Karen Talavera, eec Blog Contributor, is leading a session at the Email Evolution Conference in Miami this February.  Register today to recieve the early bird discount (through January 14th) and to meet Karen and dozens of other industry luminaries. It's the best place this winter to learn how to make email and digital marketing more successful.  Register now.

What exactly makes people respond to your email marketing offers? What is it precisely that makes them engage and buy from you? And how does knowing these things help you drive better email response?

It’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question asked of all advertising and marketing. While the fundamentals of what makes us want to transact with a company or say yes to one offer over another remain relatively the same across channels, how marketers employ specific tactics can vary drastically from channel to channel.

When it comes to email marketing it’s important to know exactly which approaches lead to trust, engagement, purchase and loyalty and how to translate them into successful email messages and  programs.

Let’s start with that first part – the approach – then move into a specific, tactical process for applying it.

The Basic Psychology of Human Decision-Making
We can pride ourselves all we want on our intellectual superiority over the rest of the species on our planet, but a commonly overlooked fact is that we are as much emotional as intellectual beings – maybe even more emotional than intellectual. Our brains are equipped with reasoning and emotional centers, and both factor into decision making.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world can be fast, furious, and impersonal.  There is a built-in immediacy in digital communication channels that often undermines the opportunity to slow down the sale and deepen the consideration process that older, offline channels afforded.

Plus, there is both a considerable amount of skepticism and unfortunately, fraud in the digital world. Allowing people to get to know you online with a relationship-building approach goes a long way toward creating the familiarity, comfort confidence consumers and business people alike need before they’re willing to buy.

It Starts with Creating Emotional Resonance
Despite our immense reasoning power, our instinctive “gut” reactions are older and better honed. From the standpoint of human evolution, we had to develop the ability to make split-second unconscious decisions to survive. This ability survives in us today and kicks-in when we’re faced with any decision – even if it’s not life or death – and often happens before our brains have time to intellectually process facts

That’s why research has proven time and again that people buy from emotion and justify with reason. So it’s essential to know how to emotionally connect with people in your marketing, and in email to do so not just authentically but quickly.

Remember, there’s that built-in immediacy factor with email – people don’t spend as much time with it as print or television. That’s right – with email you have less than three seconds to create emotional resonance.

When you resonate with your subscribers you strike an emotional chord with them. You make a visceral feeling connection.  You both tune into the same “vibe”, and it results in comfort and trust, allowing you to sell in a non-salesy environment.

As in music, your aim is to sing to the same tune as your audience, then harmonize with them by recognizing their needs, pain, challenges and desires and meeting them in that space.

So now that you know we must appeal to both the intellectual and emotional sides of people, how do we do it?

The Five P’s of Profitable Email Response
I recoomend what I call the “Five P’s” process because it not only centers on authenticity, personality and transparency over features and facts, but also honors the intellectual reasoning component of how people make decisions.

The Five P’s of creating emotional resonance and response in email are:

1. Positioning
2. Pain
3. Promise
4. Proof
5. Plan (course of action/call to action)

This process can be followed to craft your copy, offers, message design, message sequence, and even overall messaging strategy throughout a quarter or year.  Let’s explore each of these in more detail:

1.   Positioning

Proper positioning acknowledges both who you are and what’s in it for your audience to be in communication with you. Successful positioning boasts excellent clarity – it makes both your identity as the sender of email and your purpose in sending the message immediately apparent. It then goes beyond clarity to create comfort, familiarity and purpose for your audience.

In email there is little time and space for lengthy build-ups and stories – which is why creative/design elements (like graphics, color, and layout) can be more effective than long copy in creating mood, identity and personality.

Consider these tactics for creating solid positioning:

• Present the “big picture” of what’s possible for your subscribers if they respond to your offer. Show and tell – use both images and words or even video so they can experience that future potential as real.
• Include a link called “About us” or “Our Story” in your main navigation bar/ template that connects to more background about your company or organization. Don’t make it boring – tell a human story that creates both credibility and vulnerability.
• Use outcome-driven, enticing language to set the stage for your offer to come.
   

2.   Pain

Yes, evoking negative as well as positive emotions can entice response (the worst reaction is no reaction at all), but your purpose here isn’t to bring your audience into a place of fear or dread. It is instead to identify and acknowledge their problems, challenges or pain – problems, challenges or pain that you intend to alleviate. Spend just enough effort identifying the pain so your audience knows you understand them, then move on.

It’s tempting to avoid this step in the process. However, in glossing over or skipping it you risk leaving out an important part of the emotional journey for your audience; you also miss a chance to create emotional resonance by helping them feel understood.

3.   Promise

Here’s where you spare no expense getting to the juicy goodness of your message and tying back to your positioning. Effectively creating promise means conveying – again through both words and pictures – the transformational outcome your audience will experience if they say yes to your offer.

Will they be happier? Richer? More beautiful? Healthier? Less-stressed? More successful at work? Better organized?

What are the desired emotions they will feel if they say yes to your offer? Love? Joy? Happiness? Satisfaction? Relief? Peace?

Understanding how your core products/services translate into both emotional and transformational benefits is essential to creating marketing messages that emotionally resonate. If you don’t know how your offerings transform and better people’s lives, you need to learn. If you can’t express the transformational outcomes of your offerings in your marketing, it will fail to connect.

4.   Proof

So far in this process we’ve been heavily in emotional territory. In the proof stage, we accelerate the appeal to reason.

Proof can take several forms both within email messages and on web sites/landing pages. These days the most compelling proof is social proof – as humans we crave a sense of belonging and will often follow the crowd. Who else has experienced the transformational outcome of your offerings and what do they have to say about it? Ideally, you can pull this information directly from your social media pages (assuming you have it there) into your email and website.

If not, include proof in the form of testimonials, quotes, links to case studies, and short success stories. Keep it human! Clinical trials and research studies are factually powerful (and often indisputable) but social proof generates greater credibility. We tend to believe our peers more than scientists or research studies because we can identify more with a peer group.

5.     Plan

Finally, don’t leave people hanging – tell them what you want them to do next and how to do it! Show them where and how to get what you promised.

Otherwise known as your call to action, this step MUST be abundantly clear, concise, literal and logical. While positioning, pain, promise and proof all influence engagement, this final step influences action and actual purchases.  It can be as simple as a text link or a sentence next to a button; or it can involve a short list of steps.

Remember that in email true response is a two-step process beginning with a click from within a message and continuing as a completed call to action (sign-up, content view, purchase, etc.) on a web page. Continue the clarity of your call to action all the way through your landing page and conversion process to avoid abandonment.  After coming this far, you don’t want to lose the valuable connection you’ve created with your responders.

By Karen Talavera
Synchronicity Marketing
Enlightened Email & Digital Marketing Training, Coaching & Consulting
 

• The percentage of people in North America, Brazil, France and Germany that open emails on mobile devices
• Email open share by Industry, like Retail and Banking
• How Apple devices appear to dominate emails opens, and why this may not be the full story
• If and how much people are buying on their smartphones

It's darn inspiring.  Toby Fallsgraff, email director for the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign, made it clear that email marketing was not just a key channel for the President's reelection campaign, but was a central, essential and integral factor in the success of the campaign.  Wow - lowly email marketing re-electing a President?  That's something to mention next time someone responds with languor when you say what you do for a living!

One of the coolest things that Toby shared is around the challenges of using email marketing to do the hard work of a campaign:  Defining a competitor, and establishing a candidate position.  Email marketing done well, and with high frequency, can actually shape the conversation, not just reflect the brand. "We created a way for ordinary Americans to be involved and actually move the needle on the campaign success," Toby said.

The numbers are crazy.  One mailing could generate up to 2 million dollars in donations.  So the stakes - and rewards - were high.  No wonder the team worked crazy hours and gave up so much personal time for the success of the program.  There were 4.5 million donors over email, donating on average a $53 gift (many people gave more than once) generating more than a half a billion dollars online.

No question:  Email marketing has changed how political campaigns are funded.

One key to success is focus and clarity of vision.  There were four email objectives: Messaging, Mobilization, Money & Metrics, Toby said.

Some of the secrets of their success include the kinds of best practices that we talk about all the time, and especially here at the Email Marketing Summit.

