authenticity.

The founders of Serena & Lily take this a step further by devoting two separate emails to their distinct styles: Serena Hearts and Lily Loves. By incorporating a quote for each top pick, they create a conversation. Without the quotes, it would be a list of items without any personality. Of course, in both of these examples the assumption is that the quotes are real, and if they truly want to emanate authenticity then the words should be unedited, as though part of an interview or casual conversation.

Ann Taylor recently introduced their subscribers to Lisa, their new head designer, in a gorgeous email. It includes a quote, a pic of Lisa, and swatches from her inspiration board. Unfortunately, the story ended there. Clicking on the CTA under Lisa's photo dropped you straight into the shop path. Building out an online landing page where people might be able to learn about Lisa's inspiration would have been a spot-on execution.

Catering to the true fashionista who scours the web looking for the latest trends, Tobi delivers all kinds of editorial extras into this email. From taking subscribers behind the scenes at Velvet to strolling the San Francisco streets with their resident style scout, Tobi turns shopping into a full-on fashion experience. (On a best practices note, they fall short in some key areas, including SWYN and FTAF, which are major misses, especially when you consider the great content.)

At the other end of the authenticity spectrum, we have Old Navy's Super-modelquins campaign. Basically, their public-facing spokesperson, who supposedly embodies the Old Navy brand, is actually...a mannequin. While they've done their best to create personalities around these characters and make them more "human", the fact remains that they are plastic, so this comes off as fake and, to be honest, a little creepy.

Without a doubt, Banana Republic has a lock on classic and affordable go-to-work styles. While their emails are always polished to perfection, they feel the same week after week, whether they're featuring white shirts or the must-haves for fall. They get points for creating cool extras, like the City Stories short film competition and the Mad Men walk-on competition, but lose points for never letting their customers into the design studio. What was it that inspired them to make the white shirt the big staple for fall? Wouldn't it be fun to know?

Knowing who you are as a company and inviting consumers to see the face behind the name will help you navigate away from the corporate speak and towards a more casual conversation. In other words, keep it real. No one wants to feel like they're buying something that's generic and mass produced. By giving them a story behind the product, you're creating a connection for your consumer to carry with them every time they button up that shirt, slip on those sandals, or wear those must-have jeans.

- Darrah MacLean & Lisa Harmon - Smith-Harmon

Suggestion: 9 Real World Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Thursday, August 6, 2009 by Marco Marini

Not every email marketing best practice is an obvious one. In fact, in our experience at ClickMail Marketing, there are quite a few best practices that companies seem to look over or deliberately ignore. The result? The opposite of best practices, or what we kindly call "common email marketing mistakes" rather than worst practices.

In an industry where a half a percentage point can make or break a campaign, it's our opinion that tweaking and optimizing every possible factor is worth the effort. With that in mind, I asked our staff to compile a list of the top 10 mistakes they see when deploying email campaigns on behalf of clients. The good news is that they only came up with nine. And the even better news is that these are all easy best practices to adapt and adhere to.

Below are the common mistakes seen by the staff at ClickMail, and what you can do to avoid them:

Common email marketing mistake #1: Sloppy Copy

Check your spelling. Copy and paste into Word and run spell-check if you need to. Also check the spelling in your links. If your URL is wrong, so are you.
Read the copy. Don't scam, skim or skip over. Reading is the only way to ensure proper use of language like "their" vs. "there" vs. "they're", missing words, incorrect punctuation or poor sentence structure. Best practice: Print it out to read on paper. Even better best practice: Read it out loud.
Employ a second set of eyes for final review. Once you've written, read and edited the same piece of content many times, it is no longer fresh to you and errors are easily overlooked. Ask someone else to run spell check and read the copy. You may be surprised to see what you missed.

Common email marketing mistake #2: Crummy Coding

Set the pixel width to 600. This prevents the need to scroll to the right—and the potential to lose interest if someone feels they have to do too much work to read your email.
Don't use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in your HTML coding. It is stripped out by many ESPs, meaning your message can be lost. Even if you've spell checked it and done all the best practices described above!
Many ESPs also suppress images by default, as do email clients (about 80%). Do not create your email message out of one big image or your subscribers may only see a blank page with a little, tiny red X. If you use any images, to be on the safe side, utilize a View Online feature so they have another way to see images if they are suppressed.

