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

When consumers and business professionals worry about the economy, marketers find themselves squeezed. Such is the state of affairs these days as we head into the busy Q4/end of year/holiday season time.

Email can help if it's used effectively as part of a subscriber loyalty and relationship effort. Sending more of the same old batch-and-blast promotions will only flood the inbox, depress your deliverability, destroy your brand trust, and annoy good customers who are worried about their own bank accounts. Resist the urge to think of email as "free"—it's not free. It's cost-effective, certainly, but a mindset that characterizes the channel as free quickly leads to over-mailing. What you want is less email—but messages that are more effective because they are more relevant.

Who wants to be reminded to spend, spend, spend when we are worried about our financial health? Instead, take an active interest in helping your subscribers, and make sure your content and contact strategies are aligned with what the subscriber needs, not what you have to sell.

In a recession, your best buyers and loyal clients are even more important. When customers are easily distracted by lower prices or free add-ons at the competitor, it's even more important to make clear the benefits of staying with your brand. This does not mean offering more discounts, although that certainly can be an effective short-term strategy. Instead, expand your loyalty program and use email to provide both sizzle and steak. Replace just two of your generic, batch-and-blast messages this month with tailored messages around the benefits of sticking with your brand. Spend time on the subject lines and the copy (keep it brief) to make sure it resonates.

Then, deliver the benefits via email—a very efficient and effective way to connect. If you are ecommerce, add a Buying Guide or Gift Guide to the loyalty package. If you are B2B, invite your best customers to participate in online events and interactive networking—help them build their business and they will continue to support yours. Be sure to tap the next tier down of buyers and expand the reach of your program. Invite current members to bring a friend or colleague along, and reward them both.

Test these ideas with a control group this month. Segment a small portion of your file (maybe 5%) and send half as many promotional messages, but replace 25%-50% of them with relevant content, tips or interactive offers. See if revenue increases or decreases. Also watch deliverability, complaint rates and activity per subscriber. Let me know if you want help constructing the test and measuring results.

Use the results of all these ideas to make the case for stronger subscriber-centric approaches to email marketing. If email doesn't contribute more now, then we can't expect to remain at the center of the marketing mix, or budget.

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

Sometimes people need a nudge to try something new, edgy or against the conventional wisdom. So here you go, we dare you—NO, we Double Dog Dare you—to consider this challenge from Aaron Smith of Smith-Harmon:

Ask your subscribers to rate your emails. One of the more interesting email features I've seen recently is a poll in the footer asking recipients to rate the usefulness of the message or comment on the contents. General Mills, for example, includes a "rate this message" module at the bottom of their Betty Crocker messages using a 1 to 5 star rating system. Taking that concept one step further, I double dog dare you to include an email rating module not just at the bottom of your message, where few people will ever see it, but at the top, above the fold!

In theory, the rating module serves two purposes: (1) to gather feedback on the usefulness of your email program, and (2) to provide folks who are thinking about hitting the "this is spam" button a different opportunity to let their feelings be heard. So go ahead and add a rating module to your email programs…and don't be shy about the placement! Let your subscribers know you're truly interested in their opinion.

If you take up this dare, let us know how it went by commenting below. Do you see reduced spam reporting? Do you use the ratings information to make incremental improvements to your program? Or have you found you've given up valuable real estate for a feature that doesn't provide any meaningful insight or lift? And if you have a Double Dog Dare for the eec community, let us know about that too.

–>See more Double Dog Dares.

Since this is my first post on the Email Experience Blog, I thought it might make sense to formally introduce myself to all the eec blog readers out there: I'm Spencer Kollas. I have been in the email marketing business for about 7 years and currently serve as the director of delivery services at StrongMail Systems. I started out as a sender/marketer before moving over to the formal email deliverability world. Today, I spend most of my time working with clients to improve their delivery rates, increase their revenue and help them get the most out of their email programs. But enough about me…let's get to the topic at hand—bounce management

I was reviewing some old files recently and I came across some information from March of 2007 when the eec came out with a research study on bounce management. This got me to thinking about how much has really changed since then. When looking at my daily work and interactions with clients, I am doubtful that it has changed all that much.