•Treat subscribers like people, not data. Assumption that anyone who was on the list, was supportive. Messaging addressed supporters as knowledgeable insiders.  "We know you know about Obamacare, but your friends may not."  A series called, "You should forward this" is a great example of enabling social sharing.

•The subject lines were a huge buzz factor in the campaign.  Some positive and negative social activity helped raise awareness of the program and entice people to actually open some of those multiple messages they received every day.   Subject lines like, "Listen,"  "Hey" and "Say you're with me" were incredibly successful.  Continual testing was key to subject line success.

•Use a field localization approach for mobilization.  The Campaign relied on the States to know what worked best in their area.  Enablement of those programs helped improve the response to local activity.

•Lots of testing in the strategy.  They found that staff was terrible at predicting what would work or not work - just like every marketing team I've ever seen. "We had to test and test and never be satisfied," Toby said.  "Innovation and metrics became an objective in itself."

•Reliance on segmentation.  For example, on Oct 17, 166 individual email segments were sent something unique, and 84 of them were tests.
 

•Staffed for success.  "Some people had to sleep, which I don't buy,"  Toby said.  Still, of the 30-member Outbound messaging team, 22 people worked on email, 14 of them worked with the state programs.  There were four people working on social.  "We couldn't hire people fast enough. So we hired smart people who were good writers," Toby says.  It led to a very collaborative culture with cross functional teamwork, as well bubbling up of many new ideas.  "It's incredibly important to have a team that can rally around a vision, and be empowered to achieve it," he says.
 

•The program was very mobile friendly and responsive from the beginning.
 

•Continual honing of the test groups. For example, just taking out non-donors and west coasters (who were not awake when the tests went out in the morning) improved testing results and is attributed with millions in additional donations.  Testing elements also had to be changed frequently. "Novelty is highly effective but can also be highly fleeting," Toby says.

Segmentation based on demographics was not nearly as effective as past behavior.  What mattered was what you donated and when.  "We were not being creepy, people liked that we knew they had recently donated or recently signed the President's birthday card."  Toward the end of the campaign, "we put that strategy on steroids."  What happened is that the program achieved what many of us strive to do: To be personal.  The email marketing was in a voice that was authentic and honest.  Plus, it recognized the donor and celebrated and enabled them.  That is a great lesson for all of us.  Big data is not always creepy data. Consumers are okay with marketers using information that we should know - and use responsibly.

A great validation of the success of this personal connection, is the emotional and heartfelt reactions from subscribers when the campaign sent out, "Goodbye inbox" messages at the end of the campaign.  Subscribers would truly miss hearing from the campaign "personas."

Toby described what we all want to have, and often don't for many reasons: Knowledge, resources, time, technology, lack of vision.  Theirs was a very data driven program.  "We tested and tested because we had to, we used A/B testing as our bread and butter,"  he says. Routinely this meant dozens of segments and 3-4 subject lines to test.  When you are projecting several million dollars in return from an email mailing, a few points can make a huge difference.

Thank you, Toby.  For doing great email marketing, and for your generous sharing of the campaign approach and success with us this morning!  Readers, watch the video if you can!  So many great lessons for all of us who want to be smarter about email marketing.

by, Stephanie Miller

"Originally posted on the Mediapost LIVE site from the Email Insider Summit in Park City Utah this week.”  (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/189012/a-wow-re-election-story-email-marketing-essential.html#axzz2Eh3krlWd)

eMarketer’s recently published report, “Email Marketing Benchmarks: Key Data, Trends and Metrics,” concludes that email is still one of the most effective marketing tools, despite all the other channels now competing for the attention of consumers.

The report cites three trends:

1. The increasing use of mobile devices for checking email
2. The use of personalized and triggered emails
3. The use of “Big Data” for creating more targeted email marketing

Most interesting to me were the finding applicable to B2B marketers, particularly in regards to mobile and triggered emails.

In the past, those of us who write about email marketing separated out B2C and B2B issues because they differed. One would typically read an email marketing newsletter or post assuming it addressed B2C only unless stated otherwise. Any advice specific to B2B email marketing would be labeled as such. In our own email marketing blog, we strived to ensure we were offering enough B2B specific content.

These days, many of the challenges apply across the board. This makes sense because businesses are consumers too—real people, whether at home or at work. As consumers’ behaviors and expectations change, so do those of the buyers behind a business. If you’re a consumer who signed up to receive emails from Land’s End because you like their clothing, and you’re also a systems analyst responsible for recommending a new ERP platform for your company, your consumer experiences and preferences would naturally affect your expectations.

Look at the B2B adaption of social media for marketing purposes. If we were so good at keeping our personal/consumer and professional/work mindsets separate, businesses probably wouldn’t have ventured into the social media arena. However, people are people, and as our behaviors and expectations change in one part of our lives (the personal part), that can’t help but affect the other (the professional part).

Having said that, some aspects of B2B email marketing still require a different approach, as this report makes clear, especially in the case of mobile and automated email marketing.

What B2B marketers need to know about mobile email
Obviously, mobile usage continues to grow at a rapid pace. We can see evidence of this everyday both at work and at home, but research also proves it to be true. The eMarketer report states direct digital marketing solutions provider Knotice found in the last quarter of 2010, only 13.36% of communications were opened on mobile devices, but by the second half of 2011 that number had climbed to 27.39%. Now, according to this report, more than one third of emails are opened on a mobile device. According to a BlueHornet study, about two-thirds of US email users had used their mobile device to sort through email before reading it on the desktop.

However, there’s another caveat to this: an open doesn’t guarantee a click, whether it’s an open on a smartphone or a desktop. Although email open rates have gone up, click-through rates (CTRs) have gone down and now average below 5%, according to research from Epsilon and the Email Experience Council (EEC). This decline in open rates might be the result of the increasing the number of emails hitting inboxes. Mobile design has an effect on CTR, too. The BlueHornet study pointed out that 69.7% who received a non-optimized mobile email deleted it.

What B2B marketers need to know about automated email
Despite the overall decline in CTRs, one type of email continues to do well, generating noticeably higher than average click throughs: automated emails (also known as triggered emails). According to the eMarketer report, triggered emails generated a click-through rate of 10.4% (more than twice the average) in the first quarter of 2012. Some businesses have seen conversion rates as high as 50% with these automated messages.

That’s a very compelling argument for making automated emails part of your mix, especially as a B2B marketer today. Research cited in the report indicates the number of B2B emails will increase significantly. “Email research firm The Radicati Group estimates the total number of business emails sent and received daily worldwide will climb from 89 billion in 2012 to 143.8 billion in 2016.”

As a result, B2B marketers will see a lot more competition in the inbox. That’s on top of the competition from other channels—work-related and not. Keep in mind that just because someone is at work or at a desk, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still distracted by attention grabbers like Facebook and Pinterest. And that distraction can happen on any screen too, be it a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.

The best email marketing continues to evolve and change, whether we’re entrenched in B2C or B2B or both. Take note of the trends called out in reports such as this one. Be relevant and test religiously, whether your audience is at home or on the job.

Marco Marini, CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Cyber Monday was hugely successful this year. According to comScore, this Cyber Monday broke records as the biggest day in US history for online spending. Of the top retail websites, online shoppers visited Amazon the most and it had the biggest year-over-year growth of site visits at 36% (source: Experian Hitwise). By using Inbox Insight data, I saw how Amazon’s email marketing strategy for Cyber Monday this year changed, and likely attributed to their large year-over-year traffic growth.

Amazon's Cyber Monday Campaigns Doubled in 2012

When comparing last year's campaigns with “Cyber Monday” in the subject line, Amazon's Cyber Monday campaigns doubled in 2012 while overall performance of these campaigns remained virtually the same. In 2011, Amazon’s Cyber Monday campaigns had an above average engagement benchmark, and this year's campaigns continued to have above average engagement benchmark, despite sending volume doubling. All metrics, like "This is Spam" complaints and messages deleted and unread, stayed the same with the read rate decreasing slightly in 2012, but not enough to impact the benchmark.

Can marketers, therefore, double volume without making any other changes and expect the same performance? Not that easy. Upon further investigation, Amazon also changed their sending and segmentation strategy.

