With the calendar rolling quickly toward November and only a few months left before we see you all at the Email Evolution Conference 2012, we have a few exciting items we’d like to share on behalf of the entire Speakers Bureau.

First, if you haven’t participated in the eec Speakers Bureau Advisory Committee, or if you've considered joining, here’s what you should know. The Speakers Bureau Advisory Committee’s mission is to evangelize email as a key business driver for brands and publishers. It’s purposefully broad because we all know it’s a multi-channel world in which email has many applications that drive business. 

To fulfill our mission we place approved eec speakers across shows we manage, we serve as a speaker clearinghouse for organizations seeking qualified email marketing experts for their events and forums and we bring great content to external audiences. Qualifying to speak is easy; members can simply visit the Speakers Bureau page.

Second our working plan for 2012. During 2012, the Committee will execute against three key goals. We are currently planning how to best deliver and would love more involvement if anything strikes a chord.

1. We will begin utilizing social groups including LinkedIn and Facebook to grow our speakers bureau following, participation and engagement.
2. We will revamp our YouTube Channel so that the latest thought-leadership across our membership is available to communities interested in accessing our content.
3. We will expand our eec blog activity to get more and better content out to external audiences.

These three goals were selected in addition to the everyday work the committee does of reviewing and programming content across events and programs. If you have other ideas, please let us know by posting in the comments section below.

- Dori Thompson & Lana McGilvray

The Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable met on September 6, 2011.  Here's a brief overview of the meeting and the group's projects.

Attendees:

• Colleen Petitt, Aprimo - Roundtable co-chair
• Dwight Sholes, Sholes LLC - Roundtable co-chair
• Adam Cooke, Garagefly
• April Mullen, Scottrade
• Jeanette Brown, Informz

The team has completed the publication of our first project the “Cross Channel Marketing Guide.” This report provides ten guiding principles of a successful cross-channel marketing program and includes specific goals and actions your organization can apply to build a thriving program. We finalized group input in this call and the Guide is available in the eec Research Store.

Our next topic was our next project. The team determined that we would first like to create a survey of digital marketers to determine where they are in the continuum of integrated cross-channel marketing. In our meeting on 10/4 we will begin to work on this project.

The group also decided that we would like to subsequently develop a cross-channel audit that will allow marketers to assess where their strengths and growth opportunities are within cross-channel marketing.  Marketers will then be able to leverage the guide to improve and enhance their capabilities in each area. We will discuss this further in our 10/4 meeting and determine how we can use the survey to develop the audit.

Interested in joining the Roundtable?  Email Ali - aswerdlow@the-dma.org.

Mobile email...it's more than just your emails delivered via a smartphone. To succeed as email marketers on the little screen (as opposed to the big screen), we have to change our mindset.

We have to have a Mobile Mentality.

That means everything we do in email we do while considering mobile at the same time. Everything, including:

- Subscription process
- From name
- Subject line
- Copywriting
- Offer
- Headline
- Banner
- Design
- Graphics
- Call to action
- Buttons
- Frequency
- Testing
- Design
- Rendering
- Links
- Landing page
- Metrics and benchmarks
- Reporting

In particular, pay attention to your From address, subject line and headlines. These are the items subscribers are going to initially react to when viewing emails on their mobile devices (and in that order), so it’s important the appropriate message is relayed in the space provided to achieve the most optimal results. An underlying message here, pardon the pun, is that the message must take priority over the design on a mobile device. You won’t have the screen space to wow with pretty pictures or glitzy graphics. When it’s mobile, you must wow with words.

Your From address must make sense. If you haven’t yet tackled the From conundrum, do it now. The From address is the first item people look at when deciding whether or not to open an email. Yours needs to be clear and compelling. Would someone rather open an email from donotreply@yourdomain.com? Or Frank@yourdomain.com? It matters on the PC, but it might matter more on the mobile.

Keep subject lines short-er. You’re used to writing short subject lines for your emails, right? Now you get to write even shorter ones so they’ll be attention grabbing on the small screen. If the first few words of your subject line are just the buildup to the last few words of your subject line, then the buildup might be all the subscriber sees on their iPhone or Droid. Make those few words count by making them words that hook, interest and compel the subscriber.

The headline is now the headliner. Graphics aren’t going to cut it on the mobile device if you’re relying on them to earn you a click through and conversion. Plus you’re dealing with an even shorter attention span. Your headline is doing even heavier lifting than before. In fact, it might be all they see if they decide to open your email! It absolutely must compel the reader to scroll down the email for more.

You're not limited by mobile, only required to think differently. Your email rendered on a smartphone or PDA is not an end in and of itself, only one step in the process you ultimately hope will lead to a conversion. Where does one go from an email? To a landing page...
 
Mobile-friendly emails need mobile-friendly landing pages. Otherwise, you might lose that hard-won click through. Some might wait until in front of a computer before clicking through, but if someone wants to take action while on the go, we want to make it easy for them by designing a landing page that works on a mobile device. With that in mind, here are a few tips for making landing pages as mobile friendly as your emails.

Design your landing page for mobile with the same mindset as your email design, with narrower widths and a single column.

Be brief when it comes to copy...and make that copy count. Consider using two landing pages, the first which is optimized for mobile and says the bare minimum and a second they can click through to if they need more information.

Make everything shorter: headlines, line lengths, chunks of text. As with the email, think bare minimum to get your point made and your prospect clicking.

Avoid using Flash. Replace it with HTML5 or JavaScript. For best results across devices, our design team recommends building landing pages optimized for mobile as straight HTML, CSS, and minor amounts of Java.

Design for fingers, not mice. Make links and buttons a size that is easy to read and easy to navigate with a finger. You don’t want someone getting frustrated when they are trying to click through and the button or link is too small! Also remember there’s you don’t get a hover state for a touch screen on a smart phone.

If you have a form, ask for as little as possible. Ask only for an email address if you can.

You must test the rendering of both your emails and your landing pages.  You can put countless hours into the From line, subject line, headline and design of that email so it will have maximum impact on a mobile device, but if you don’t test and check how it renders in real life on all kinds of devices, all your work could be for naught. Ditto for your landing page. Test, tweak, test again.

Also remember the growing use of iPads and other tablet PCs. Smaller than a laptop, bigger than a smartphone, it’s hard to know yet where these computing devices fit into the scheme of things, how people will use them, and the best way to market to people who use them.  Don’t overlook them, however.  Being prepared for these smaller devices is only one part of having a Mobile Mentality.


- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

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

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

Other key findings include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This month’s highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

My point to this post is this: all the marketing chatter around “email marketing best practices” and related subject matter are mostly garbage.  It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in “email,” how many emails you’ve sent in your career, what company you worked for, how well you code, and I definitely don’t care if you’re an “expert.”  At the end of the day, it’s about data; it’s about results and overall achievement of the channel in conjunction to the goals set for it.  If you don’t have goals on your email channel – start tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

Here are this month’s highlights:

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

Email marketers should own Social Media!

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

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

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

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

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

It’s more than that—Much more.

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

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

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

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

Cheers, Chris


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


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

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
 

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

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

Read the press release.

Download the free report.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

SUBJECT LINE: Introducing the Student Job Portal on LinkedIn






































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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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