I still get questions all the time from clients asking what they should do about their bounces, how should they handle them, and what the difference is between hard and soft bounces. Given that response, I thought it might make sense to talk about this subject a bit. Plus, not only is it something near and dear to my heart, it's also a topic that can help those who still aren't sure what to do about bounce management.

In their report on bounce management, the eec highlighted three important reasons every marketer should have effective bounce management programs:

● Performance evaluation. Proper bounce management provides crucial data on your use of email and the ROI that comes from it. By keeping track of this information and applying it back to your conversion numbers, you can see how to improve your ROI.

● List management. Bounce data is key to keeping your list clean and to maintaining or restoring contact with customers. With proper bounce management you are able to remove the customers that are no longer actively using the email addresses you have on record.

● Practice improvement. Your email system should furnish detailed data for diagnosing issues with your marketing practices (data capture, targeting, etc.) and for taking the corrective actions that will ensure both a good reputation and better deliverability. Make sure to look at your data, as this will allow you to see if certain receivers are blocking your mail or whether any other possible issues are occurring.

Now, if you are working with an ESP that is worth anything, they should have a bounce management process already put in place to make sure that their clients are following best practices. However, if you are sending email in-house, or you just want to make sure that your ESP is following best practices, those are the three areas you need to focus on when asking questions.

So what makes up a good bounce management system? Here are some basics that all programs should include:

1. Capturing of all data streams.
2. Correctly interpreting data.
3. Organizing (standardizing) data.
4. Making data actionable.
5. Being continually updated.

With a bounce management system that meets these requirements, you'll be in a position to properly evaluate your performance, manage your list and improve your practices—all of which translate into better bottom-line results. So follow these simple rules and make sure that you have a system that meets your needs and both you and the ISPs will be happy. Good luck and good sending.

—Spencer Kollas of StrongMail Systems

Hitting "send" on any email campaign always leaves us with a small feeling of dread in the pit of our stomachs. "Did I forget something? Did I double-check EVERYTHING? Will my message render properly? Will I have a job in two hours?" We feel your pain.

Ever wish you had a buddy to rely on—someone competent, steadfast and efficient who would remember to help you double-check all the key elements of design and QA success? Well, now you have one—in the form of two email checklists from the eec's Email Design Roundtable.

The first is the Code QA Testing Checklist, which covers what to check to make sure your email looks and acts exactly how you intended. The second is the Email Design Checklist, which covers what to check to maximize your email creative's performance.

Both checklists are available in the eec's Whitepaper Room—and all this week you can download them for free.

As part of the creation of these checklists, the Roundtable members discussed their value, their own send-button "feelings of dread," and even some mistakes they've made. Learn how their real-world experience contributed to the checklists and about some trouble spots to avoid:

Brent Shroyer of Listrak: When you put together a web page, you can always go back and fix it later. But in an email you only have one shot. You have to be perfect. The importance of a checklist is critical for email more so than any other online effort, since it is once and done.

Chad White of the Email Experience Council: Subject lines are so important. Subject lines are right up there for the most frequent spot for mistakes. We tend to put writing them off until the end.

Stephanie Miller of Return Path: Yes, and then the result is that messages go out with TBD or "subject line goes here" or misspelled words or missing words. Instead, view it as a critical part of the content and spend time making it relevant and engaging. Oh, and that there are no errors!

Raj Khera of MailerMailer: Test different subject line lengths to see what garners higher open rates. In studying our customer base, we found that subject lines with 35 characters or less had a significant boost in opens.

Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon: One essential that often gets missed is that the primary link shows up just below the preview pane, so it's not visible without scrolling. Oh, I think to myself, ouch! If they had just looked at it and moved it up 30 pixels, it would improve response so much!

Joanne Carry of DMG World Media: Always check the rendering. Ignore Lotus Notes! It's increasingly important with Outlook 2007 not supporting CSS and Gmail being a growing part of many marketers' files.

Brent: Be sure that everything that can be HTML text is actually HTML text. Avoid unnecessary images so that your message is completely visible even when images are turned off.

Chad: Image suppression is like a philosophy—a new way of constructing the message and approaching design. This needs to be adopted by email marketers.

And here's one that is so fixable, and yet happens all the time: I so often see dead links. I know it seems silly to say that we would double-check the links, and it's tedious, but it must happen frequently that this step gets skipped. I know what I do, when the link doesn't work—I just abandon it and go on with my life.