More Sending Volume, Less Sending Days

The chart below shows how Amazon’s strategy for sending Cyber Monday emails by day of week changed from 2011 to 2012. In 2011, the day before Cyber Monday saw few campaigns sent, but in 2012, it was Amazon's biggest day volume-wise. Amazon also changed the length of their Cyber Monday campaign schedule. In 2011, Cyber Monday campaigns continued for the next five days, In 2012, Amazon ended their Cyber Monday only two days later. This tactic proves to be a smart way to increase volume while maintaining high levels of engagement. Clearly, consumers have an appetite for more marketing emails just before, on, and right after Cyber Monday.

Amazon Used Segmentation Less This Cyber Monday

Most of the Cyber Monday campaigns that Amazon sent in 2011 were small and targeted. Even their “Cyber Monday Deals” email to announce the start of Cyber Monday went to about half of their total list. In 2012, this strategy seems to have changed. While they still deployed small, targeted campaigns, Amazon increased the number of campaigns aimed at most of their subscriber file. Their email to announce Cyber Monday with the subject line “Cyber Monday Deals Week Starts Now” went to their whole list. In addition, they had quite a few other large deployments where they advertised deals in certain verticals, for example, in Electronics and Books, to a significant percentage of their list. This broadening of their segmentation strategy did not negatively affect their overall engagement, again confirming that their subscribers were waiting to see these Cyber Monday offers.

So what can we learn from Amazon and their Cyber Monday campaigns and results in 2011 vs. 2012? It looks like consumers look forward to Cyber Monday and have an increased tolerance for emails just before, on, and right after Cyber Monday. Assuming subscribers value the offer, increasing volume or broadening your segments for Cyber Monday may be a strategy worth considering in 2013.

Margarita Golod
Director, Product Marketing

(originally published on the Return Path Blog)

DMA Acting CEO Linda Woolley embraces the power of marketing to transform our world. “Marketers have the power to transform politics. Marketers have the power to use big data to get exactly the right items to the right location at the right time,” she said during her recent keynote address at the DMA2012 conference.  One of her oft quoted stories is that Walmart and Kellogg’s use weather forecasts to ensure enough strawberry pop tarts are sent to Florida before a big storm. The data shows that when there is a storm, sales of pop tarts goes up.  This is data driven marketing, just as much as any email campaign.

Marketers have the power to feed the poor, save the environment, change the world, she said at the event. We can predict customer intent by making educated guesses about that is needed when. “Big data is almost an understatement,” she said. Consider that we approach the production of a zetabyte of data is around consumer and marketing transactions, which is a LOT of data. It’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros. Linda said that $168 billion will be spent on products marketed in the US this year – that represents 52.7% of all US expenditures. Marketers and the companies they support account for 9.2 mm jobs in this country.

No kidding, the business of marketing is fueling the economy in new ways. That is a great way to think about how important it is to participate in our industry and do what we love to do.

Linda also showed a new video that the DMA created on how consumers rely on the data embedded into their daily life. They are “Thrilled and delighted to have that data help them connect with products, brands, people, causes and elected officials,” Linda said.

However, Linda warned us that the FTC has started going after data brokers – which is really all of us – anyone who uses data to do marketing to anyone else. The FTC wants to legally require us to allow consumer permission for every transaction. This would be the end of customer centricity. Imagine checking into a hotel that you frequent often, and the registration clerk asks if you have ever stayed before. Unfortunately, privacy zealots have scared Congress with their hyperbole, Linda said. “They’ve frightened people with the idea that if you buy a deep fryer you will be denied health care.”

However, if marketers fight back hard enough, we can show Congress the value of data driven marketing. This is where the DMA comes in.

Linda asked for each of us to join her and the DMA in taking a pledge to support the mission of the DMA to advance and protect responsible data driven marketing. Please do take the pledge today and ask others in your organization to do the same.

Linda herself pledged that the DMA will work tirelessly with every direct and digital marketer to make sure that the future is a world where we can give customer what they want , when they want it. Where marketers can play a significant role in social causes. A world where products and people get where they are supposed to be, on time.

“Together, we can transform how Congress thinks about marketers and data driven marketing,” Linda said. “we will make sure they – and consumers – understand that what we do improves lives, benefits the economy and strengthens our society.”

I hope you will take the pledge with us today – and provide us any feedback on what you need to ensure the DMA serves you the best way we can.

As Linda said last week, “We are DMA. And we’ll be there for you!”

-Stephanie Miller, VP, Member Relations, The DMA

If your direct email marketing program is intended to drive traffic to a landing page or website, chances are you have abandonment issues. Not because you’re doing anything inherently wrong, mind you. It’s just the nature of the online world. Some people will show up at your website and simply not buy. Even the best email marketing will have people abandon their shopping after following through on a call to action. In fact, 88% of online shoppers abandon, according to a 2009 Forrester Research estimate.

It might be the prospect lands at a page then clicks away without buying (called up funnel abandonment) or it might be the prospect goes as far as starting to buy from you--or register with you--then clicks away (called down funnel abandonment).

Either way, they’re clicking away. And every click on the Back button is a lost revenue opportunity for you.

Is that it? Are you done? Must you stand idly by and let them go? Not if you use a strategic email abandonment campaign to re-engage those who clicked away.

At ClickMail Marketing, we’ve been partnering with Smarter Remarketer, helping clients use re-engagement campaigns that kick in when a prospect abandons a landing page or website. During that time, we’ve realized there are two vital reasons for implementing an abandonment campaign: relevance and ROI.

1. Relevance: Emails that follow up on a specific prospect action, such as clicking through to a landing page or adding an item to a shopping cart, are by default highly relevant to that prospect. We can’t know the reason for not following through and purchasing. For all we know, the cart was abandoned because company showed up unexpectedly or the boss called the prospect into her office. It might not be a decision not to buy. It might be real life got in the way. So imagine the relevancy of an email sent to a prospect who was that close to purchasing? The email could remind them of the selected items or even offer a discount if purchase is made within a certain time.
2. Return on Investment: The same logic we apply to factoring the real cost of email deliverability issues applies when computing the real cost of losing a customer because they’ve abandoned your website. Simply look at your abandonment rate and multiply that by your average sales amount to get an idea of the money you’ve left on the table. Chances are, you’ll see a potential ROI that makes the time and cost of implementing an abandonment campaign make both dollars and sense.

In addition to the immediate benefits of higher ROI, consider the longer term benefits of brand and customer relations, plus having a bona fide reason to send that prospect an email. And not just any email, but a very targeted and relevant email, one very likely to get opened, which in turn will help your email deliverability by showing the ISP a high level of engagement.

Getting started
Due to the importance of adding a re-engagement element to your email marketing program, you want to be sure you’re using the best email service provider you can, one that maximizes deliverability and helps automate or simplify abandonment and other triggered emails. Make sure your current vendor (or any ESP you are considering) has a proven record of actual, real life successes too. Ask about measuring and tracking results, and how the vendor will be held accountable for helping you to implement such a campaign. You can learn more about abandonment emails and get advice on choosing a vendor here.

There’s more to reaching out to abandoners than a simple, “Hey, what happened?” email. Adding an abandonment and reengagement email program into your mix makes sense, not only because abandonment emails are perfectly relevant, but because they make an essential tool for ROI, thanks to their ability to reclaim what would have been a lost sale.

Marco Marini, CEO
ClickMail Marketing

If your business is seasonal, back-to-school time and the pre-holiday months of late summer and early autumn are likely major tipping points for driving revenue and ensuring you end the calendar year on a high note. More than ever, this is the time that marketers, especially those with a retail and/or e-commerce business, need to harness all the tools they have at their disposal and implement smart email program decisions.

After all, the bottom line isn’t graded on a curve and there’s no such thing as summer school when it comes to missed opportunities for recognizing ROI from the email channel. When Sam Cooke sang, “Don’t know much about history. Don’t know much biology…” his “Wonderful World” put academics second and love first. Unfortunately, email marketers can’t afford to ignore their IQs when it comes to email intelligence.