Common email marketing mistake #3: Cold Calls to Action

Your call to action (CTA) should be in text format, not an image because—as mentioned above—images are suppressed by default by many email service providers and email clients.
Include two to three instances of your CTA above the fold (in the first 300 pixels). Make sure to include at least one graphical and one textual CTA.
The top one-third and the left-most area of your emails are the most valuable real estate. Try to place a CTA those areas, in text and as minimal images.

Common email marketing mistake #4: Poor Subject Lines

Your subject line should be seven words or less (or 35 characters). Most people know this but might not know that the following conditions in a subject line can be flagged as SPAM:

Percent of Capital Letters: Too many uppercase letters compared to lowercase letters
Repeating Capital Letter: Too many upper case letters in a row (e.g., SALE)
Gaps: When the words have gaps between letters like s*t*y*l*e
Repetition: When letters or characters are repeated (*****)
Special Character Flag: Overuse of special characters (e.g., & $ # @ ( )[ ] !)
Punctuation Flag: Too much punctuation (…) or the type of punctuation (!)
Word/Space Ratio: Spammers use blank spaces to catch the recipient's attention resulting in a high ratio of spaces to words
First Character Flag/First Word Flag: Subject lines starting with a special character or punctuation. Words like "Free", "hey", "Sale" etc.

Common email marketing mistake #5: Obscure "From" Label

Your From address is key information used by subscribers to determine if your email is spam or not. If it's not relevant or recognizable, they may mark it as spam, or just delete it without opening it.

Common email marketing mistake #6: Floating From Address and/or Domain

Keep a static "From" address and/or domain, and ask to be added to the recipient's Safe Sender list at the top of each email.

Common email marketing mistake #7: Lazy Lists

Utilize the Forward to a Friend (FTF) feature to organically grow your list.
Practice good and consistent list hygiene. Most people know to honor opt outs in 10 days to be CAN-SPAM compliant but you should also clean your list(s) of hard bounces after each send, plus monitor soft bounces and remove from your list as needed.

Common email marketing mistake #8: Competing Links

Don't include competing links, period. Unless it's a newsletter, most emails should be single subject with a single call to action. If it's a sale, link to the appropriate sale items. If it's an invitation, link to the registration page etc.

Common email marketing mistake #9: Unfair Unsubscribe

The unsubscribe link must be the first step, per CAN-SPAM. Don't make people jump through hoops to opt out.

Now, I hope you read the nine common email marketing mistakes above and nodded your head in agreement, confident you're innocent of all. If not, if even one of those nine listed tripped you up, go fix it now and increase your ROI later as a result.

- Marco Marini, President & CEO, ClickMail Marketing

Marco Marini is an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over a decade and half's-worth of experience in the field. Before taking over as CEO, he was CMM's VP of Marketing & Operations. Marini has also held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada.

Socializing with the eec Email Design Roundtable: A Discussion on the Integration of Social Media and Marketing Email

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

The eec Email Design Roundtable recently spent some time discussing an industry hot topic: the integration of email marketing and social networking.

Social networking generally makes its way into email in two primary ways:
(1) Through appeals in email for subscribers to join an existing social network.
and
(2) "Share with Your Network" (SWYN) invitations for subscribers to share email content with their networks. While these are each fairly simple, there are important creative and strategic considerations that contribute to email success, as well as innovative ways to bring user-generated content (UGC) into email.

Each Design Roundtable member offered fresh insights and ideas to the evolving body of best practices around social optimization in email. Below is a summary of key points from the conversation:

When it comes to making emails more viral, content is king. However, creative elements can contribute to the successful integration of social media. How can design and copy encourage social behavior?

Tim Siukola, ExactTarget: Use the same design "toolbox" to draw attention to alternate ways to interact, keeping the toolbox consistent across campaigns.