Lisa: Oh, yes! And then what happens is that follow-up and conversions are down and no one can figure out why. Well, it was because the links were not working. Another important step is making sure not just that the link works, but that it goes to a place that is logical. Optimize your landing page as part of the overall email experience.

Stephanie: Isn't it true that whenever response is down, the first thing we do is blame the creative? But it's often the case that deliverability was poor, the message was not mailed at the optimal time for subscribers or there were back-to-back messages from the same company, or even that the list was not segmented properly. So many things that are not a function of design.

Brent: Make sure the price in the alt tag text matches the pricing in product imagery. If the price changes during the production cycle, then you can get caught with an old alt tag. Also make sure that the landing page matches as well.

Lisa: I've seen renewed interest in text files because of mobile, thinking about its importance being slightly renewed. Although I confess that it's easy to never look at your text files or to bother matching them to the current offer. How many times I see that the copyright is last year, or the copy is outdated or is last week's promotion.

Share your own pre-send jitters or advice by commenting below.

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

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

During the eec List Growth & Engagement Roundtable's most recent meeting, we discussed an email challenge common to members and email marketers everywhere: What do you do with subscribers who have not responded to your emails in six months or more?

Initially we had a good discussion over what really defines "active." Because of image caching by the ISPs and the reading of emails on mobile devices or text-only readers, it was decided that you can't only look at opens as an indicator of someone being engaged. The best definition was any person who opens, clicks or makes a purchase (any purchase from any channel) from your company.

Now that you have defined your active email base, it's time to start looking at the inactive subscribers. Some suggestions of what to look for when trying to determine why they are inactive were:

Deliverability issues. Are your emails not getting to people's inboxes? Do you have unknown IP issues that need to be addressed? One suggestion is to look at the domain counts for the inactive subscribers. If you look at the domain counts for your active vs. inactive subscribers to see if there is any clustering that could indicate delivery issues. For example, if your total database contains 30% AOL addresses, but your non-responder domains are 65% AOL, is that difference something that indicates email filtering at AOL may be an issue?

Mobile devices. This is probably more of an issue for B2B marketers, but are more of your subscribers reading emails on their mobile devices? One idea is to include something like "click here to read this on your mobile device" at the top of your message. That would link to a short 'mobile friendly' version of your email with short body text and links to pages with more details. You could then track clicks on that link so you know who your mobile readers are.

STRATEGIES TO RE-ENGAGE INACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS:

Explore segmentation tactics. One-to-one communication and segmentation are so easy to do with email. It's highly recommended that you start categorizing your non-responders into various cells, and start testing different content and subject lines for each cell. When you identify a strategy that starts to show positive results (getting people engaged), use that strategy for the remainder of the cells.

Consider a survey. Inviting subscribers to participate in a survey can be an effective tool for re-activation programs. Ask your subscribers for information that can be helpful in providing them content and offers they will find valuable.

Get a new email address. Is the fact that the subscriber is not responding a sign that the email address is going to be invalid soon (abandoned email account)? Should you try to find a new email address for that subscriber? Over the last 6 to 8 months, there's been an increase in the number of customers that are submitting their "chronic non-responders" for email change of address and email update services. One reason for this trend is because of slowing list growth. As a marketer's growth rate of their opt-in house file slows down, the loss of emails due to bounces and non-responders start to really show their impact in terms of lost revenue. Therefore, finding a new email address for a non-responder has been a strategy that's being adopted by more companies.

Is there a risk if you continue to email non-responders? This question came up. The general consensus was that there probably is not a risk that the non-responder will press the automated complaint buttons or report you as spam. However, abandoned emails do sometimes get converted to "honeypots" or "spam traps" by the ISPs. The ISPs don't tell us good guys which addresses may have triggered a spam trap, so you don't know which ones to remove from your list. A suggestion on the call was to do a 1-year purge—anyone who hasn't shown any action (as defined above) could be suppressed from future campaigns.

This is only a summary of the conversations we had. We talked for about an hour and could have gone longer, so there was a lot of good information shared by everyone on the call, which included eec members DJ Waldow of Bronto Software, Luke Glasner of Robin Publishing, and Stephanie Miller of Return Path.