While being an A+ student in all aspects of email marketing might be unrealistic, there are a few subjects that marketers definitely shouldn’t ignore:

1. Security: Phishing and spoofing activity has never been more rampant and marketers need to be proactive in protecting their brands. Contrary to popular belief, fraudsters aren’t just going after financial institutions like banks, payment services providers and credit card companies; they’re targeting any legitimate brand that subscribers may be familiar with. This includes social networking sites, shipping companies, wireless phone and internet providers and many more. A phishing or spoofing attack has the power to undo all of the good ground work that has been laid for optimizing inbox placement rates and performance metrics. If a subscriber’s personal details or finances are compromised as the result of clicking on a link in an email that pretends to come from your brand, you’ve not only lost an email subscriber and potential (or existing) customer, but your brand reputation has plummeted. In this age of social sharing, that negative outcome likely includes anyone in that subscriber’s network of friends and family as well. What can you do? Protect your brand by using an anti-phishing and anti-spoofing tool that monitors fraudulent activity and blocks any attempts to hijack your domain. Learn more about Return Path’s solution here.


2. Inactivity: Having a large portion of non-responsive addresses on your file is the equivalent of blaming the dog for eating your homework. Not only does this segment reflect poorly on your list hygiene practices, but the inactive portion of your file isn’t going to diminish by ignoring it or pretending it isn’t there.  Most major ISPs such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL are factoring engagement metrics into their filtering decisions. This includes metrics like whether or not the message was opened, replied to, clicked on or added to a subscriber’s address book. The more messages being sent to inactive addresses, the greater the likelihood that sender reputation and inbox placement will be impacted, negatively affecting response rates and overall program performance. In addition, depending on how long these addresses have lingered on the file, there could be a large percentage of spam traps. When it comes to email intelligence around inactivity, marketers should have a solid and ongoing plan in place for communicating to pre-defined inactive segments with a specific strategy to reengage and ultimately remove any persistent non-responders.


3. Skimmability: Optimizing your creative templates has never been more important as subscribers increasingly use their mobile devices to check email. Return Path’s latest research study “Mobile, Webmail, Desktops: Where Are We Viewing Email Now?” shows that email opens on mobile devices grew 82.4% year-over-year and Apple devices account for 85% of all mobile email opens. Designing email for mobile viewing has its own unique set of best practices to experiment with based on the devices your subscribers are using to view email. Whether it’s testing single-column or multi-column layouts, trying a variety of “finger-friendly” sized buttons that allow for easy clicking, using a text size that can be easily read on a variety of screens or designing mobile-friendly landing pages and websites that support on-the-go conversions, email messages read on mobile devices need to work even harder to be skimmable. The decision to click-through on an email viewed on a mobile device is made in a split-second, so the clearer and concise your message is, the better.

When it comes to realizing ROI from the email channel, what you don’t know can definitely hurt you. The good news is that with a little studying (along with testing, adjusting and optimizing), you can go a long way toward ensuring your program makes the grade for the back-to-school season and beyond.

Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting
Return Path

Living in a society where we constantly need more than 24 hours in a day, is there a perfect time to press the send button on your email marketing campaign?  The answer is yes and no.  How can that be?  Well, there is not a single perfect time for every marketer to send every email.  That’s the “no” part.  But there probably is a nearly perfect time for your company to send your messages.  And that time may even vary by message, with different messages to different audiences having its own “perfect” time.  That is the “yes” part.

Instead, look at the bigger picture.  Whether you’d like to admit it or not, we all have some sort of daily routine.  The answer as to why timing is not so sensitive lies in how people engage and process their email inbox.  Personally, I’m checking my email on my iPhone the moment my alarm goes off in the morning.  I always notice the influx to marketing emails between 6am-10am.   But does being the first to the inbox all that important?  If you find yourself asking this question, please refer back to the beginning of this paragraph.  As the industry shifts to weighing heavily on engagement rates, marketers should be focusing on other aspects besides what time to send a campaign.

Consider the following factors:

1. Content relevance:  Subscribers are more likely to open emails that contain content relevant to their preferences.  When a customer sees a preview of an email in their inbox, they are more likely to participate if they can relate directly to the content.  The ultimate goal is to build a relationship with your subscribers by offering valuable content that encourages engagement.
2. Subject line and FROM name: Is your brand easily recognized by subscribers?  Are you telling your valued customers who you are and what you’re offering immediately when they see the subject line?   People are naturally attracted to timely and relevant offers, thus your subject line should be tailored accordingly.
3. Brand Loyalty: Marketers love returning customers.  Take special care of these subscribers, as they will become your most loyal fans.  Allow subscribers to choose which lists they would like to join.  Personalized targeting will make a more enjoyable experience for the customer.
4. Previous experience with your messages: Each subscriber is unique, so pay attention to how they’re interacting with your messages.  Can subscribers easily access your website from the email?  Is the message easy to navigate? Create messages which meet your customer’s needs.

An infographic released by Pure360, an email marketing software company, breaks down the best and worst times to send emails.  Generally, email open and click rates varies about 10% throughout the day.  If you’re a sender offering a 12 p.m. flash sale, then you want your message in the inbox a few hours before.  If you found through testing that having campaigns deployed by 6 a.m. drives the highest response rates, keep sending at that time. Periodically test to see if there are any trend changes.  Return Path offers a tool called Campaign Insight that can also help determine optimal times to send emails.  Campaign Insight provides additional data regarding the active users of your email program.  You can easily identify when a campaign was opened and look for trends.

It all comes down to what makes sense for your brand. Is there a best time to send an email campaign? Yes and no.  If you’re waiting around for the perfect time to press send, you’ll probably never launch the campaign.  Prioritize your mail deployment based on what your subscribers are telling you.  Listen!  If your audience tends to purchase after lunch, make sure they have your campaign in their mailbox before then.  Target the loyal customers with relevant and appealing content and any time is the perfect time to hit send.

How are you determining your perfect time to send?

Shannon Rosic
Account Coordinator
Return Path

In email marketing - as with any other profession - it's easy to get in a rut. We have a system. It works pretty well. We stick with it. However, times are changing, your customers are changing, and that means that your email strategy needs to follow suit.

In this video from CRMSoftware.TV, Bryan Brown, the Director of Product Strategy at Silverpop, explains three tactics for taking an outdated email strategy and turning it into an outstanding one. Bryan's advice is not only insightful, but it's also practical, leaving you with a plan that you can begin implementing immediately.

Click here to watch the video and be sure to leave your comments below.

With billions of emails being sent to subscribers on a daily basis, it’s difficult for email marketers to make sure their emails stand out in the crowded inbox.  Over the years, email marketers have tried various tactics, like adding the recipient’s name to the subject line or sending fake apology emails, to make subscribers notice and open their emails.  Obviously, some of these were more effective than others (please don’t send a fake apology email, so tacky!).

So what’s the latest trend in making your emails pop?  Using symbols in subject lines!

Have you noticed any of these in your inbox yet?  Several well-known marketers like LivingSocial, Lululemon, Lowes, The Body Shop, and Shoe Dazzle, have been testing out this tactic, and it has certainly made me take notice! 

Here are some examples of marketers using Unicode symbols in their subject lines:

There are many more symbols you can use too, get a full list of Unicode symbols here.  There are smiley faces, rain clouds, shamrocks, coffee mugs, musical notes, astrological symbols … the list goes on.  Because there are so many choices, it’s important to determine which would work best for your mailings.  There are some obvious choices: hearts for Valentine’s Day, shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day, suns for summer mailings.  But try to think outside the box too!  Add an umbrella when sending on a rainy day, a coffee (hot cocoa) mug when sending in the winter, or a telephone when your call to action is to call into your company.

While there are seemingly endless possibilities when using these symbols, it’s also important to not go overboard!  If symbols in subject lines are used too much, they will become white noise and won’t make the impact that you’re hoping for.  So use them sparingly and make sure each time you use them, it will wow your subscribers and grab their attention.

It’s also important to note that these Unicode symbols will not work in every email client.  In addition, some of the symbols won’t render well on the small screen and will end up looking smushed and unrecognizable.  Use a pre-deployment rendering tool, like Return Path’s Campaign Preview, to test your subject line and see how it will render in various different email clients, including mobile devices.