Lisa Harmon, Smith-Harmon: Including the toolbox in a "Share Bar" or "SWYN Module" in the header or footer of the email makes the most sense for most marketers.

Chad White, Smith-Harmon: Integrating the social appeal into clever calls-to-action (i.e. "Help a college student save money – forward this email!") can garner more interest than simple links. But some also announce their social networking presences through emails focused entirely on social. For example, Shoeline found that by announcing their social networking presence through a social-dedicated email and then adding a prominent banner in later emails increased subscriber engagement by 57% (Source: Style Campaign).

Justine Jordan, ExactTarget: For organizations with tight-nit communities and/or UGC, integrating photos is a strong way to engage subscribers. It also plays off the significant voyeur aspect of social networking! In addition, integrating the social network icons encourages participation by building recognition across email campaigns.

What strategic considerations are important in integrating social networking with email marketing campaigns?

Megan Walsh, Williams-Sonoma: For retail, the challenge is prioritization of "Share vs. Sell." You have to weigh the benefits of directing subscribers to engage with the brand's social network with the importance of ROI. Ideally, the integration is done so that "share" and "sell" complement one another.

Chad White: "Social Influencer" has emerged as a new category of customer that could be used in email segmentation (similar to non-buyers or early adopters). This segmentation would serve the same purpose as brands targeting of bloggers – making sure that messages are reaching the most influential people in the audience. Measuring the success would call for a different set of 'performance' metrics.

Brooks Bell, Brooks-Bell Interactive: In non-retail messaging, it's valuable to think about how upsell messaging and lifecycle messages can be engaging enough to warrant them 'shareworthy' in the eyes of subscribers.

How does the use of rich media impact social behavior?

Lisa Harmon: Is there a way to adapt the visual language of rich media to the email channel, in a way that makes messages more viral? Subscribers should be excited to share content with friends, and rich media contributes to enthusiasm around a particular message.

Tim Siukola: People are more apt to share video than text with others – it's more likely that subscribers will think of rich media content as appealing to people in their networks.

Ron Blum, Upromise: People are also very likely to share text content – whether it's newspaper articles, magazine articles – any type of content – not just rich media. If you look at Twitter, people are sharing tons of URLs to text content.

Chad White: That's definitely true in the B2B circle. It takes much longer to assimilate information via video. You can assimilate information via text much more quickly than via video.

Raj Khera, MailerMailer: In Twitter, in the B2B space, people link to charts too… While that isn't text, it's not rich media; it's something in between. People tend to like to share those types of visuals.

What are some examples of good social marketing via email?

Tim Siukola: Urban Outfitters includes network logos at the bottom of their emails and promotes special social features when they have them.

Lisa Harmon: American Apparel held a DIY costume contest where they encouraged subscribers to submit photos of themselves in American Apparel costumes. They also showed last year's winner in the email. This is a good share + sell example.

Final Remarks
Who is an expert on these topics? No one! We're all new to the game, and it's important to be in the game, regardless of any anxieties about how far ahead competitors might be. The most important thing is to consider what makes sense for your brand and how you can use social elements to create a unified experience that engages subscribers.

Seven Digital Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Email List

Monday, June 22, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

Though growing your email database takes time and effort, when done correctly, it will house your most qualified and responsive leads. A well structured email database will enable you to boost sales with more targeted messages and offers, extend the lifecycle of any campaign and increase customer retention with regular and relevant communications.

Consider the following techniques to acquire new leads and grow your email list with success:

1. Who is your ideal lead and how do you reach them? Create a profile for your best customer(s). This should include things such as age, gender, hobbies, job function, how they shop (online or at stores), where they shop, what they read, what websites they visit, etc. Depending on the product or service you are marketing, some of the above will be more relevant than others. For example, if you are marketing a clothing line, job function will be less relevant than where and how they shop, where as if you are marketing a trade publication, job function and industry will be extremely important.

