Email Deliverability Rates | Email Experience Council

What Are the Standard Features Any Email Marketing System Should Have? It Depends

Tuesday, July 5, 2011 by Marco Marini

If you ask which standard features to look for in an email marketing system, you’re asking the wrong question. The correct question is what do you need. Here’s why…

"It depends."
Recently at a marketing conference, one of the speakers stated that consultants are notorious for starting their answers with phrases like, "It depends."

Clients might think that’s a runaround. It’s not. Quite often, the answer to a client’s question isn’t, “If you do X, you will get Y”. Quite often it’s, “It depends.”

That’s also the way to start off any answer to any question about the features to look for when considering an email marketing system. It depends on what your needs are.

If choosing an ESP or email marketing system meant looking for standard features only, we likely wouldn't have over 100 ESPs to choose from. If there were standard features that narrowed down your choice and made comparisons easy, many of us would likely be out of business.

In reality, email marketing systems come with a wide range of capabilities in order to fulfill a wide range of business requirements. As a result, comparing email marketing systems or ESPs is like comparing apples to oranges.

If you can't simply start with a checklist, then where do you start? You start with your requirements. That is your checklist. The question shouldn’t be, "What features should we look for?" Rather, "What features do we need?"

Two factors you must consider
There are two factors you must consider no matter the ESP or email marketing system. One is the deliverability rate and the other is uptime. No matter the provider or system you choose, the deliverability rate and the uptime have to be as high as possible.

Uptime is easy to determine: Ask.

However, with deliverability "it depends" because it will vary for everyone. If one ESP gets a 97.3% deliverability rate for one customer and list, it doesn’t follow that they’ll achieve that same deliverability rate for another company with a different list. To make sure you choose an ESP or system with the highest deliverability rate for you, try and take your choices for a test drive, using the system to mail to your own list to test deliverability.

Unfortunately there isn't any one checklist that’s going to help you find the features you must have, but finding an ESP with an uptime of 99.5% or higher and high deliverability among its IP addresses is key to finding an ESP that is going to serve your best long-term.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Build vs. Buy: The real cost of building an email solution

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 by Marco Marini

The trend for several years now has been away from building and toward outsourcing, yet some organizations still think building an in-house email marketing solution is the way to go. The market offers numerous ways to build your own in-house solution. But what's the real cost?

Some organizations have so much IT talent that they think they can build their own email marketing system. A perceived cost savings typically drives this decision. Would they consider building their own print shop? Probably not. It's a matter of sticking with your core business vs. being your own vendor.

There are so many possibilities for email platforms these days. ESPs have been around for over a decade. They are a tried-and-true way to go as the "buy" option for companies preferring to outsource the infrastructure. If an ESP isn’t for you and your organization plans to build, I offer some factors to consider to help you determine the real cost.

There's a real cost to building that must be considered. It's a capital expense vs. an operations expense. But building comes with operational expenses too…and the cost of not having certain competitive capabilities.

"Building" can mean a variety of approaches to your email marketing system. It might mean you're buying a server from StrongMail or using an online solution like Amazon Cloud. It can also mean you’re building from scratch. There are sending solutions where sending is hosted but you still have to do the front end. No matter the route you go, if you build, you will have to manage the hosting, maintenance, firewall, integration and more. Much more. When you “buy,” you’re outsourcing the infrastructure and getting invaluable additional benefits as well, including deliverability, currency and relevance-enabling tools.

Deliverability
Deliverability is critical. It directly impacts your email marketing ROI. If an email isn't delivered, you have zero potential for an impression or sale. In fact, you don't even get to work a little brand awareness in there. An undelivered email might as well not exist. When you buy—meaning outsource—your email solution, you get a team of postmasters who will keep your email deliverability rate up. When you’re doing this in-house and you run into an email delivery problem, you’ll either have to hire a consultant to help or be willing to dedicate your IT team’s time to figuring out the problem – which is not easy to say the least.

Currency
Plus there's staying current. ESPs are constantly evolving, continually adding new features to keep up with email deliverability requirements and consumer expectations. If you build your own, you are essentially freezing yourself in time. For some organizations, the incremental cost for email goes away. But you still have IT costs. It's a business decision and there are tax implications as you consider capital vs. operating expenses.

Relevance
To compete in the inbox in 2011, you must have relevance-enabled tools. Those tools used to cost thousands of dollars. Today they cost hundreds...when you outsource. Relevance-enabled technologies include trigger-based and event-driven emails, lifecycle and drip campaigns, and dynamic content. You can build out these capabilities, but the undertaking is massive. And massive means pricey because you're talking payroll costs and lost opportunities while you wait for your solution to be built and deployed.

Top-tier ESPs have this relevance-enabling technology built in to their platforms. That means "buying" instead of "building" lets you take advantage of these competitive advantages from day one.

Relevance also requires website analytics resulting from a recipient interacting with an email. Many web analytics platforms can track this at a macro-level, but the real value comes when the data is tied to a specific email address. If you don't have the tight integration required to give you insight from web analytics, or integration with your CRM system, you won't be able to do truly relevant, targeted email marketing.

How long will it take to build and deploy?
If your IT department says it will take six months to build, plan on 12 to 18 months before you're fully functional with all the features you want. Can you wait a year and a half for a good email marketing system? While your competition is emailing your target market, you won’t be…or at least you won’t be at the level of effectiveness you want, meaning your competition will likely win out.

Don't forget the payroll costs
Consider the staff time and associated payroll costs. If you're going to build and maintain in-house, you’ll need at least two staff people trained so you'll always have someone on hand if problems arise. In addition to the IT aspects of building and maintaining an email solution, at least one of your employees must have expertise in email areas like privacy, working with ISPs, deliverability issues, protecting your online sending reputation, being CAN-SPAM compliant and more. If you plan to design your own emails or use rich media email, you’ll also need someone who is an expert and who will take into account rendering issues in different email clients and on handheld devices too. That’s three staff people. What does that add up to when you add in all the benefits, taxes and other costs of adding a body to your payroll?

Unless you are sending hundreds of millions of emails monthly, outsourcing is cheaper...and safer. Building might look cheaper at the outset, but the cost is going to be higher than you anticipate. If email isn't core to your business, outsource. If it is core to your business, absolutely critical, maybe build. Maybe. But consider every single cost.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

A Call to Action for Standard Email Metrics

Wednesday, December 15, 2010 by Stephanie Miller

The email marketing industry needs standard reporting and metrics.