I have heard some marketers question whether adding symbols to subject lines will affect deliverability.  In the research I’ve done so far, I have not seen that to be the case, and all of the examples showcased above were delivered to the inbox versus the junk folder.  However, with that being said, I do recommend that you send your campaign into a deliverability tool, like Return Path’s Mailbox Monitor, so that you can monitor your inbox versus junk placement and determine if deliverability is impacted by these Unicode symbols.

Finally, a good rule of thumb when trying anything new is to run an A/B test first.  Start by sending to a small test segment of your list.  Fifty percent of that test segment should receive the subject line with the symbol and the other 50% should receive the same subject line without the symbol (and remember to keep all other variables – From line, creative, call-to-action, offer – the same for the most effective test).  Allow that test to run, and then compare open/read/click rates.  This will allow you to see if including a symbol in the subject line works for your company and subscribers.  The winning subject line, with or without the symbol, should then be sent to the remainder of your list.

So what are you waiting for?  Give this latest trend a try with your own mailings!  And don’t wait too long … jump on the bandwagon now when seeing a symbol is still a fun, intriguing surprise for subscribers.

Have you seen any symbols in subject lines of emails you’ve received recently?  What did you think, were they effective in gaining your attention?  As a marketer, have you sent any emails with symbols in the subject lines, and how was the email performance compared to non-symbol subject lines?  I’d love to hear your experiences, please comment below!

Joanna Roberts
Account Manager
Return Path

While we were updating our ESP selection guide last year, “integration” was the recurring theme. Email is no longer a standalone marketing channel. Integrating email with social media marketing, web analytics and more has become a necessary capability for many email marketers.

And integrating email with content marketing is part of that holistic approach.

Content and email are ideally suited for a symbiotic marketing relationship. Content marketing can both inform and draw from email marketing.

Create Once, Use Repeatedly
As you’re planning your content pieces, whether that content consists of words, video, photos, podcasts, webinars, infographics, or a slideshow, consider also how you can promote that content to your in-house email list. Maybe it’s a B2B webinar, a tradeshow video or a cookbook offer. Whatever the content and your method of lead generation, consider making that same content available to appropriate people on your email list too.

As long as your content marketing program is healthy and strong, you’ll always have relevant reasons to email your audience or at least some segment thereof.

We call that creating once, using repeatedly. And that’s how your content marketing can give your email marketing a boost.

You can also use your email marketing to improve your content offerings by testing to see which type of content gets the best response rate. Maybe you thought your audience would prefer video but email marketing A/B testing shows a preference for whitepapers. Or perhaps your case study offer falls flat but your archived webinar does wonders when they go head to head while testing your offer. No matter the winner, you can use that information to refine your content marketing program, offering more of the types of content your audience seems to want. 

Use Email, Get Content
Content marketing can inform your email marketing program…and it can draw from it too, when you use your email platform for generating more content.

Your email newsletter should be considered part of your content marketing strategy and probably already is. Less obvious, however, is the messaging created specifically for your email marketing campaigns, and even the one-off emails sent by your sales or service teams. Review the messages created as part of your email marketing program to find nuggets or even gems you can repurpose elsewhere as part of your content marketing strategy. Also keep tabs on the information your employees send out in response to email inquiries. These can be very targeted and readable pieces of content you can repurpose in your blog, newsletter, case studies or elsewhere.

Also consider using email to conduct surveys and solicit customer feedback. These can be sought after via email and the content provided by your customers can then be repurposed and used in online marketing, your blog or in your social media. Ask subscribers to submit photos, videos or even drawings, and you’ll open up a whole new avenue for content generation that can’t help but be relevant, since it’s your customers who created it.

Email is the multi-purpose marketing channel that can be integrated with pretty much every other marketing channel, whether that’s a technical integration or a tactical one. Make sure your content and email marketing strategies are working together to maximize your results from both.

Marco Marini, CEO
ClickMail Marketing

By Joanna Roberts
Account Manager
Return Path

As an account manager at Return Path, I get to talk to clients about what’s hot in the email world.  I have lots of conversations with clients about the newest trends, and what’s not so popular anymore.  So what’s the next new thing in email marketing?  Responsive email design! 

Have you ever noticed that your carefully crafted email doesn’t always look great on the small screens used for tablets and mobile devices?  Historically, email marketers have designed for the typical 1024 x 768 screen and, because of the typical email preview pane size, have been advised to keep email width around 650 pixels.  However, with the growth of smart phones and tablets, this one-size-fits-all approach isn’t necessarily best practice anymore. 

Here’s where responsive email design comes in.  Using CSS3 coding technique called “media queries,” you can design your email to automatically re-format and re-size itself to optimize for whatever screen size your recipient is using to read your email.  It can also be used to hide non-essential elements of the email from the mobile reader, thus making sure the main call-to-action of the email is easily found, and can change various other elements of the email, including text size and color, background images and background color. 

So how can you think about this in terms of your own emails?  The most basic use of responsive email design is your email layout.  Let’s say your typical email format is a 3-column layout.  Using responsive email design, you can now design two other versions: a two-column layout for tablets and a one-column layout for mobile devices.  This will ensure that your reader is always seeing the most important parts of your email, no matter what size screen they are using. 

Of course, as with any new email trend, it’s important to understand the impact and test the effectiveness of responsive email design.  First, use a tool like Return Path’s Campaign Insight to ensure you have a large enough mobile audience to justify the additional design work.  If you do decide to move forward with responsive email design, use a rendering tool like our Campaign Preview to ensure your responsive email formats correctly in desktop, webmail and mobile views.  One thing to note is that responsive email design works only in the native mail apps in the iPhone and Android.  Recipients reading emails on their mobile devices using either the mobile browser or proprietary email apps (for example, the Gmail app) will see the desktop version of the email.  And finally, don’t forget to track open and click-through rates so you can quantify the impact this new technique has on your email metrics. 

Have you already tried responsive email design?  We’d love to hear more about it!  Please leave a comment below with your feedback, learnings and successes. 

This post originally appeared on Return Path’s In the Know Blog.

Joanna Roberts is an account manager at Return Path. Joanna has over six years of experience in online marketing, and regularly advises companies on email marketing strategy, deliverability, and compliance standards. She enjoys blogging and leading webinars, specializing in the topics of email marketing best practices and strategy, and is often encouraging marketers to push the envelope on their email efforts with new ideas and initiatives.

Unsubscribes. The dreaded rejection by someone who was once a willing recipient of your email marketing. Ouch.

Unsubscribes are often viewed as a necessary evil in the life of every email marketer, with emphasis on the word “necessary.” We not only offer unsubscribe links because people want them. We do so because the law requires them!

Rather than treat the unsubscribe like a freeloading, undesirable distant cousin we’d rather ignore, however, email marketers are better off making the most of the situation to be subscriber-centric and keep people happy by following best practices.

If you search for examples of unsubscribe worst practices, you’ll find plenty. I wish I could tell you all the worst examples come from small mom-and-pop operations that don’t know any better, but I can’t. Plenty of unsubscribe sins are committed by big, well-known brands that really should know better.

Two Big Reasons to Be Unsubscribe-able
The unsubscribe is required by law, yes, but beyond that, we suggest knowing and implementing unsubscribe best practices for two very important reasons:

1. When people can’t easily unsubscribe, they are more likely to simply report your email as spam which negatively impacts your email deliverability rate. And without the highest possible email delivery, you can’t have the highest possible ROI.
2. When people opt out, you want to leave them with good feelings about your brand. They might be unsubscribing now, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose them as a customer forever…unless you annoy them.

With those two reasons in mind, consider the following unsubscribe best practices and how well you are—or aren’t—adhering to them.

Make It Overtly Obvious
Make the unsubscribe obvious. This best practice probably seems obvious, yet you’d be surprised how many companies bury the unsubscribe link in an email. Look in your own inbox. Open a few random emails from companies and see.

How does it get hidden? It can be included in a list of links making it hard to spot among the clutter. It can be overshadowed by graphics or in teeny tiny font that’s hard too find. The unsubscribe link should appear at the bottom, where people expect to find it, without any clutter hiding it and big enough to be found a.s.a.p. when someone wants it.