2. Analyze your competition. Take some time to find out what your competitors are doing to build their email lists. Start off by going to their websites. Then do a web search on your competition as well as relevant key words, and take note of any banners / CPC ads that appear. Be sure to click through to check out what their landing pages look like and what type of information they are choosing to capture. If they have an e-newsletter, sign up for it. This is an easy way to start receiving their email campaigns. All of these steps will help you find out what type of promotions they are running, any marketing alliances they have formed, and how they are positioning their product or service.

3. Reach your best customer. Once you've created your customer profile(s) and finished your competitive analysis, you are ready to develop your list growth strategy. Your strategy can include initiatives such as: banner ads on websites that your target audience visits, a PPC campaign, direct mail or email campaigns to magazine subscriber opt-in lists, etc. You can also approach other products or service providers for co-promotions or mutually beneficial partnerships. Starting an e-newsletter or a blog for your company are great ways to grow your list as long as your content is desirable. The lifecycle of any campaign can be extended with behavior-based trigger emails.

4. Your offer is everything! Unless your offer is relevant to the recipient, they will not respond to your campaign. Your offer will need to prompt the recipient to make a purchase or willingly give you their information in exchange for something they want. For instance, you might send an email introducing your company to a magazine subscriber opt-in list that you know your target audience reads. By including a free downloadable premium such as an industry salary guide, a list of the hottest bars in town, or a best practices whitepaper – what ever might be most relevant to your target audience – recipients will need to provide their email address and demographic information in order to download the premium. Once you've captured their information and they've opted-in to your database, you will be able to communicate with that lead on an ongoing basis.

5. Your offer is almost everything! Unless the recipients receive your email, they cannot receive your offer. Therefore, be sure to comply with email marketing best practices: include a physical mailing address, an opt-out link and a subject line that reflects the content in your email. Also, when writing your email, try to stay away from words that are flagged by spam filters.

6. Create a landing page. It is extremely important to guide the campaign recipient through the entire process. By creating a landing page on your website that mirrors your campaign's message / offer, you will encourage the recipient to fill out the form with the ultimate goal of opting-in to your list.

7. Use a lead capture form. Your landing page can either link to a lead capture form or you can embed the form in the landing page itself.
a. Since people are more prone to filling out a short form than a long and drawn out questionnaire, limit the amount of information you are asking them to provide in exchange for their premium. Besides the basic name and email address, think of including one or two other demographic questions. These questions should be well thought out to provide you with information you can leverage for future email campaigns.
b. In addition to the demographic questions, your form should include a check box giving people the option to opt-in to your mailing list and receive information about your company and future promotions. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, if people do not explicitly say that they would like to receive emails from you in the future, it is unlawful to send them commercial marketing emails.
c. If you do not currently have a way to capture leads, an easy way to do this is through your email service provider. Most ESPs will provide you with both the lead capture form and a database to house the acquired leads. They will also manage your opt-outs for you.

8. Track your efforts. If you track your list building efforts, you will be able to pinpoint which initiatives are working the best and focus more of your energy on those. You might decide that others aren't worth your time. Easy ways to track your initiatives are:
a. Web Analytics: sign up for a free Google Analytics account. This will enable you to track how many people are visiting each page on your site and which campaign they are coming from.
b. In your lead capture form, include one question asking people how they heard about you with a drop down menu where customers can select from a list of your current list building initiatives.
c. Landing Pages: create a separate landing page for each marketing initiative so you can track page visits to these dedicated pages through your web analytics account.
d. Dedicated 800 numbers: there are services that will provide you with a range of 800 numbers that redirect to your main phone number. Including a dedicated 800 number on each landing page will enable you to associate each call with a specific campaign.

Remember, even if you are accurately targeting your best customer, your campaign will only be a success if you get them to act on your offer and opt-in to your database. Be sure to spend enough time tailoring your message and the offer to the people who will be receiving your campaign.

- Yael K. Penn, Founder and Principal, Imagine 360 Marketing

Are You One of the Cool Kids? A/B Testing Will Make You Popular...and Successful

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

There are a few things in the small world of email marketing that I believe can be simply attributed to peer pressure. Just like back in our school days, most of our impressionable brains feel the need to keep up with the "cool" email marketers. The fact that you are reading this article tells me that you are at least interested on some level in learning more about and improving your own email program.