Join the conversation! Do you have any comments or advice to add regarding this challenge? Is there a list growth challenge that you'd like to see discussed at our next Roundtable meeting on April 9 at 1pm EST? If so, please comment below. Thanks.

—List Growth & Engagement Roundtable co-chairs Dan Babb of Walter Karl Interactive and Austin Bliss of FreshAddress

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

We asked the Voices of Email to look into their crystal balls and foretell what 2008 had in store for the email marketing industry. Here are their predictions:

Stephanie Miller of Return Path:
#1 - Email Marketers, if you want to keep your job, segment your file. I was hoping that last year would be the year that we'd see more targeted, tailored, relevant campaigns and less batch and blast. Not sure that happened, although I was half right in that we certainly saw MORE segmentation and targeting than in 2006.

Why will email marketers lose their job if they don't do it now? Because the email channel is more expensive than ever, and there are too many risks to brand and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Unhappy email subscribers—all that dead wood on your file—is not just a missed opportunity, it's a liability. Engaging with those folks is going to take more time and effort in creative and list hygiene and segmentation than ever before. To get those budgets, the email marketer has to prove the channel. To prove the channel, the email messages have to be a lot more relevant. To be relevant, they must be segmented. Thankfully, the technology and best practices are already in place and proven. We just need to set our minds to it.

#2 - The Data Capture form goes multichannel. We'll see more and more email marketers open up their data capture form to include permission to contact via SMS and mobile marketing. Building up the database with these contact touch points will be increasingly important as more marketers start to test the efficacy of those channels.

#3 - Transactions will become touchpoints sometimes too hot to handle. More email marketers are going to push the envelope on turning transactional messages into marketing opportunities. The receivers and FTC will get stricter on standards, potentially causing trouble for some senders. With the need to dynamically create, message and track these messages, ESPs will aggressively go after the transactional email market to build their base and capture higher share of wallet.

Chip House of ExactTarget: Increasing focus on subscriber engagement. When emphasizing the importance of list hygiene, David Daniels of Jupiter Research often compares mailing the portion of your list that hasn't opened or clicked on your emails in several months to "flying an advertisement over a ghost town." Many marketers are realizing the benefits to their success potential via email by truly understanding which segments of their list are responding, and which aren't. The non-responsive segments drag down your deliverability and ROI, and waste your time. This is something that I like to call the "ignore rate." Marketers that ignore the needs of their subscribers, send irrelevant communications, or make other blunders leading to dissatisfied subscribers, drive a higher ignore rate.

Most sophisticated email marketers now closely track their open and click rates, and more are even tracking subscriber spam complaints by ISP. However, it is often what you don't see that can be most harmful to your deliverability and campaign ROI. More marketers are beginning to see the benefits of closely analyzing the portion of their customer base that IS NOT paying attention. By doing so they can better reactivate them, opt them in again, or discard them—all to the benefit of their response rates and ROI.

2008 is about flying hundreds of planes, towing just the right message, over hundreds of small cities.

Amy Bills of Bulldog Solutions: I think we will see some shaking out in the use of social media for lead generation. Right now, a lot of companies are really struggling to understand what works and what can be integrated into their existing strategies. Is a blog, a podcast, RSS, an online community, a presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. going to be worth the effort and resources? How can you even measure their effect on your objectives? And of course, what works for one company is not going to be the same formula for another. Some have the impulse to try everything. Others want to bury their heads in the sand and deny the landscape is changing at all. A third group is experimenting and trying to be smart about making good choices, thinking about what their prospects will respond to and how to make social media enhance what they are already doing.

After Paul Dunay joined Bulldog in November for a webinar on making sense of social media for BtoB marketing, he made a comment that really stuck with me. "[The question isn't] if social media is right for your company, but which social media is right for your company. And at this point in time and state of your company, you need to determine which social media is right for your company for next year. A year from now, the picture may look very different. And the answer to which social media is right for your company will be different for each company. My advice is look into next year with an eye toward experimenting with a few tactics to begin to get yourself and your team up to speed."

So, I predict that more marketers will ease into that third group, and start to get smarter about social media. And by "smarter" I mean more creative and experienced about how to make tactics work and measure their results, and brave enough to admit when a particular tactic might not work.