Even when found in plain sight, sometimes it’s in obscure language, so it doesn’t look like an unsubscribe and is overlooked as a result. Words like “manage,” “delete” and “edit” aren’t clear enough. State it plainly, using words like “unsubscribe from these emails” or better yet, “stop getting these emails.” Don’t make people guess. They likely won’t. They’ll opt for the spam button instead.

Make It Easy as Can Be
Once it’s easy to find, make it easy to do. Are you making people log in to unsubscribe, really? It happens! Don’t ask for captchas, either. When they click the unsubscribe link, send them directly to that page, not to a page with a lot of other options. Or make them confirm their email address for you.

Your best practice is a one-click unsubscribe. That is all. They click a link, you take them to a page, they click on a button…done!

Give Them Another Chance
Now, this doesn’t mean you’ve lost them forever. If you have a preference center, direct them there to change the options. It could be they still want to hear from you, just not as often or with different content. This is after letting them unsubscribing easily, however.

If you don’t, you can let them know you are sorry to see them go and give them a chance to change their mind with the click of another button to resubscribe. You can follow up with an email confirming the unsubscribe and thanking them for being a subscriber. In that email, give them a resubscribe link. Whichever route you choose, remember that this is your last chance to leave them with good feelings about your company and word your message accordingly, in a friendly, helpful way. Avoid being apologetic or groveling. I’ve seen this in an unsubscribe confirmation. It’s not pretty.

Leave Them With a Loving Feeling
An unsubscribe doesn’t have to hurt. It can be a pleasant, even humorous, experience. My favorite unsubscribe experience had me laughing out loud: After clicking on the unsubscribe link, I was taken to a webpage and asked, “Are you sure?” To answer yes to that question didn’t mean clicking on a “yes” button. Rather the words on the button were “I’m out of here.” That was funny enough, but then a popup box appeared asking, “For the love of god, are you sure??” I laughed out loud at that. I still unsubscribed, but I enjoyed the experience. They made me go through two clicks for the unsubscribe, but I didn’t mind because it was playful and unusual.

You don’t have to be a comedian to be good at unsubscribes. I share this story because it illustrates how to leave them with warm fuzzies for your brand. Just because they don’t want your emails doesn’t mean they’re boycotting your brand altogether. And wouldn’t you rather leave them smiling?

Reduce the Urge to Unsubscribe
Unsubscribe best practices are smart marketing, but even smarter marketing is having fewer unsubscribes. You can decrease the number of unsubscribes you get by proactively managing and meeting expectations:

• Manage expectations by being clear from the very beginning what types of emails you will send and how often.
• Send a welcome email to reiterate these expectations.
• Deliver relevant, targeted and timely email messages that meet expectations.
• If it’s within your capabilities, offer a preference center on your website to give recipients more control over the content and timing of your emails.

Unsubscribes might not be fun for you as the email marketer, but you can lessen the pain for both you and the subscriber by following best practices and making the most of every situation.

Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Can Email Work as a Customer Acquisition Channel?
A lot of savvy email marketers ask the question of whether email can work as an acquisition channel. Because the power of email marketing is based on permission (which can’t be transferred), the assumption is that email can’t be used to acquire new customers.

In reality, email can be a tremendously powerful customer acquisition channel when it’s handled right. I am, of course, biased, since ividence is an ad exchange for acquisition email. Still the numbers bear me out.

Acquisition Email by The Numbers
The DMA found that the average return on investment for every $1 spent on email was $40.56 in 2011. That number far outstrips other marketing channels. Though that number is an average that includes retention email, it gives a good idea of the potential that email has as an acquisition channel.

Additionally, click through rates on email beat out those for display. The average CTR for online display ads is 0.09%.

Email by contrast has an average CTR of 5.2% according to Epsilon’s most recent data. Acquisition email CTRs are lower on average (because there’s not an established relationship with the recipient). Still, ividence’s average CTR for acquisition email is 1.5%, or more than 16 times the CTR on display.

Facebook ads have an even lower CTR than display—0.051%—or 30 times lower than the acquisition email CTRs that we see.

And last, but not least, eMarketer’s 2011 figures show online ad spending up by 23% YOY, which an anticipated growth rate of 23.3% for 2012. That means more advertising dollars available for trying new, efficient channels.

So if email can work as a customer acquisition channel if done well, how do you do it well?

Getting Acquisition Email Right
Because the inbox is a very personal space, email marketers must work very hard to respect consumers in that space. That’s never truer than when you’re introducing a brand to a consumer via email. For acquisition email to work for all parties (the brand, the consumer, and the list owner), there are three concepts that must be followed:

1. Respect subscribers
Email marketing derives much of its power from permission and trust. When a consumer subscribes to an email list, there’s an implied expectation that the list owner respect that trust. For acquisition email to be effective, it needs:

 • Permission – Just as retention campaigns should only be sent to opt-in subscribers, acquisition email campaigns should only be sent to subscribers who have given the list owner permission to send third-party offers. There also needs to be an option for the recipient to unsubscribe from advertiser’s offers or to unsubscribe from the list all together.

• Clarity – Only the list owner has permission to send emails to their list, so their brand name (or the name of the list) should be in the mailfrom and mailfrom friendly fields. This makes it easy for the subscriber to understand why they’re receiving the email, reducing spam complaints and increasing open rates.

2. Ban “batch and blast” from your vocabulary
To be welcome, emails need to be relevant to the recipient. Send too many emails that a subscriber doesn’t relate to, and they’ll become an unsubscriber (or worse, will report your email as spam).

Any acquisition emails needed to be carefully targeted to the recipients most likely to be interested. Behavioral targeting is among the most effective segmentation techniques, driving higher open, click through, and conversion rates.

However, if the publisher you are working with can’t offer behavioral targeting, you should at least narrow by demographics or geographic data. Alternatively, you could send different offers to different targets: a clothing retailer could segment by gender or an insurance company could include different package options to people at different income levels.

3. Continually optimize
Just as importantly, don’t send to the entire (targeted) list at once. If you send in smaller waves, you can use the information gathered at each stage to optimize your target. If you’re testing two different creatives or subject lines, you can also pause the losing treatment once you have enough data to select a winner and get a better response from the full campaign.
 

An example of how this played out for a real brand is a bank client that we worked with at ividence. Our client was looking to drive acquisition of new real estate loan prospects.

In addition to the typical challenges that all brands face with deliverability and following legal requirements, financial institutions are very sensitive to concerns about phishing and fraud as well as the unique regulation around the banking industry. In a study by David Daniels of The Relevancy Group, 41% of banks and credit unions surveyed said they were somewhat to very challenged in overcoming fears of phishing and fraud.

Using the above approach of respecting subscribers, targeting smaller email sends, and continually optimizing the campaign, we were able help them drive new leads. The ividence team and platform monitored and adjusted the targeting of the campaign after its launch, which resulted in an over 1800% increase in the number of leads generated by the campaign between its first and last month. There was a simultaneous 233% increase in effectiveness (ratio of leads generated to emails sent).

Unsubscribe rates for the campaign were in line with those of retention campaigns in finance, and abuse complaints were below the average seen in retention campaigns (below 0.01%).

Have you used acquisition email to grow your business or to generate revenue from your email list? What tips would you add to this list?

Eric Didier, ividence

Test These Email Campaign Elements to Optimize Performance
Author: Stephanie Miller, co chair, DMA/eec and VP, Aprimo

Email marketers always are on the hunt for ways to optimize performance.

In fact, a study from Marketing Sherpa found that most marketers routinely test at least four different email campaign elements:

 Which of these should you pay attention to? What are the most important email elements to test?
Usually, the answer is in finding the right combination and optimizing over time.  Let’s take a look at the top five.

Subject line
The best guide in subject line writing is that, “Clarity trumps clever. “ Say what you mean, say it succinctly and say it with gusto.   Avoid lots of punctuation or aggressively spammy techniques like repeating the word “Free” six times or using symbols to replace vowels like  “Vi@gra.”    Other than that, feel free to be a marketer and tell me about the offer and the sale prices.  You may find that  shorter subject lines  outperform longer ones – depending on the type of message.   You must test this, as we see results favoring both styles win.  Optimal performance depends on a variety of subject line factors.  Consider: 

• Don’t wait until the last minute to write subject lines. Craft them as a key part of the creative process.
• Focus on clarity, and front load subject lines with the most important information as many email clients and mobile devices will truncate longer lines

• Use longer subject lines  whenever  there is a compelling reason to do so, or if you have multiple offers in the same message
• Test!