Today it is impossible to compare and benchmark response and deliverability rates across the industry because marketers get reports with different terms based on different calculations. Marketers are restricted in comparing reports and synchronizing data when looking to evaluate or change email broadcast vendors.

Inaccurate or inconsistent metrics diffuse the credibility of email marketers. If our own metrics cannot conform to benchmarks, we lessen our ability to convince senior management and fellow digital marketers of our success. It also hinders our ability to negotiate for resources.

You can help. Read the quick background here and then take action with the links below.

The email marketing industry may be ignobly unique among direct and online marketing disciplines for our lack of measurement standardization. For the past two years, the members of the eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable (a volunteer member committee) have wrestled with the problem of a lack of a consistent and unified standards for the most basic email metrics such as delivered, open and click.

Through our work, the Roundtable has built a foundation for industry standardization for these basic but important metrics.

We have created (and vetted) new definitions of key measures so that they are not only accurate, but the names accurately reflect the measure. (You can read in past eec blog postings about the struggles and debates to come up with terms we could all support.) Latest definitions are here.

We have surveyed dozens of email broadcast vendors (ESP's and MTA/on-premise providers) in order to audit existing reporting and gauge the level of variance across the industry. Please note that the eec Roundtable does not support or claim that any one provider's method of calculating common metrics is better than any other. Many ESP's and other broadcast vendors participated in the development of these definitions. We are very grateful for their support.

The Roundtable has repeatedly come to the industry – practitioners, eec members and thought leaders – to gather feedback and insights.

Now it's time for action.

Here's how you can help us start the ball rolling. Join our launch efforts now.

Voice your support (or dissent) for standardization of metrics in our industry. Take this one question survey.

Read the definitions

Tell us your thoughts and send in any corrections to the Roundtable.

Commit. Sign the petition to advance standard metrics now.

Join the Roundtable (eec members only). Just email Ali at the eec.

Please place your comments below. And stay tuned!

Thanks to the hard working members of the eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable!

- John Caldwell & Luke Glasner, eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable Co-Chairs

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

Pull the Trigger for Targeted Messages and Higher ROI

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 by Marco Marini

When do fewer emails mean higher ROI? When your emails are hyper-targeted and truly one-to-one. That doesn’t mean you need a huge team of people contacting customers one at a time, like the telemarketers of old. It only requires you to tap into existing technology and know-how to make it happen.

I like to say “happy birthdays mean happy profits” because birthday emails are a perfect example of this concept. When someone subscribes to get your emails, you get their birth date along with the other data you gathered about them upon signup. That date goes into your system and on or near the customer’s birthday, depending on how you have it configured; an email is automatically triggered offering a birthday bonus of some kind, like a free ice cream cone if you work for a chain of sweet shops, or a free movie rental if you’re marketing your video stores.

These emails get a remarkably high response rate because they are so targeted…and therefore, welcome.

You’re not limited to birthday emails, however, nor are triggered emails only appropriate for B2C marketing. Triggered emails come in three types—recurring, transactional and threshold—and can be used in a variety of circumstances:

A recurring email can be a birthday email like we’ve described above, or could happen a certain period after a purchase, to remind a customer that it’s time to renew
A transactional email can be one email, like a follow up to a purchase or download, soliciting feedback, or even a drip campaign following a purchase, giving tips on how to use the product (and also up-selling)
As a threshold email can occur when a customer’s behavior has gotten to a certain point, say if they’ve purchased three songs from one album, you offer a discount on the album

In the past, marketers resisted moving from batch-and-blast to this kind of targeted, triggered approach because the cost seemed prohibitive. Between building the API and the software to handle the emails the technological cost made any chance of an ROI a slim one. Today, however, all top-tier ESPs and many secondary ones offer triggered messaging capabilities. That means you can make your email marketing program even more relevant without increasing your staff or IT costs.

Before we dive into the benefits and how-to’s of triggered emails, let’s review the terminology:

Triggered means triggered by an event: A trigger based message is one sent out in response to a certain action within an email or on a website
Targeted means segmented, with dynamic content, so different recipients get different email content and even colors and graphics
Drip marketing is a series of messages triggered by an event, such as a purchase or whitepaper download (also known as lifecycle messaging)

You’ll also need to define the event or events that trigger the website. The event might be a click on a website, time spent on a page with no shopping cart activity, a coupon download, or a link clicked in an email. Or, to return to our earlier example, it might be date driven like a birthday or anniversary.

One-to-one triggered emails have a much higher ROI so even though you’re sending out fewer emails, you’re making more money off the targeted ones. But what do you need to do to be set up for that kind of triggered email?

1. An ESP or in-house solution that enables triggered messaging

2. An API to automate the flow of data from your CRM or in-house database to your ESP or internal ESP

3. A content library, so your system can take from it to place the appropriate message in each email

Also consider that these types of emails typically use a transactional delivery engine vs. a marketing delivery engine, i.e. point-to-point transmission vs. one-to-many broadcast.

The one caveat happens when you start to collect the data upon which to define your rules. Do not ask for too much. You can ask for up to four pieces of information upon sign up, but any more than that, and your abandonment rate will soar. Instead, be very clear what information you want to start out with and only ask for that (based on what you can really use). Then over time you can ask for more information, and append that information to that subscriber later.

The idea of this kind of targeted email marketing might be daunting, but it’s really not difficult given today’s technology and pre-existing services. As a result, your triggered email messaging can be as sophisticated as you want to make it, to get the most ROI from your highest value customers. For example, your system can score a customer based on behavior, such as purchasing a higher-priced item, and offer an exclusive and limited price on another item as a reward.

Marketers have to start automating their email campaigns based on customer behaviors, such as shopping cart abandonment. Companies who’ve done this have experienced higher click through rates and conversion rates, without increasing staff costs. Alternatively, automating email programs around customer behaviors with hyper-targeted messages will result in a higher email marketing ROI.

And it leads to a higher engagement index, which means more of your subscribers are engaging with your email, which in turn will give you a better standing in the eyes of the ISPs…which in turn will improve your email deliverability and get you into more inboxes…and so on and so on and so on.

Sounds pretty happy to me!

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Abracadabra: Is Email Metrics Standardization Real or Merely an Illusion?

Wednesday, July 21, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

I’m a lover of magic. When illusions appear creative, bold, and clever, they seem worthy of being shared with everyone. On the other hand, if it’s a trick that everyone knows, the “magic” becomes cheap and hollow, unlikely to fool anyone. When it comes to the standardization of email metrics, the question arises: is this truly noteworthy, or simply another case of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?” Smoke and mirrors won’t work in this case; complete transparency is necessary to address this issue. It’s time to put all of our cards on the table and examine various aspects of the argument surrounding standardization.