Tricia Robinson of StrongMail Systems: The email space gets larger and faster daily. With this growth comes change, and I predict we'll experience much change in 2008.

Automation Becomes The New Buzzword. We've lived through closing-the-loop, 1to1 digi-dialogues, and deliverability. Look for campaign automation to catch-on in 2008. We're seeing more clients rapidly move in this direction. Those that already have are realizing the time/cost benefits of auto-generated programs.

The Final Sunset for the Old Homegrowns. The replacement of the original homegrown system has been a trend since 2006. However, this year we'll see the last of the first homegrown systems built by Web 1.0 companies and those that thought "email is easy, we'll make our own." Some organizations will always custom-build, but most have done it on top of something more sophisticated than generic MTAs.

All Outbound Customer Email Includes Marketing. Even if it's the inclusion of a logo, all outbound customer email (transactional, customer service, promotional, etc.) will include a touch of marketing. According to MarketingSherpa in mid-2007, 90% of email marketers planned to overhaul their transactional email in the next 12 months. Not sure if they will meet their own deadline by June, but look for an improvement in the look of all outbound email. I'm not crazy enough to predict the death of the text email, but maybe next year.

Still More Acquisitions. 2004-2006 were large vendor consolidation years in our space. I argue that 2007 was the year of the IPO. Now with more cash and CNBC viewers to consider, look for Constant Contact and ExactTarget to make purchases that round out their offerings or extend their reach into new markets.

Unlike many, I like change. It's good to shake things up as long as the goal is always towards improvement. Happy New Year!

Chad White of the eec: 2008 will be the year that retailers and other B2C marketers increase the transparency of their email programs and relinquish more control to subscribers. In 2007 we saw more retailers allow potential subscribers to view a sample email before signing up. More also offered emails on different topics or allowed some level of content preference selection—which is key to elevating relevancy. Consumers are getting very used to having more control over how they're marketed to, and email will be forced to fall in line over time. On the upside, giving consumers more control over content and frequency, and being more upfront about those aspects of their email programs, should generate more lifetime value from subscribers. Although eventually we'll see this kind of control move to the front end, during 2008 we'll start to see it more and more on the tail end of the relationship when subscribers are fed up and trying to opt out. Rather than lose subscribers, more marketers will give up control over frequency and other elements to boost retention.

During 2008 we'll also see retailers pay more attention to content—product reviews, videos of product demonstrations and fashion shows, blogs, articles, podcasts, etc.—and do a better job of leveraging it in their email channels.

Following the announcement we made on this blog last week regarding the availability of the session schedule for the Email Evolution Conference, yesterday we released a more formal version of that announcement to the media, adding some new details. For instance, the conference's 34 sessions will include more than 85 speakers. Over the past few days we've updated the conference program with more of those names, which include executives from National Geographic Society, Conde Nast, American Express, Gannett Co., Allstate, Live Nation, Cisco, KeyBank and eHarmony.

We also promised that each of the 27 breakout sessions will include at least one marketer, so attendees can be sure to get real-world advice on everything from deliverability and list hygiene to acquisition and multichannel marketing.

In addition to all the educational sessions, we also announced that the conference will include an Experience Hall, with exhibits from more than 40 of the industry's top vendors and service providers, including Message Systems, Puresend, Habeas, and the conference's exclusive title sponsor, ExactTarget. The Experience Hall will feature special pods instead of booths, which will allow for better networking and make you feel less like a mouse in a maze of booths.

For more information or to take advantage of early bird rates, please visit http://www.emailevolution.org.

Based on what I saw at the ClickZ Specifics: Email Marketing conference yesterday, deliverability remains the hot topic. They had a packed session dedicated to the topic and it also came up during the closing 5 Experts/5 Minutes session, where five experts were given 60 seconds each to answer a question from the audience. Here is some of the wisdom that I jotted down:

Regarding first steps…
Stefan Pollard of EmailLabs said to start by knowing your metrics—your delivery rate, bounce management, spam complaints, etc. You can make improvements if you don't know where your program stands currently.

Deidre Baird of Pivotal Veracity said that you should get on ISPs' whitelists (which is free) and take advantage of spam compliant feedback loops.