Message Format
Be sure to test your message template every quarter to be sure it continues to serve you well.   Test for spam filters, but also for response.  Is your navigation in the way of offer prominence?   Would a sidebar serve you best, or does it distract from the core message?  Does your footer have the correct legal mumbo jumbo and privacy/compliance links?  The DMA/Email Experience Council released a number of Design Checklists for this purpose. Download them (free for members) in the Resource Room.

Calls-to-Action
Relevant content is essential. Subscribers are too busy –and too overwhelmed with digital content –to read messages that aren’t specifically related to their needs/wants. Make sure your message is meaningful and that it stays true to your brand’s voice.  I just published Seven Tips for Higher Click Through Rates on the Aprimo blog  (LINK:   http://blog.aprimo.com/seven-ways-to-improve-email-click-through-rate).   Consumers are savvy and impatient, so  entice them with information that’s relevant and specific.  Consider that there are many elements to a message:

1. Button.   Perhaps rather than “Click Here,” your readers would like to be invited to “Learn More” or “Get Discount,” instead. Be realistic about what your readers are prepared to do (not everyone will be ready to “Buy Now!” after reading a few lines of email copy) and be clear with your directions.
2. Message type.  Design calls-to-action customized to each email type and purpose. As always, , pay careful attention to their frequency, font, color and location on the page.
3. Offer.  Testing offers is not specifically on the Marketing Sherpa list, but I can’t imagine it isn’t a key aspect for optimization.  Automation technology and the use of personas can guide you in putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. 

Layout and images
Email layout and images are more important than ever. Odds are, many (if not most) of your subscribers use an email preview pane feature that displays horizontally. It’s also likely that they block images by default and access email on mobile devices. Plan accordingly. Opt for more horizontal v. vertical elements. Don’t count on images to convey your message. Create content that can be read in different formats and on smaller sized screens.

Day of week sent
As my fellow columnist Simms Jenkins concludes at ClickZ, there is no magic bullet for timing emails. Today’s subscriber lists are typically diverse, and they’re likely to include international customers, people who can/can’t access email during the work day, those who read email on mobile devices, various age groups, etc. Obviously, trying to pinpoint an optimal send times across this wide-range of readers can be problematic. You have to use some judgment , of course–I wouldn’t choose Monday morning to send out a coupon for a Saturday night dinner special, e.g.  –but don’t expect a one-size-fits-all solution for every email campaign.

In all marketing, Your mileage may vary.  Testing will give you the insights needed to determine optimal send times for your particular message types and audience profiles. Marketing automation plays an increasingly important role, as well, as it allows you to track performance, integrate email communication with other marketing tactics, manage campaigns and change responses based on reactions from the marketplace.

Five Ways to Improve Email Deliverability with Gmail

Email remains one of the most focused, effective ways to get your marketing message exactly where you want it to be: in the hands—well, inboxes—of your current and prospective customers.

Unfortunately, there’s also a dark side to this “clutch” marketing tool. In addition to legitimate email marketers, spammers send billions of messages to consumers every day, leading harried recipients with little to do in response but send everyone to “Report Spam” oblivion. 

So how do you avoid “guilt by association?” How do you ensure that your valuable messages make it past junk filters and reporting buttons?

If your recipients are using Gmail—and it’s likely many of them are, since it’s the email client of choice for more than 350 million users worldwide—here are some useful tips to improve Gmail deliverability. Although these strategies are smart for Gmail, they are good to keep in mind for other ISPs as well.

1. Ask your users to mark your messages as “not spam.” If your email happens to trip some junk filters and get put in your recipient’s spam folder, ask your readers to click on the “not spam” button to let Google know you’re an approved sender—not just for that user, but for other users, too. Google puts a premium on user input, and trusts their devoted Gmailers to tell them what they want to receive . . .and what they don’t!

Likewise, if you do get to their inbox but have your display images filtered, encourage readers to click on the “Always display images from this address” button. This lets Google know that you’re a valid sender, and enables your recipients to see your carefully constructed emails in all their HTML glory.

2. Ask your readers to add your sending “from” address to their Gmail contact list. This is a simple way to ensure all your emails get delivered, as it puts a big seal of approval on everything you send. If at some point you change your sending address, be sure to let your recipients know—they’ll have to add that address, too!

3. Keep a close eye on recipient behavior. Recipients who open your emails and click through your links are engaged users. Their behavior indicates they want to receive messages from you. Recipients who never open your messages (and miss your links entirely, as a result) could become an issue for you if they decide to report you as spam --even though they signed up to hear from you in the first place. 

ISPs, and we believe especially Gmail, use “engagement metrics” as a factor to determine if your recipients are interacting with your email (clicking and opening), just deleting it, unsubscribing, or reporting you as spam. If a subscriber hasn’t clicked or opened your email in the last 45-60 days, or 2+ publications, you should consider a reengagement strategy and ultimately remove unengaged users from your list. Monitoring your list and segmenting out unengaged subscribers will help your inbox placement across the board.

4. Make it easy—and as quick as possible—to unsubscribe from your emails: The easier you make it to leave your messages behind, the less trouble you’ll see from frustrated recipients. At first, it might seem like a good idea to bury your unsubscribe link somewhere easy to miss. But, if someone who doesn’t want email from you can get rid of you that way, they’ll simply report you as spam, which will subsequently affect your reputation and inbox placement for users who want to get your email.

This also goes for senders who don’t have an automated unsubscribe function, or who take too long to scrub unsubscribes from their lists. Your recipients aren’t going to be too happy when you pop up in their inbox after they took steps to banish you.

5. Monitor Domain Level Engagement Reports and Third Party Data: Even though Gmail doesn’t offer a feedback loop for complaints, you can assume that Gmail subscribers would behave about the same as the active portion of your other webmail customers (*not ALL those subscribers, but the active ones).  You should create a domain level email metrics report and monitor clicks, opens, bounces (by type), unsubscribes, opt-outs and spam complaints for your top sending domains. You can use this data to make judgments about engagement at Gmail, too and to determine if a specific campaign is causing higher complaints.

In addition, you should seed your lists using a product like Return Path to monitor inbox vs. bulk placement.

By putting these simple tips to work in your email marketing campaigns, you’ll increase your conversion possibilities in a big way by getting into the inbox and stay where you want to be, on the good side of one of the biggest email providers operating today.

 Colleen Petitt, Aprimo

In the B2C space if a message hard bounces it could be because of a bad address or maybe some ISP blocking.  In the B2B space if a message hard bounces it could be a bad address or a former employee or maybe some corporate firewall or filter blocking.

When I worked for FreeCreditReport.com we were in the same building as Pfizer.  We’d email each other all day about credit, and I’m sure they had some emails back-and-forth about Viagra.  I know that our corporate filters blocked anything mentioning Viagra and would guess they felt the same about credit.  The point is, corporate email is filtered based on the needs of the business and edicts from on high.  Unlike an ISP, there isn’t anything that we could have said to Pfizer, or them to us, to allow mail into each other’s Inboxes.

One B2B client I had a while back sold specialized gazillion-dollar electronic test equipment.  

Because of that there were a couple of things that we had to look at, the first of which were channel success metrics.

This organization measured email program success by the amount of seminar attendees and White Paper downloads, knowing that each played an important and measurable role in the sales cycle.

After an individual would register to download a White Paper they would be taken to a download page and sent an email to thank them and reiterate the download link.  I’m simplifying here for time….  For each White Paper download was a series of follow-up emails and surveys regarding the paper to help segment and qualify within the sales cycle.

Another success metric was seminar registrants from emailed event invitations.  This program was even expanded out to where registrants were entered into the data stream as signing or not signing into attendance at the event, and as the event was ending, those in attendance were receiving a Thank You for Attending email recapping the event; and those not in attendance were receiving a “Sorry You Couldn’t Make It” message and a recap of the event tailored to those non-attendees.

So what does this have to do with recapturing B2B bounced emails?  I’m getting there….