As co-chairs of the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, independent email consultants John Caldwell and Luke Glasner have marshaled a group of industry players to launch an email standardization project. For what it’s worth, that project is gaining momentum and earning some serious ink within the industry. This is not the same old dog and pony show we’ve seen in the past; these guys really have their act together. Think of them as Siegfried and Roy of the email industry. Their S.A.M.E. project (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) has bent the ears of industry pundits, and their formula for encouraging ESPs to adopt the standards seems to be fooling everyone. And in this context, deception is a good thing. Learn more about the S.A.M.E. project here.

Sleeveless in Seattle
As with any new industry-related project, many challenges surface, but without early adopters, we’d be left sleeveless, a nightmare for any magician. Two ESPs, MassTransmit/EmailTransmit and AllWebMail have already committed to adopting the industry standard for metrics which was released by the DMA/eec in March 2010. Since then, a dozen other high profile ESPs have committed to adopting the standards within the next six months. When you think about early adopters, companies like these help pave the road for the rest of the industry. As interested ESPs begin to track the progress and milestones achieved by the S.A.M.E. project, momentum will build and the benefits will begin to blossom around the industry.

“Adoption is not just a semantics game,” says Stephanie Miller, Vice Chair of the eec and an active member of the Roundtable (her day job is at inbox deliverability solution provider, Return Path). “Marketers usually find out that there are no standards when they go to benchmark their performance, or when they change vendors and realize that all those numbers they’ve been betting their bonus on – they don’t mean what they thought they meant!

“It’s about time our industry stepped up and supported standard metrics just like any other direct marketing discipline,” she says.

Deliverability Will No Longer be a Selling Point for ESPs
Once the implementation of email standards leads to congruency across the industry, ESPs and marketers will find themselves on a level playing field. This means marketers may spend more time searching for the right ESP, but once a match is made, marketers will be less likely to move from one ESP to another due to inconsistency in metrics. This means attrition rates for switching ESPs will fall, and in turn, ESPs will focus on services that will keep customers longer and help them achieve a higher ROI. Examples of such services include compelling creative copy and perhaps even a SWOT analysis every month/quarter provided by the ESP to each marketer. Higher performance of the channel benefits all of us.

S.A.M.E. Project Goals
Once a magician takes his oath, he must never reveal his secrets. However, if aspiring participants are willing to learn magic, they, too, can join the “magic club.” ESPs face a similar choice. They can remain on the outside looking in, simply observing the progression of the S.A.M.E. project, or they can choose to be an active part of the club. John and Luke's first goal is 10-15% of the ESP market adopt the standards.

Nowadays, when an ESP reports on the “state of the industry,” they analyze metrics only of their own campaigns, like a magician who looks in the mirror and declares himself successful. Industry standardization will introduce accountability to the industry, providing the digital marketing community with sterilized benchmarking and consistent reporting. The spotlight now shines bright on John and Luke and the eec Roundtable, along with other industry veterans and aspiring ESPs involved with the S.A.M.E. project. It is their mission to deliver what the email industry yearns for: a final levitation act that will wow the crowd and inspire mass adoption. They hope to prove that they are master magicians—if they perform their act well enough, even the skeptics will believe.

Get Involved

Marketers: Send this article to your ESP and encourage them to adopt the standards.
ESPs: Study the new standard definitions and set a goal for yourself to adopt them. Be part of the program.

Now, where did all the Rabbits go?

- Fred Tabsharani
Port25 Solutions, Inc.
@tabsharani

Sending from the Receivers’ Perspective

Thursday, July 1, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

In one of his many brilliant quotes on modern life, George Carlin mused, “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” The difference is purely perspective.

We all need a bit of perspective. We all need to be better at sitting in the other guy’s shoes. Chelsea vs. Manchester? Perspective. Colts vs. Patriots? Perspective. Red Sox vs. Yankees? Perspective. As Seinfeld said, “athletes change teams so often, at the end of the day, you’re just cheering for the uniforms.”

As marketers we also need perspective. We’re supposed to be good at reading and analyzing reams of data to assess what makes our customers tick, then use this to provide more relevant offers and in turn generate higher response rates. Why is it then that we marketers also tend to be a bit thick-headed when it comes to understanding email deliverability from the receivers’ (ISPs) perspective? Many marketers are a bit stuck in their own shoes and fail to realize that ISPs don’t exist to serve them. Their loyalties are to their users. This seems so basic, yet many deliverability challenges can be avoided by marketers if they realized this one truth: The inbox is supposed to be usable, helpful, and optimized for the subscriber – not for you (the marketer).

We (ExactTarget) felt so strongly that we needed to help bring this perspective to light, so we worked with several of the top experts in this industry to create a whitepaper entitled: “Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious about Permission & Deliverability.” We challenged each contributor to imagine they had the chance to corner the CEO and give him a piece of their mind on what the company needed to do differently to achieve better results via email. Contributors from Yahoo, Earthlink, McAfee weighed in from “where they sit” as part of the receiver community, and I think the advice they provided is spot-on accurate and a must read for any marketer needing to optimize their deliverability.

George Bilbrey of Return Path also contributed another insightful letter as part of the document that highlights another often cited area where perspective is needed – the culpability of the ESP vs. the marketer when deliverability problems arise. George says, “It’s worth noting that most inbox placement problems can only be solved by the marketer—not the Email Service Provider (ESP) sending the message. What ESPs can provide is a well-configured infrastructure, which is certainly important.”

Five Steps to Building a Preference Center

Thursday, June 24, 2010 by Marco Marini

Your business needs the highest possible email deliverability rate in order to maximize your email marketing ROI. And there are many steps you can take to incrementally improve that deliverability rate, including adding an email preference center to your website. That’s where you establish the foundations of the relationship between your email marketing program and your subscriber, to ensure you’re delivering the most relevant emails possible, thereby meeting their expectations.

But how do you build a preference center that will do what you need it to do, primarily improve your communications with your subscribers so your email marketing is more relevant? How do you know what to offer as choices and what kind of information to ask for?

Below are 5 steps to building a preference center that will give you the information you need, and your subscribers the relevance they want.