We all read trade magazines, blogs, attend webinars, and watch twitter feeds looking for those nuggets that could make all the difference in our ROI. All of the "experts" seem to talk about the same things over and over again in these different mediums. Why do the topics seem recycled? The reason is because these really are the keys to success and they do work.

I wanted to talk about one of those "we hear this all the time" topics and put a bit of a different spin on it. Let's talk about A/B testing. Yes, testing again. Testing seems to be the staple of many best practices discussions. All of us senders know we should test our email. The problem lies in the fact that, for most of us, we have no idea of how to pull that off. I break it down like this: 10% test correctly, 30% attempt testing, 40% plan on testing, and the other 20% could care less. I think these statistics mirror most things in our lives. We have the overachievers, those among us who make the attempt, those who continually plan to start tomorrow, and those who don't even want to discuss it.

Why can't most of us actually get good results from our testing? The answer lies in the peer pressure we talked about earlier. All the cool kids are doing A/B testing, so we feel like we have to do the same thing. There is a big difference in doing real testing with a purpose in mind, and sending two different email campaigns. Testing is all about the results, not the actual tests. If you are not in position to capture data or understand why results were different, testing is a waste of your time. It's time to give up your seat at the popular table.

So you're ready to test…

Step one before beginning a testing program is to determine what element you want to test. It is very important not to change multiple elements in a single test; that makes it impossible to discern what drives your results. Let's say you decide to test subject lines. The rest of the email needs to be the same to determine true differences in the test. I would also highly recommend you anticipate results before testing. You won't always be right – and it's sometimes exciting to be wrong – and this will help to predict what you are going to do with the results.

Test quantity is something we often see handled in a less than optimal way. If you have a campaign going to 100,000 recipients, the way to test is not to send 50,000 to one group and 50,000 to the other. The proper way to test is to send 5,000 to each test group; analyze the results and send the other 90,000 the highest performing copy. The value in testing is to optimize each and every campaign right now. It's too often that I see people testing a campaign 50/50, and then doing nothing in the future with the results.

The last piece of advice I'd like to leave you with today is to think historically. Proper testing can give you the future play book for your email programs. Historical testing results can help develop new campaigns, understand what works for different segments, and generally sharpen your program. Don't miss the opportunity to get a letter sweater, a date to the prom, a convertible, and just generally be one cool email marketers. Testing is where it's at, Daddy-O!!!

- Kevin Senne, Premiere Global Services

Build Yourself An Award Winning Welcome Program

Thursday, April 2, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

Last month I was delighted to learn that one of my clients, Sony, won the gold award at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami for best automated series. The winning campaign was a serialized message stream developed to welcome, educate, and engage individuals who had just joined the Sony Rewards loyalty program. We executed the new strategy though a simple test plan to quantify the impact of the new messaging, and were quite pleased by the results.

The new messages, a series of three, sent over the course of seven days, enjoyed significant increases in click-through rates over the control group, and drove an exponential lift in site visits and online engagement. Sony has taken the learnings from this test and extended them through similar serialized message streams targeting other segments.

If you're not currently leveraging a multi-message or serialized welcome strategy, I strongly suggest you develop a plan to test one. The bottom line is that new members of your list have unique needs and are likely to be up to five times more responsive to the messages they receive during their first few weeks as subscribers. It simply makes good business sense to address these needs and ensure that messaging critical to your core business objectives makes its way to the inbox during this time when recipients are most likely to respond to it.

Where do I start?

We began the process of developing our new welcome program by reviewing the eec Welcome Email Checklist, a terrific resource that I highly suggest you download. It covers virtually all of the key issues and articulates best practices that we followed when developing our award winning campaign.

Once you've devised a new welcome strategy, test it appropriately - hold out control groups to receive existing messaging [or none at all], and identify specific success metrics that tie directly to core business objectives.

After analyzing test results and optimizing existing messaging appropriately, explore extending the program with additional messages sent during various stages of your customer [or prospect's] life-cycle.