Because this B2B sold a very high-end niche product each and every prospect and customer attached to an email address was critical to selling and supporting the company’s products, we couldn’t let one person fall through the cracks. 

To recapture those individuals whose email address had bounced back, we created an internal program that would join the bounce logs with the master data table to create a file that contained the intended recipient’s name, company, phone number (when available), and the descriptive reason that the message bounced back, and then mail those records daily (or weekly) to a designated representative who would then route that information to the appropriate out-bound telesales group.

Of course, those records that were returned as hard bounced addresses would be removed from the email channel and pursued by different means.

So what did it take to do this?

First of all the client had an email tool that would allow us to insert the record data into an email message.  That made things a little easier.

The email tool also provided access to system files like the Bounce Logs, and this particular vendor also allowed for SQL through the UI.  Our SQL statement that pulled bounced records daily read something like:

SELECT a.EMAIL_, b.FIRST_NAME, b.LAST_NAME, b.COMPANY, b.PHONE, a.DESCRIPTION_ , a.TIMESTAMP_ FROM $A$ a INNER JOIN $B$ b ON b.EMAIL = a.EMAIL_ WHERE TRUNC(a.TIMESTAMP_) = (TRUNC(CURRENT_DATE) – INTERVAL ’1′ DAY)

Where $A$ is the Bounce Log and $B$ is the Master Data table.

While not all ESPs allow for SQL via the GUI, most of the better tools will provide you some sort of access to the Bounce Logs via a “wizard” that will allow you to join or at least reference other data tables.

Even if your email tool doesn’t provide the ability to create this type of automated internal email program, that doesn’t mean that you can’t pull the hard bounced records from your email tool – provided that you’re vendor allows you access to those records – and do the record matching outside of the tool, and then pass those records along to your out-bound sales staff.

In the B2C world it’s a little easier to let go of some bounced records here and there.  In the B2B world that can get expensive.  What could it be worth to your B2B organization to recapture even 10% of the leads whose email addresses were bounced back?

 John A. Caldwell, Red Pill Email

EU proposes a reform of the data protection rules
March 28, 2012 by Dennis Dayman

 As some of you know there were privacy reforms that were released a few weeks ago by the European Union (EU).  The European Commission is proposing a comprehensive reform of the EU’s 1995 data protection rules to strengthen online privacy rights and boost Europe’s digital economy. Last week I spent the day at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington D.C attending the EU Conference on Privacy and Protection of Personal Data. This was the second event in the past two years allowing global stakeholders like legislators and business to sit down and talk face to face about technological progress and globalisation have profoundly changed the way data is collected, accessed and used.

What makes this of interest for US based stakeholders is that the 27 EU Member States have implemented the 1995 rules differently, resulting in divergences in enforcement. The proposal reforms will do away with the current fragmentation and costly administrative burdens, leading to savings for businesses of around €2.3 billion a year. The initiative will help reinforce consumer confidence in online services, providing a much needed boost to growth, jobs and innovation in Europe.

Attitudes towards data protection

◦Just over a quarter of social network users (26%) and even fewer online shoppers (18%) feel in complete control of their personal data.
◦74% of Europeans see disclosing personal information as an increasing part of modern life.
◦43% of Internet users say they have been asked for more personal inf​ormation than necessary.
◦Only one-third of Europeans are aware of the existence of a national public authority responsible for data protection
◦90% of Europeans want the same data protection rights across the EU.
The Commission’s proposals update and modernise the principles enshrined in the 1995 Data Protection Directive to guarantee the right of personal data protection in the future. They focus on: reinforcing individuals’ rights; strengthening the EU internal market; ensuring a high level of data protection in all areas, including police and criminal justice cooperation; ensuring proper enforcement of the rules; and setting global data-protection standards.

With all this going on, we thought we might answer some additional questions for you so you can better understand how we are seeing this and reacting to it.

What are the key changes in these reforms?

◦A ‘right to be forgotten’ will help people better manage data-protection risks online. When they no longer want their data to be processed and there are no legitimate grounds for retaining it, the data will be deleted.
◦Whenever consent is required for data processing, it will have to be given explicitly, rather than be assumed.
◦Easier access to one’s own data and the right of data portability, i.e. easier transfer of personal data from one service provider to another.
◦Companies and organisations will have to notify serious data breaches without undue delay, where feasible within 24 hours.
◦A single set of rules on data protection, valid across the EU.
◦Companies will only have to deal with a single national data protection authority – in the EU country where they have their main establishment.
◦Individuals will have the right to refer all cases to their home national data protection authority, even when their personal data is processed outside their home country.
◦EU rules will apply to companies not established in the EU, if they offer goods or services in the EU or monitor the online behaviour of citizens.
◦Increased responsibility and accountability for those processing personal data.
◦Unnecessary administrative burdens such as notification requirements for companies processing personal data will be removed.
◦National data protection authorities will be strengthened so they can better enforce the EU rules at home.
Q: How will the data protection reform affect social networks?

A: Social networks provide a useful tool for staying in touch with friends, family and colleagues, but they also present a risk that your personal information, photos and comments might be viewed more widely than you realise. In some cases, this can have financial, reputational and psychological consequences. The Commission is proposing a strengthened right to be forgotten so that if you no longer want your personal data to be processed, and there is no legitimate reason for an organisation to keep it, it must be removed from their system. Data controllers must prove that they need to keep the data rather than you having to prove that collecting your data is not necessary. Providers must take account of the principle of ‘privacy by default’, which means that the default settings should be those that provide the most privacy. Companies will be obliged to inform you as clearly, understandably and transparently as possible about how your personal data will be used, so that you are in the best position to decide what data you share.

Q: How do the current data protection rules hold back the single market?

A: As we said before, today’s data protection rules are divergent and inconsistent across the EU’s 27 member countries. Companies may have to deal with 27 different sets of data protection rules within the EU. The result is a fragmented legal environment with legal uncertainty and unequal protection for individuals. This has also caused unnecessary costs and a significant administrative burden for businesses. This complex situation is a disincentive for businesses – particularly small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) – to expand their operations across the EU and represents an obstacle to economic growth. The Commission is proposing new rules to remove barriers to the internal market which exist because of the divergent legal approaches of the 27 EU countries. This will create a ‘level playing field’ on data processing within the EU. The Commission will achieve substantial harmonisation of data protection rules at EU level, creating one single law applicable across the EU.

Q: How will the EU’s data protection reform make international cooperation easier?

A: Personal data is increasingly being transferred across borders – both virtual and geographical – and stored on servers in multiple countries both within and outside the EU. That is the nature of cloud computing. The globalised nature of data flows calls for a strengthening of the individual’s data-protection rights internationally. This requires strong principles for protecting individuals’ data, aimed at easing the flow of personal data across borders while still ensuring a high and consistent level of protection without loopholes or unnecessary complexity. To respond to these challenges, the Commission is proposing a system which will ensure a level of protection for data transferred out of the EU similar to that within the EU. This will include clear rules defining when EU law is applicable to companies or organisations established outside the EU, in particular by clarifying that whenever the organisation’s activities are related to the offering of goods or services to EU individuals, or to the monitoring of their behaviour, EU rules will apply.

Moving Forward

There remains quite a lot of work to do before these reforms take effect and it is not yet known what form the final regulations will take. Industry stakeholders including businesses, trade associations, and Data Protection Authorities around the world have already or are preparing their comments to the European Commision regarding their concerns about areas of the proposed regulation. From a US perspective, while some of the proposed regulations are welcome such as having only a single set of rules to comply with, other areas are sure to raise significant concern as hurdles that may hinder global compliance. This underscores not only the different attitudes and approaches to data protection in the US and EU, but also the need for each to continue to pursue more harmonized frameworks as the global economy grows. The Internet has no borders, and regulations must recognize this in order to foster continued growth of the internet economy on both sides of the Atlantic.

The interesting timing of this blog post is that this week the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s chief privacy policy and enforcement agency for 40 years, issued their final​ and long awaited industry privacy report. Also, yesterday I was on the Hill meeting with Congresspersons and Senators who are tackling privacy in their committees to help them understand and shape our and customers online marketing landscapes. I will work up a blog post to address this weeks fun here in DC.