Step One: Determine what information to collect
There are two reasons for offering a preference center: to improve your ability as a marketer, and to improve your subscriber’s experience as a recipient. Before you start building your preference center, make sure you are clear on why you are building it, and what information you hope to gain from it…always staying focused on how that information will help you do a better job of serving your customer or subscriber. What segmentation ability do you want and how granular should it be? Also keep in mind what your staff is capable of doing. Review your technology and staffing to determine what is possible as far as dynamic content, existing preference center limitations, etc.

Step Two: Spell it out
Tell them why you are asking for the information in the first place. When offering more than one newsletter or email type to subscribe to, be detailed in explaining what they will get and how often and allow them to sign up only for the newsletters and/or emails they choose.

Step Three: Give them some choices
A little choice can go a long way toward making subscribers feel heard! Even standard choices like these can make people feel like they have some say in how you will communicate with them:

• How they want it: html, text or mobile
• How often they want it: daily, weekly or monthly

Depending on your staff’s capability, time and resources, you can offer as many choices as makes sense (per Step One). Maybe they subscribe only to one of your newsletters, or maybe they only want to get emails about promotions. Or let them segment themselves geographically, or by gender, or age, or interest. Whatever you’re capable of doing plus whatever makes sense for your program equals the choices to offer.

Step Four: Make sure you’re asking for subscriber-centric information
Don’t view your preference center as a way to gather massive amounts of self-serving data about your customers. Ideally the data you collect serves you both: you as the marketer so you can be more targeted, and them as the subscribers so they can get what they want. If data like gender, income or age helps you with your demographics but doesn’t affect your email program segmentation, don’t ask for it. But if certain information helps you do a better job at delivering relevant content, do ask. You might need a ZIP code to segment geographically, for example. If you publish a parenting email newsletter, you’ll want to know how old the kids are. Or maybe you ask about their interests, if that ties into how you segment your content.

The options offered via your preference center will differ depending on whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, too. Asking for a job title makes perfect sense for a B2B preference center, but no sense at all for a B2C one.

Step Five: Make sure it works
After building, test it from the user’s perspective and pay attention to what happens after it goes live. Does your sign-up rate go down? You might be asking for too much information. Scale back and see what happens. Does your unsubscribe rate go down? Congratulations, you’re doing a better job of meeting your subscribers’ expectations!

Email marketing doesn’t work unless it’s delivered. Give your subscribers some control over how and when they hear from you, and you’ll do a better job of keeping them happy, which in turn will keep your unsubscribe rate and spam complaints down. Ultimately, what you prefer is a great email marketing ROI, right?

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Key Email Marketing Trends to Act on in 2010

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 by Marco Marini

As CEO of ClickMail Marketing, part of my job is keeping up with, and even ahead of, trends and changes in the email marketing industry. In a world like ours, technology and tastes can change in a flash, leaving the unsuspecting email marketer playing catch-up once he or she finally does catch on. Spotting email marketing trends becomes, therefore, less of a fun guessing game and more of a critical strategic process.

The common theme in 2010 as I see it is integration. To me, this indicates email's lasting power, as it becomes more and more entrenched in the marketing framework. No longer is email a standalone messaging medium or marketing tool. Now more than ever, email is becoming the backbone of marketing, enduring and evolving…and proving its worth one message at a time.

Below are the trends we at ClickMail Marketing see as the most important for this coming year. You won't find any rocket science-level complexity in this list, because by now you've at least been exposed to all of these trends even if you haven't yet acted on them. But this coming year will be the time to take the next step: start implementing now, or be left behind. Far behind.

Integration with social networking sites and tools
Email still reigns supreme as a marketing tool, but to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of technology and cultural expectations, it must integrate with social networking tools. That's the only way you can hope to communicate with all audiences, as some stay with email for communication and others move to social media. Integration with social media extends your reach, as people share your content and therefore expand your exposure. (And sharing is what social media is all about, so make sure your content is worthy of sharing!)

Integration with add-on services like CertifiedEmail
Email is still the strongest messaging platform out there, despite cries of its demise. One characteristic that makes it so strong is the ubiquity of email. It is everywhere, truly. And as technologies are developed, it integrates more and more with add-on services, services like video in your email marketing and Goodmail's CertifiedEmail.

Integration with the new data management tools
Major ISPs are making decisions about which emails are spam based on if and how recipients interact with an email. That means their interaction is directly influencing your deliverability. You have to have the tools to manage your data to meet these new standards, tools that move you beyond open rates to data that really matters, like Pivotal Veracity's Mailbox IQ that helps you measure audience engagement. But these new tools must integrate with your existing email platform.

Speaking of trends and staying current with changes in the email marketing industry, stay tuned for our soon-to-be-released 2010 guide to choosing a top tier ESP.

Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

4 Reasons Why Email Segmentation Matters

Monday, January 4, 2010 by DJ Waldow

Sometimes it sounds very "broken-recordish."

Send timely, targeted, relevant emails to subscribers who have asked for them.

It's my go-to message - my mantra of sorts - when it comes to email marketing. It's one of those things I recommend printing out and pasting to your desk. It's a phrase you should repeat when you're getting ready to hit the send button on that next email marketing campaign. It's the question to ask your team all of the time, but especially if you see your metrics on the fritz (declining open and/or click through rates, increasing complaints, poor deliverability, etc).

What Poor (Or No) Segmentation Looks Like

On December 20, 2009, I received these 3 emails within a 33-minute span (6:09AM, 6:29AM, and 6:42AM).

1. Inbox View: Before even opening the emails, what do you notice about them? Pretty easy one, right? While the from names are all different, the subject lines are identical. As it turns out, Multichannel Merchant, DIRECT, and Chief Marketer are all divisions of Penton Media (see email footer).

Why this matters: I feel like I just got spammed. Why? Penton Media just asked (errr...told) me 3 times to fill out their survey. Poor brand impression not only from Penton, but also from the 3 divisions who sent me that survey. I deleted all three.

2. Opened View: You'll quickly see if you open all three emails (see Multichannel Merchant below) that, with the exception of the header image, a few words here and there, and the signatures, the email copy is identical.

Why this matters: Again, I've just been sent the same survey 3 times. The response rates on surveys already tend to be low. Sending it to me 3 times under 3 different from names does not increase my chances of completing.

So, who cares?

4 Reasons Why Email Segmentation Matters

I'm an email snob. It's easy for me to sit up in my ivory email tower and tell everyone what they are doing wrong. I can't argue that fact. But I do think segmentation matters - not only for me, but for the average email consumer as well. Here's why:

1. Reduces inbox clutter: Assuming the emails were the same, would you rather receive 3 or just 1?

2. Increases relevancy: The more relevant an email, the more likely I am to take action (open, click, convert)

3. Earns trust: If I believe that you - the email marketer - have my best interests in mind, I'll trust you more. More trust ultimately leads to more action (see #2).