Regarding list rental/buying…
Baird also said to avoid spamtraps by not buying lists and harvesting addresses from the web. Only use opt ins, she said.

Jordan Ayan of SubscriberMail said flatly, "Don't ever buy a list."

Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ said that they were very close to advising readers to never rent or buy lists, but that they hadn't quite reached that point yet.

Regarding offline sign-ups with incentives…
If you're offering incentives in order to collect email addresses offline, be sure to "deliver the incentive to the email address," said Austin Bliss of FreshAddress. The customer is more likely to give you their real address and to write legibly if the incentive is being delivered this way.

Lieb told a story of a major apparel retailer that gave in-store customers a 20% off coupon in exchange for their email address. Well, people wrote down bogus addresses in order to get the discount and those addresses lead to the retailer being blacklisted. Ouch!

Pollard recommended using double opt-in for offline sources of acquisition.

Regarding B2B filtering…
"B2B filtering is more whimsical than B2C," said Bliss.

Baird said that companies rely much more on spam lists like Spamhaus and SpamCop.

Regarding authentication…
People were universally proponents of authentication (DKIM and Sender ID), which makes it clear that you are who you say you are, thereby fighting spoofing. But they also all said that it currently doesn't lead to better deliverability, as very few ISPs give authentication serious weigh yet when deciding which emails to filter. However, some of the experts thought this would be given more weight in the future.

Regarding cleaning up old, dirty lists…
Pollard told marketers to look at the date of subscription—the older the date, the more likely you should just cut them. He also advised people to remove role addresses like sales@domain.com.

Al DiGuido of Zustek said you should cut people who haven't opened an email in the past 6-12 months.

But Ayan said not to assume that your emails are going unread because the subscriber could have images turned off. He said it's best if you send a series of emails asking if they want to continue receiving email.

—Chad White

Bulldog Solutions hosted a live roundtable on Email Deliverability for BtoB Lead Generation earlier this week. We expected a great turnout for this Webinar—and we weren't disappointed. More than 50% of registrants made time to attend the hourlong live event—an attendance rate that exceeds nearly every measure for online marketing we track in the Bulldog Index.

Our panel included two familiar EEC names: Stephanie Miller of Return Path, who is the EEC's vice chair for member initiatives, and Michelle Eichner of Pivotal Veracity, who leads the EEC's deliverability and rendering roundtable. That group produced the March report on email standards and bounce management that we referred to several times during the webinar. We also had Ryan Rutan, a senior programming analyst at National Instruments, who offered his perspective from an organization that's confronted many of the issues marketers are facing. You can view a recording of the roundtable here.

Prior to the webinar we solicited questions from our registrants, a practice we typically employ to help us ensure the panel addresses the audience's biggest pain points. As the EEC's Jeanniey Mullen pointed out, the questions themselves are fantastic market research.

Here's one observation I think we can all relate to. The questions showed us that marketers want a magic bullet. This is human nature and not surprising, but when the topic is complex, it's not always easy to provide. While they're certainly willing to put in the work on testing and research, and to consider variables such as industry and message, the fact remains we received many questions asking for answers on:
—The best time to send emails
—The most successful subject line
—The best word count for a promotional email
—A definitive answer on whether text or HTML is best

One attendee summed up the panelists' responses with humor: "Great stuff. Very knowledgeable panel. Bottom line: It depends. Ha ha."

During the webinar we promised attendees we'd answer some of the questions we didn't get to address during the live event. We'll use this blog and Bulldog's sales and marketing blog, as well as our Marketing Watchdog Journal newsletter, to communicate when we have some Q&A written up for the audience to explore.

—Amy Bills

A recent New York Times article about online retail sales caught my immediate attention. Titled "Online Sales Lose Steam," the piece detailed new research from Jupiter showing that in the last year, growth has slowed sharply in major sectors like books, tickets, and office supplies. "Analysts say it is a turning point and growth will continue to slow through the decade," the article said.

To be sure, some of the slowdown is just simple math: Internet sales are forecast to hit $116 billion this year, approximately 5% of all retail sales, and as the overall size of the market grows, it's harder to maintain the same growth rates as when it was smaller. Still, some of the slowdown was attributed to consumer attitudes: "Consumers seem to be experiencing internet fatigue and are changing their buying habits."