If you have any welcome message success stories, please share here, look me up on twitter [@neinstein] or email me.

- Nicholas Einstein
Datran Media

How Are We Doing?

Monday, March 23, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

Much has been written in the category of "the best" when it comes to email marketing. For example:

*Best day to send
*Best time to send
*Best subject line
*Best copy, design, call to action

Best. Best. Best. There certainly are email marketing best practices and guidelines to follow; however, "best" is often relative to your company's situation. It depends on your audience (subscribers, readers, lurkers), the industry you are in (b2b vs b2c, retail vs government, etc), and many many other factors. At the end of the day, what matters most is did the email campaign reach or exceed expectations? Did you achieve the open/click/conversion numbers you had intended?

Below is an example of an email I received recently from Egencia. (Egencia , formerly Expedia Corporate Travel, is the "fifth largest travel management company in the world." Bronto uses it to book corporate travel). Let's break it down into the "best" categories outlines above. How did they do?

1. Best day to send: The email was sent on Thursday. It was sent to my company email address, so sending during the middle of the week makes sense. If they had sent this email to me over the weekend, it may have been buried in my inbox until Monday morning.

2. Best time to send: I received the email at 11:02 PM. Many people are not awake at that time, and if they are, they're probably not checking their work email (well…wink, wink). However, based on the time sent, the email was near the top of my inbox on Friday morning. Also, sending during off-peak times *can* result in better deliverability.

3. Best subject line: Determining the best subject line can certainly be subjective. If possible, I'd recommend performing some form of A|B subject line test on every single email you send. Most email service providers (ESPs) offer this option. Take advantage of it. In this case, I thought the subject line was so-so. It certainly caught my attention as it was asking a seemingly personal question, "How are we doing?"; however, without sender recognition (I knew who Egencia was), I may have deemed this email spammy. Egencia could have offered some incentive for completing the survey and/or added a deadline or sense of urgency into the subject line. But…I opened it. So, the objective of the subject line was met - for me.

4. Best copy, design, call to action:

Copy: The copy here was short and to the point - exactly how it should have been. After all, the message is simple: Fill out the survey. Sometimes marketers clutter these emails with sales pitches, partner offers, and other items that distract from the intent of the email. I like Egencia's KISS approach.

Design: I am usually a big fan of an email that balances text and images; however, as mentioned above in the "copy" section, this email was intentionally image-light. They could have included a few images to spice up the email a bit, images that would have added and not detracted from the message. No harm either way.

Call to action: This is one area where I would've like to see a stronger call to action. "Just click this link to begin" followed by the full URL "http://expedia.qualtrics.com" is pretty weak. Give me reason, an incentive, to complete the survey. Just like they preach in sales training, WIIFM - "What's In It For Me?" Provide several options to get to the survey. Perhaps a bullet-proof button or a "Take Survey Now" link.

Overall, I really like this email from Egencia. I opened the email, clicked on the link, and even spent the 3 minutes to fill out the survey. Well done Expedia team.

What do you think? Would you have opened, clicked and/or completed the survey? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

- DJ Waldow, Director of Best Practices & Deliverability at Bronto

Challenging Subject Line Length Assumptions

Thursday, July 10, 2008 by eec Blog Contributor

Stop drinking the kool-aid! Your subject line test strategy needs a complete overhaul.

Last week I released a whitepaper on subject line length and its effect on open, click and click-to-open (CTO) rates called Subject Lines – Length Does Matter. At first glance, our analysis of over 640 email campaigns supports the widely held view that short subject lines are best for opens. But what it goes on to demonstrate is that when it comes to subject line length, more opens = less clicks!

We discovered that although subject lines with 60 characters or less make more people open the email—the traditional view—these people are less likely to then go on and click on content or offers within the message than people who open an email with a longer subject line. There is an inverse relationship between opens and both click and CTO rates.

The study goes on to show that CTO rates start to be optimized when the subject line is over 70 characters in length and continue to rise until well beyond 100 characters. This is true for both the number of characters and the word count. The more words there were in the subject line, the better the CTO rate (if anything the results are stronger for word count).