4. Gain credibility: Good segmentation proves to me that you know what you are doing. It shows that you are not blasting off emails. Instead, you are putting thought behind each send.

Segmentation is not hard. Time to add it to your email marketing new year's resolution list.

*After a conversation over IM with Andrew Kordek, it was pointed out that this post is lacking in concrete examples (case studies) of "segmentation success stories." If you have some, please share in the comments below as I'd like to do a follow up post.

DJ Waldow
Director of Community, Blue Sky Factory

Managed Email Marketing: The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Email Marketing

Monday, November 16, 2009 by Marco Marini

If you're still managing your own email marketing campaigns without any outsourced expertise, you might want to take a look at the benefits of outsourcing. Here are just a few of the many benefits of outsourcing for better managed email marketing:

Increase your deliverability rate
Improve your email design and email rendering
Gain a deeper and more actionable understanding of your reporting and metrics · Protect your online sending reputation with expert advice
Have more staff time for other initiatives
Add the highest caliber email marketing expertise to your team without increasing your payroll
Draw on more and broader email marketing experience with seasoned professionals guiding you
Spend more time on strategy and planning, less on implementation
Enjoy a solution that automatically scales with your growth
Know you're working with the best email service provider for your business
And ultimately, improve your email marketing ROI!

If you want to learn about better managed email marketing via outsourcing, reach out to ClickMail Marketing for more information.

Where Does Your Email Really Go?

Thursday, November 12, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

The internet was designed to be a free exchange of information wherein anyone, upon a loose framework mainly having to do with networking and rendering capabilities, could join, share and digest what they wanted. Email was developed as a predecessor to the internet. Again, one in which, as long as you had the most basic SMTP compliancy between networks, messages would be handed off between point A to B.

Today, email has turned into a monumentally powerful marketing tool and communication channel that still rivals the internet and other upcoming social networks, regardless of which side of the "email is dying" debate you fall under. With email marketing, forward to a friend, sharing links, email filters and forwarders, along with major ISPs providing outsourcing solutions (like Google Apps), the audit trail of an email is sometimes all but impossible to decipher without CSI level forensic header analysis.

But, you don't care about all this.

What should you care about?

When you place an order to have something delivered with the USPS, UPS or FedEx, that item almost never leaves that company's chain of custody. Meaning, if you dropped it off with FedEx, the recipient will most likely receive it with FedEx. Again, there are exceptions, but the vast majority of the time this is the rule. When you send an email out, though, it may be going to a Yahoo! domain address, then forwarded on to a Gmail domain address and finally rendered in Outlook 2007. What can you do to ensure that your mail has the highest rate of making it to its final destination regardless of the cyber hops in the middle?

1. Ask your recipient up front if their email address is still, indeed, the right one to be using. I check over 8 different email accounts on a normal day, and with inbox email aggregators with dynamic collection addresses (such as OtherInbox), I probably have several hundred email addresses (with OtherInBox I can use disposable email addresses) that will get to me somehow. However, the email address to sign up with your service when I was a fresh college grad and using my Alumni account may no longer be at the top of my list. So, I appreciate it when companies I do business with ask me if that's still the one I should have on my account. If it is, I click through on a prompt when I login. If not, it takes 2 seconds to change. I don't get asked this every time I login, but perhaps, every 6 months or so to ensure the email address is fresh. Guess what? My Alumni account is forwarded to my Yahoo! account. So, I changed it to have my Yahoo! account receive the email directly (and thus avoid any errant filtering on the part of my school).

2. Authenticate outbound email. Period. DKIM was designed not to break when making multiple hops in an email's path to the final destination. Unfortunately SPF will because of the technical nature of email headers, but with DKIM enabled mail, if it comes through at Gmail verified and then is forwarded on to AOL, the DKIM signature stays intact and the message has a higher likelihood of being delivered.

3. Here's the bad part. Just like you as a sender pushing mail out to a recipient, when email is forwarded to another domain by the recipient domain, the reputation and deliverability of that mail falls back on the ISP doing the forwarding. For instance, I run my own domain hosted through Gmail. When you send an email there, it gets forwarded to Yahoo! which is what I consider my central email nervous system. But, sometimes, email from Gmail gets bulked at Yahoo! because of Gmail's reputation. This means I don't get my mail. What can you do about it? Gently remind your subscribers to check their spam folders for mail that may have accidentally fallen prey to a filter somewhere. In my case, I'll get email that randomly gets bulked (as opposed to breaking any obvious best sending practices) and have made it a habit to check my spam folder often.

4. Check your content in multiple web clients. Oftentimes, an email sent to a Comcast domain looks fantastic, but when forwarded to an AOL accounts, looks horrible. Now, like in #3, a lot of this is out of your control if the actual content is changed en route by the ISP. But, if you ensure that your content looks good in the different clients, you increase your chances that when an ISP doesn't reach in and play with the HTML when it's being forwarded along, it will look fine in the end email inbox.

5. Have unique identifiers in your unsubscribe links tying an email address back to a particular sender. If I unsubscribe from my Yahoo! address on an email that was sent to me originally at a Gmail account but was forwarded on, you could end up shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. I could have any wanted email to my Yahoo! account stop but the Gmail email continue. Recipients will oftentimes setup multiple email addresses for one account, or across multiple accounts you as an ESP or single sender support, so directly tying that recipient's unsubscribed email address to their preferences (and not the one that happened to actually do the unsubscribing) is key.

This is pretty technical stuff, folks. But, in order to stay on top of the original intent of email being free flowing and having as few barriers as possible, you must be cognizant of the challenges in your path. Reach out to your technical team to ensure you've got these points covered. And remember, an email address is easily disposable. We, as marketers, tend to see them as having high stickiness. But, recipients can come and go with fluidity and tracking them along the way with their permission (ultimately their keeping you informed of their moves) keeps you in touch with your customers.