The value proposition of email marketing—for consumers—must have to do with ease and convenience. You can surf the web at your convenience, obtain the products or services you like when and wherever, and we arrange to have it sent to you. We can then even track what you've bought and let you know about offers on related things.

Email marketers tend to talk about relevance a lot, but it isn't just because being irrelevant leads down a nasty path toward deliverability issues. Relevance—we'll get you what you really want— is about making it easier for consumers to get things done online.

Yet, does email as a marketing channel overall make things easier for consumers, or more difficult? "Online, it's much more of a task," the Times piece quotes Macy's executive Liz Hauer as saying. The article cites Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn who suggests that online shopping, because it involves a computer, can feel like work.

What are we as email marketers doing to minimize this feeling? Have we made it easy for consumers to tell what messages are real and desired? Or have we defined "relevance" as whatever we can send that doesn't get us blocked? As a marketing medium, email is a pretty motley mix now—urgent email from bosses, overt scams, multiple copies of the latest viral video hit forwarded from multiple college friends, bills and statements, and regular old-fashioned spam.

What are we doing to make things easy for consumers?

—David Atlas

Our creative team here at Bulldog recently passed around this compelling post on the value of spending time considering the preview pane view of your emails. Not because they aren't already sold on making message choices that take the preview pane into account, but because there is nothing better than having reliable statistics to back up your actions. One stat cited in this post: 64% of people who are offered preview panes start using them as their default (MarketingSherpa, 2007).

The editor of our monthly newsletter, Marketing Watchdog Journal, was particularly enamored of the post (she's the one who sent it around) because it validates the time we've been spending on the preview pane view of the newsletter. For the past several months we've been playing with rich media, adding a relatively simple video component to the newsletter and watching the effect on metrics such as open rates and clickthroughs. Video is a more and more compelling part of the online marketing experience, and the technology and availability of production facilities are making it more accessible to marketers (see my earlier post on embedded video in other areas of our prospect engagements). So it's really not a question of whether we were going to add video to the newsletter, but how to go about it.

In our June newsletter, we combined the ongoing video testing with a preview pane message that highlighted the availability of said video. A simple text message, appearing at the top of the newsletter, highlighting the availability of video: "In this issue of Marketing Watchdog Journal, you'll learn how to apply social media to BtoB marketing. View the video introduction for more!" The results: Open rates up 30%, clickthroughs almost double the previous month.

I'm not ready to isolate that preview pane message as the sole reason for the open rate jump. The topic, the subject line, the deliverability of the newsletter all play a role, and Bulldog's analytics manager would pass out if I announced I was ready to draw conclusions after a single test. But those numbers were certainly gratifying—the seeds of our own reliable stats to back up our actions.

—Amy Bills

Sometimes you just want that extra bit of security. You want to own the "real deal." Depending on who you are, you might seek this out in different ways, such as buying a 4WD, off-road-ready vehicle even though you live in Manhattan, or a having a watch rated to depths of 50 feet, even though you don't scuba dive. What matters though is that should you want to drive through a muddy mountain pass or scuba with the watch on, you could! Most of us, however, never get to see our fanciest gadgets in action, so we really don't know if they work!

Thus far, most email reputation systems have been a bit like this, haven't they? Though they're rated to provide better deliverability, to qualify for the program you already have to have pretty darn good permission policies and list hygiene practices, and in turn pretty good deliverability.

Last week, the folks at Return Path upgraded their Sender Score Certified system to "go off-road." Along with the changes at Windows Live Mail (image suppression, increased use of throttling and bulk-foldering for new IP's, etc.), Sender Score Certified now provides some additional tangible benefits that marketers can see and feel.

Return Path also reported that those qualifying for Sender Score Certified will have their images enabled by "default" at Windows Live Mail/Hotmail and will enjoy more lenient daily throttling limits. Plus, certified senders will also have an "unsubscribe" button enabled by Windows Live Mail/Hotmail, providing the opt-out button that marketers have been yapping about for ages. The ESPC study from earlier this year shows that consumers are likely to use it, too. Per that study, 90% of respondents said they would use such a button "if it existed." Guess what folks, now it does. Want to reduce your complaints at Microsoft properties? Sender Score Certified is looking like a better way now than ever.

—Chip House