Given the strength of the whitepaper's findings, I wanted to find out what subject line lengths marketers were using as common practice. As you might expect, we monitor a large number of UK email campaigns, from a cross-section of sectors and companies including British Airways, Hilton, Apple, Amazon and Reuters and we were astonished to find out just how many subject lines sent by these companies were short (i.e., 60 characters or less).

Out of 700 subject lines sent to our monitoring accounts in the last 90 days, the vast majority—87% of them—were under 60 characters in length. A further 7% fell into the 'dead zone' between 60 and 70 character where neither opens nor the CTO rate is optimized, and only 6% of the subject lines were over 70 characters long and therefore likely to optimize click and CTO rates.

Does his mean that everybody out there is only interested in opens and doesn't care about clicks? Or perhaps that email marketers, having extensively and regularly tested longer subject lines, know for a fact that they don't work? What's more likely to be the case is that as an industry we've done such a fantastic job of drinking the kool-aid that we have stopped testing outside of the accepted norms.

Our whitepaper also found subject lines with a higher word count also optimize clicks and CTO rates. So how do the numbers break down when it came to word count? The numbers are equally amazing. Only 13% of subject lines monitored contained above 10 words—where clicks and CTO are optimized. 60% fell into the 'dead zone' of between 6 and 10 words, where neither clicks nor opens are optimized; and 26% of the subject lines contained fewer than 6 words, and therefore optimized open rates.

So what I have learned from this exercise is that email marketers need to completely overhaul their subject line test strategy:
● Subject line tests should be more granular—long and short just isn't good enough. Subject lines need to be broken down into more character groupings (1-10, 11-20, …91-100).
● Introduce word count testing. Words are a much better way of conveying meaning than characters.
● Assess the impact of the number of propositions contained in the subject line on your campaign performance.
● Finally, open rates are just a small part of the story. Your tests should assess the impact of subject lines on clicks, CTO rate and conversions, as well as sales.

My greatest fear is that the people reading the whitepaper will be looking for a simple answer such as "when it comes to email subject lines, short is best", when in fact the central message is keep searching, keep optimizing and keep on challenging assumptions.

—Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx

Enterprise Email Marketing: Centralization vs. Coordination

Monday, June 2, 2008 by eec Blog Contributor

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Develop and share an email marketing calendar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Email Impacts Society

Monday, May 12, 2008 by eec Blog Contributor

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

Good Intentions Gone Bad

Friday, May 2, 2008 by eec Blog Contributor

On the front line of email, sometimes the best intentions go awry.

That recently happened to me so I wanted to share it with all of you. Hopefully you can all use this as a best practices learning, or story to share internally about crossing i's and dotting t's, and what to do when something goes wrong.

So in celebration of Earth Day the eec thought it would be nice to give something free to our subscribers (just like we did when we gave away free dice from SubscriberMail during the holidays 2 years ago). We decided to go with one free issue of VIV magazine. We chose this because it both demonstrated how email can extend into the digital world even further and because it is an all "green" publication.

Sadly, when the service message was set to send, notifying people their eec gift was ready for review, a few things went awry:
1. People received two or more emails with this notification
2. The context of the eec Earth Day gift was left off the copy

While no one's information was rented or sold to any other company, admittedly, the perceived recipient experience looked pretty poor. This is a great learning experience for us all.

While I have received emails both praising our thoughtfulness and attempt to share with the industry, I have also received emails questioning the execution of this campaign.

I would like to invite anyone who has questions, concerns or comments to give me a call at 973-204-0023.

I am posting this not to invite complainers to bash this effort (although I am sure we will have those), but to continue to share. The eec's mission is to pursue a community-based approach to making email better. If this is something you applaud us trying, thank you, if it's something you can learn from so the same thing doesn't happen to you, we are happy with that as well.

—Jeanniey Mullen of the eec

Ten Dimes May Make a Dollar, But Is It Worth It?

Tuesday, April 1, 2008 by eec Blog Contributor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path