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability
Bronto Software
@ChrisAWheeler

AOL Ends Report Card Program

Thursday, August 27, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

Christine Borgia from AOL announced this week that the long-standing Report Card program has come to an end. For those of us who have been in the email marketing world for any period of time, we know this marks the end of an era. I go way back with AOL from my previous role running email operations at Travelocity. I started back at the dawn of "email time" in 1999. I had the privilege of sending AOL Travel email, in addition to my regular Travelocity mail. This gave me some insider type access to the Postmaster Team at AOL. I won't tell you that everything was always smooth. In fact, I had a pretty rocky year, one that I've tried to delete from my memory banks. Looking back, that was when the discipline of deliverability was born. AOL was way ahead of the curve in the implementation of the Report Card program. If you aren't familiar with the Report Card, here's a sample:

You are receiving this message via AOL's automated "Report Card" process because our available data indicate that in the last 24 hours your domain's mail stream has exceeded an inbox complaint rate of 0.30%. This email is only an indication that your domain's mail stream has exceeded a pre-defined complaint threshold; it is not necessarily indicative of a spam problem. We send a report card to every domain that exceeds this threshold, regardless of what type of mail is sent. We hope that it may be useful to help identify potential issues. For additional information please visit our http://postmaster.info.aol.com Postmaster website, where one can find a more detailed explanation of how the Report Card system works, AOL's technical requirements for sending email to us, AOL's best practices guidelines for bulk-mailers, and more.

This was really great stuff! Imagine an ISP sending you an email each day warning you that you had slipped into the danger zone. You didn't have to build any reports, aggregate any data, or haggle over "hanging spams!" This kind of service just isn't around anymore, and I fear we took it for granted. It means we're back to "new school" techniques with AOL. Their feedback loop program is top-notch and has always been the leader in FBL technology. (You are signed up and watching your FBL complaints/statistics…aren't you? Of course you are, because we all know that complaints are the bellwether statistic for email marketers.)

Goodbye, AOL Report Card. I will miss you. Actually, I will miss those days from long ago when a day without a Report Card meant we had aced our promotion. We were good enough, smart enough, and AOL liked us!!

- Kevin Senne, Director, Deliverability & Social Networking, Premiere Global Services, Inc.

Time to Drive Solo? Or Stick With the Carpool?

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

If you have ever dealt with onboarding at an ESP, you probably know one of the main topics of discussion around scalability and reputation is whether to go with dedicated or shared (pooled) IPs. Are you ready to "drive solo" with a dedicated IP, or do you stick with the "carpool," an IP pool. It can be daunting and sometimes a bit ambiguous as to which model fits your needs best. With that in mind, here are the top 5 factors you need to keep in mind when determining which path to go down.

1. How much mail are you planning to send?
The way email is relayed from sender to receiver is fundamentally based on the IPs (or network fingerprints) involved in the handoff. The more IPs you have, the more inroads you can create with getting mail delivered to an ISP (such as Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.). Many ISPs have hard requirements around how many messages will be allowed through and how many active IPs you can use at one time. If you're looking at sending more than 20,000 per week, you should see if having your own IPs to send through will give you the scalability needed to match that. However, if you're not going to be sending at least that much, you might have more horsepower than you need which is where a pooled group of IPs helps – it spreads the load like peanut butter over the different IPs from the grouped senders.

2. What is the deliverability impact?
Email deliverability, at least right now, is heavily weighted on IP reputation. What does this mean? Like a credit report, ISPs will determine what sort of mail they can expect from an IP based on the history of mail that's been coming from it. If you have mail that is strong enough reputation wise, which includes low bounce rates and end recipient complaints, a dedicated IP might work. You will only have to worry about your own mail's impact as opposed to allowing the possibility of other mail going out the same IPs impacting your delivery. But, proceed at your own risk – when using a dedicated IP, you determine your own fate. Pooled IP senders usually rise and fall with each other depending on the sum total of mail being sent out where one particular sender won't necessarily sway the pool as a whole. This is why choosing an ESP that has good deliverability rates on a pool is of paramount importance – you'll be judged by your peers. A bad reputation will cost you in the long run.

3. How is dedicated v. pooled different in implementation?
Typically, a new IP will be warmed up (or pulled from an already warm pool) and allocated to a sender on a dedicated system. This means special attention should be given to initial sending and ISP feedback. Dedicated IPs also require a bit of inflight tweaking as the ISPs learn what sort of mail will be delivered. But, once this initial ramping has completed, you're free to do as you like as long as you don't violate any ESP best practices. You also have more wiggle room for making your IP specific to you since you're the only one it's representing. Pooled IPs generally don't require much technical implementation since the sending IPs are ready to go and have a critical mass of mail already being sent out. However, the business investment with vetting and passing certain ESP requirements can be heavy since the new sender has to prove they won't do anything to risk the pool's reputation and thus the existing senders using it.

4. Does the cost make sense?
Dedicated IPs require more time, effort and maintenance to get everything setup. They use their own bandwidth which subsequently means the cost isn't shared. Most ESPs charge for this as a result. Pooled IPs? There's usually no cost associated above and beyond the normal sending charges. This means money saved for smaller sender.

5. How much autonomy do I want?
This is a critical question for anyone sending email. Do you care if your messages go out with custom or group headers? Do you want to be able to send on your own schedule whenever you want (again, as long as you stay within the ESP's published best practices)? How about not having to worry about what other senders in the same pool are doing? With dedicated IPs, you get to be in control of a lot more of the decisions around how email is actually delivered. Many clients don't care, though, as email is just a component of a much larger marketing strategy and as such, they don't have the resources or capitol to afford dedicated IPs. In a pool, you're more heavily scrutinized depending on any hiccups along the way impacting the greater good.

There's a tendency for email marketers to see the issue as black or white wherein they fall into one or the other side with strong convictions. It's not that simple and as email becomes more widely adopted as a marketing and end customer communication vehicle, taking into account the above points will help you achieve success no matter where you land.

- Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability, Bronto

Chris is leading the charge to ensure both Bronto's customers and staff are well-informed about email marketing practices and technology as well as being the face of Bronto deliverability externally. Previously, he created the internal deliverability program at Amazon.com alongside program managing the operations of the email team and was at an ESP leading a team of deliverability consultants. Besides being a frequent contributor on Deliverability.com, Chris is a part of many email industry forums, both business and technical.

Market Forces Combine to Increase Demand for Email Campaign Outsourcing

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

So we are deep in a recession economy, marketing budgets and headcounts are being cut, yet we are seeing an increase in requests for the outsourcing of email production and campaigns. Why is this?

Well let's take a little time to explore the variables in play here. As marketers turn to more cost effective channels, email is becoming more popular than ever – according to a recent Forrester study the number of marketing messages for the average email user is predicted to double by 2014. This makes the email channel even more competitive and crowded, causing a dilution of open, click and conversion rates.

The only way to genuinely attract attention and boost performance is to send more relevant and personalized mails. To experienced email marketers this will not be news, and it is common wisdom nowadays to absolutely progress beyond broadcast (or blast) mailing tactics to attain any kind of click thru and conversion response.

There are a number of campaign types that increase relevance beyond broadcast, such as 'life cycle', 'clickstream' and 'targeted'. JupiterResearch states that these types of campaigns are up to 18 times more profitable than broadcast. Each of these types leverage known intelligence about the recipient, whether based on a user triggered event, online behavior, or persona driven. BUT in order to actually create a highly relevant campaign, each mail needs to be customized to each identified audience segment and ideally personalized for each recipient - both of which increase the number of steps and effort in the overall process of producing a campaign from start to finish.

You have a choice here: do you create individual email templates for each audience segment, or minimize the number of actual email templates and leverage conditional email content for a more dynamic 'data driven' approach. More email templates means more production effort to create, optimize and test each and every template – whereas the data driven approach needs more advanced skills/technology to design and test more complex templates.

Are we at a tipping point? Has the amount of extra effort, technology and skills required to execute more advanced email campaigns pushed email campaign production to a point where outsourcing makes more strategic and tactical sense? Perhaps. Organizations need to be competitive and need to consider ways to execute these types of campaigns. The tremendous ROI (as stated by Jupiter) more than outweighs the additional operating cost, so each and every marketing department who takes the email channel seriously will need to formulate a strategy here.

With headcounts diminishing, outsourcing is an obvious path forward. Having a tried and tested production team getting your mails out of the door in good time, with great quality (...under SLA), allows you to not only benefit from advanced campaign performance, but to focus your time on higher value marketing initiatives!

- Andy McCartney, Vice President of Strategic & Account Services, Premiere Global Services

Andy runs a team of email marketing gurus and specialists who help clients of all shapes and sizes with their emarketing initiatives. Advice and service engagements are delivered in areas such as strategy, campaign production, list health and deliverability. Andy has over 20 years of experience in marketing and services with hi-tech companies, including 10 years in business intelligence and analytics and 12 years in interactive marketing leadership roles.

Improve Email Marketing Success by Getting Back-to-Basics

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

Email marketers are always on the lookout for the next best thing. We always want to be recognized as "thinking outside the box." This kind of entrepreneurial spirit is what we're all about as we go off into the digital world. Some recent studies have suggested that around 95% of all email is really SPAM. At first glance, this can be a pretty scary number to us as senders. The reality is that this is a great opportunity for email marketers to take control of an opportunity. This means that you only have to compete with the 5% of messages that are legitimate. How do we take advantage of the lack of effective email marketing? I suggest we get back to basics and explore a different way of thinking about email marketing. Are you ready for a mind-twisting thought? Thinking "inside the box" is the new "thinking outside the box."

What exactly do I mean by this statement? I want each of you to take an honest and simple look at your email programs. First, ask yourself some foundational questions:
What am I trying to accomplish with email?
Who is my audience?
Why do my customers sign-up for email?
If I was a customer, what would be my expectation of the email I was going to receive?
Do I educate my customers on the benefits of my email program?
Do I have a frequency plan?
Are my messages relevant to each recipient?
Do I have a goal in mind each time I send an email?
What is my bounce rate?
What is my complaint rate?
Do I historically track my stats for comparison?
Am I testing with regularity?

These questions are the basic building blocks for any successful email program. These are also questions whose answers can pretty easily be pushed aside to be answered another day. Revenue pressures, the need to increase engagement and subscribers, perceived deliverability issues, and executive pressures are all factors that can cause us to get off track from time to time. A common misconception goes something like this. I send to 10,000 addresses today and sell 100 widgets. If I send to 20,000 addresses tomorrow, I will sell 200 widgets. This type of flawed logic gets us away from our basic questions and mission. Email marketing is about the recipient, not the sender. If you build a relationship with the recipient and give them something of value, the relationship will pay dividends.

When we hear about the "end" of email as a medium, it is that 95% of unwanted email that drives the perception. Now more than ever, it is time to focus on what your customers and prospects want to see. Bring your thinking back into the box of good marketing plans and communications, and see your results soar.

- Kevin Senne, Premiere Global Services

Rebound From Bounces to Protect Your Reputation

Monday, April 27, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

There's plenty of information on the Internet about how to manage bounces, but not much about why it's so important to do so. And if you don't know the why, will you follow the how?

Although email marketing has countless moving parts to it, one part is key: Deliverability. This can't be overstated. Email marketers live and die by their delivery rates. You have to do everything you can to maximize your deliverability. Your deliverability is affected by your reputation, and your reputation can be tarnished by a high bounce rate. If you're at all concerned about your delivery rate, and you should be, take a look at your bounces and how they're impacting your reputation.

A bounce means your email didn't get delivered. That's easy enough to track as far as knowing how many of your emails made it to the inbox. But you need to know why an email bounced and you need to have a plan for managing bounces so you can reduce their occurrence, and therefore work to protect your reputation.

First, understand the difference between a soft bounce and a hard bounce. Think of a soft bounce as temporary: an employee is on vacation and her mailbox is full, meaning there's no room for your email. Think of a hard bounce as permanent: the employee left her job and the email address is no longer valid.

You'll get a message from the ISP when your email isn't delivered telling you why. That will tell you whether it was a hard or soft bounce. Look to those messages to figure out why your emails didn't go through.

A soft bounce, being temporary, means the email address is still valid and you can try resending your email again another time. That's a name that stays on your hard-earned in-house list. But a hard bounce might not mean one less name to market to. While there are sometimes 'false positives' with hard bounces, most ESPs typically automatically block hard bounces. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn't exist, the recipient is unknown, or there's some type of network problem on the recipient's end. In this last case, there might be a temporary issue that will be resolved so if you're confident the email is valid, you might want to consider emailing it one more time.

On the other hand, if the email address is a bad, you have to remove the name from your list a.s.a.p. otherwise too many bad addresses could result in an ISP blocking or even blacklisting your IP address. You will always have bounces. The trick is to minimize them and delete the bad emails right away.

Now that you know the "why" behind managing bounces, you're ready to search the Internet for all the advice on "how"!

- Marco Marini, ClickMail Marketing

UK Subscriber Study: Email Must Say Something Worthwhile

Monday, April 20, 2009 by eec Blog Contributor

It's not surprising that a recent study of UK email subscribers finds that most email marketing is pretty terrible – it's irrelevant, untargeted and poorly timed. What the study really points out is that consumers notice.

Put out by Emailcenter, an ESP in the UK, the study polled British consumers about their inbox habits and preferences. The report (free registration required) is full of wonderful ideas to improve email marketing response and deliverability. One thing that struck me is the data to support what we know intuitively from our own inboxes: we all get a lot of email, and many marketers take a short term, aggressive approach to content and frequency. Luckily, all the factors that go into reversing this trend and improving both the subscriber experience and response rates for marketers are under the control of the marketer.

Almost 64% of the respondents in the Emailcenter survey say that only a quarter of the marketing messages they get are relevant to them. Just a half a percent of them said all of it was relevant. With targeting, segmentation and dynamic content technology integrated in most email broadcast vendors and all the in-house software solutions, there is no reason why email marketers have to compromise any longer.

Using segmentation helps solve another big challenge for email marketers: frequency. In the study, 62% said that high frequency is a factor in making them wish to stop marketing messages. More than half say they got more than expected at sign up – with 36% reporting they got "more" and 16% reporting "far more." We know from our Return Path data that high frequency and low relevance are key factors in complaints to the ISPs – which depress deliverability and lower response further. The Emailcenter report also has some good suggestions about educating executive management about the perils of overmailing.

Beyond too frequent messages, another 70% say that "no relevant products" was a factor in making them wish to stop receiving marketing messages. A sizeable minority, 43%, said that their requirements changed. Again, these are all factors that marketers control. Frequency is important not only because it encourages a "delete" (the rolled eyes of subscriber feedback), but it's also the most commonly cited reason for an unsubscribe request. And it's a big reason why subscribers click the "report spam" button, depressing inbox deliverability and lowering response rates across the entire file. A quick way to check if volume and high complaints are a concern for you is to check your sender reputation for free (free registration suggested for deeper data, but not required).

Subscribers aren't asking that much of marketers. Sixty-five percent said they signed up to get exclusive discounts. A full 75% of respondents said that "special offers" is a key factor in their response to a marketing message. Another 55% said "relevant products." My goodness! All we have to do to engage a majority of our subscribers is identify what products they are in market for and provide a compelling offer that makes them feel special and valued? Certainly that is within our grasp.

What happens when we push the limits? A full 75% of these respondents said they unsubscribe (this is much higher than the studies I've seen in the US, and more than twice that found in our US consumer study). Another 40% say they just delete – which is like an emotional unsubscribe and they are lost subscribers. Only 14% said they click the "report spam" button; again, significantly less than studies of US consumers – our own study last year showed 33% click the "report spam" button when messages are not relevant.

Keep in mind the key finding here: consumers notice what email marketers do. When we send something interesting and relevant at a good pace, they are happy to stay active with our programs. When we don't… well, then we've lost them, perhaps for good.

- Stephanie Miller, Return Path

Test for Success

Tuesday, December 9, 2008 by eec Blog Contributor

Ever wondered what drives response – pictures or words? Red or blue? Flash or plain html? A great way to capitalize on the democratic medium of email is to put your burning questions, late night hunches, and out-of-the-box ideas to the test with an A/B split test! Allow your audience to vote with their clicks and get instant answers that can help drive stronger results!

Follow a few simple guidelines provided in the eec Email Design Roundtable's A/B Test Checklist and start testing your way to more engaging email program.

Let no area of your message be safe from scrutiny! The checklist provides test ideas that will help you optimize:

Subject Lines
Pre-Headers
Navigation
Layout
Copy/Messaging
Imagery
Calls-To-Action

According to the vast and varied experiences of our very own eec Email Design Roundtable, there are 3 golden rules to follow when executing a successful and insightful test:

Rule #1:
Focus on one key variable at a time. Note before you start the test what key metric you are looking to influence to declare a winner. Subject line testing is generally about getting people to open the email; calls to action are more about clicks and conversion.

There is one caveat to focused decision making in A/B test scenarios - while it is necessary and rewarding to get answers to your burning questions by tracking a measurable change in a single metric, it is important to realize that your fidgeting with things can cause unintended side-effects…

• When SL testing, you might focus on change in open rate in order to determine which worked better, but also consider post-open actions (did the subject line set the person up to convert in the email?).
• When image testing, keep an eye on your overall file size, does this negatively impact your deliverability?

At the end of the day, email is a direct response medium, so just be clear what you are trying to test/achieve, and make sure your positive results in one area aren't sabotaging another.

Rule #2:
You MUST use a random distribution for setting up your "A" and "B" audience groups. The sizes of the segments don't need to be the same if the key metric you are looking to influence is expressed as a "rate", but they do need to have the same general characteristics to be a fair test (don't test all buyers in the A group and all prospects in the B group).

In fact, if you can't decide between one hero image and another, do an initial AB split test with a small percentage of your audience on Monday, then send the winning creative to the remainder on Tuesday.

The initial test will give you enough of a sense of "what worked" to roll out the best variation to the remainder of your list. Be ready to act on what the data tells you – you might be surprised!

Rule #3:
Ron Blum of Upromise astutely points out that while the purpose of A/B testing is to find out what works - "don't assume what works today will work tomorrow…
tastes change, people get used to and fatigued by getting the same look-and-feel".

Continuous testing is the best recipe for continued success.

Advanced A/B Testing

If you are one of those highly-evolved, weekly A/B test prodigies and are looking for a new angle on ye old A/B test, try multi-variate testing on for size.

Not all customer / audience segments behave the same way. As your mailing strategy gets to be more complex, there is no reason to stop A/B testing. In fact, segmenting your audience allows you to exponentially increase the insights provided by your A/B testing!

Take this example from Williams-Sonoma:

In general, we find that including the price for a featured item on the hero image of an email drives clicks and conversions. However, when we recently tested the presence of price on an email that was segmented between customers who had a history of spending more than $100 per transaction vs customers who had a tendency to spend less than $100 per transaction, we found that low price customers were more likely to click when the price was NOT provided whereas the opposite was true for customers who had spent more than $100 with us.

Not only did this test help us drive response rate for all customers in the first test, this insight helped us develop a strategy around talking to our lower price customers that will continue into future campaigns.

In order to set this up correctly, just remember golden rule #2 and make sure you have a "control" group in both segments.

With these four segments:
Low Price A vs Low Price B
High Price A vs Low Price B

You can test A vs B in Low Price Segments and see if it's the same as A vs B in your High Price Segments.

Please join us in the pursuit of more perfect email by using our A/B Test Checklist, available in the eec's Whitepaper Room, and returning to post your results below!

Megan Walsh, Williams-Sonoma
eec Email Design Roundtable Co-Chair