The email marketing landscape is always changing as marketers find new and savvy ways to boost engagement, increase conversions, and maximize their efforts. But, beyond the discussion of open rates, click-throughs, subject lines, A/B testing and deliverability is the issue of compliance.

In an overall sense, there are two rulebooks that email marketers follow:

• "Best Practices"... which are the processes we abide by because we know it treats our customer’s inbox as a special place and that’s a responsibility we take seriously.
• "Legal Compliance"... which are the specific and mandatory rules we follow because our actions are governed by law [....and because none of us would do well in prison! :) ]

Most marketers are familiar with the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. But, now Canada has their own proposed version of anti-spam legislation that in it’s current state goes much further than it’s US counterpart.

It’s important marketers are aware of the new proposed legislation so they can begin taking action well in advance to ensure they remain in full compliance. While there is still a lot of time to make sure your ducks are all in a row to appease CASL, it’s never too soon to get started.

This post will cover the main highlights of Canada’s proposed Anti-Spam Legislation. For a more in-depth summary, you can read my blog post titled “All About CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation) in Plain English”.

I’m Not In Canada, So Why Do I Care?

CASL isn’t just focused on Canadian email marketers, but rather extends its coverage to anyone who is emailing someone that will receive that message within Canada.

So, if you run an eCommerce store out of the USA, but you occasionally sell to people north of the border and have those folks on your mailing list, then CASL is in full force for you.

It’s not just those in North America that have to play under these new rules because the people behind CASL are hoping it’s reach will extend to marketers internationally who are contacting Canadians. In an interview, the CRTC’s chief compliance and enforcement officer, Andrea Rosen, said:

If the spammer is offshore, we have the ability under the law to co-operate with foreign governments, to share information and to bring proceedings together against individuals that are offshore.

There is an exemption written into CASL that if the sender does not know or could not expect to know that the receiver would be using a Canadian computer to access the email, then you’re off the hook. So, if your USA-based eCommerce store doesn’t ship to Canada and you have no Canadian’s on your mailing list, but someone has taken the trip to see the Jays play in Toronto and while there they get your email, you don’t have to panic.

Do keep in mind, however, that ignorance won’t be an excuse so even if you don’t think you have Canadian’s in your database, be sure to be on the lookout for that. At Elite Email, we have been prompting people to look at their geo-reports to get a sense of who is engaging with the email in Canada because it might be more than you think.

What are the key requirements of CASL?

The current proposed regulation is really long and if you care to see the whole thing in it’s entirety, you can click here.

For those that are too busy to read the whole law (...and that is probably ALL of us!) here are the primary requirements:

• You must have permission BEFORE sending an email.
• You must be able to prove that you have received clear consent (more on “consent” below)
• You cannot use false or misleading subject lines or sender names.
• You must have a working unsubscribe mechanisms where manual requests are processed within a 10 day window and any unsubscribe links are valid for at least 60 days after the send date.
• You cannot pre-check subscription boxes on firms. Valid consent must be an affirmative action.
• You must include a physical mailing address as well as an alternate way to reach you, which could take the form of an email address, phone number or link to contact form.
• You cannot confirm unsubscribes by sending a follow-up email.
• If an email is being sent “on behalf of” another organization, you must clearly identify both parties.
• If you are a charity, then you are included in CASL if you are selling or soliciting anything.

One key thing I want to highlight is the notion of subscribing to your mailing list as an affirmative action. I see a lot of signup forms where the box is pre-checked and you have to uncheck it to indicate you don’t want to signup for a mailing list. If your organization is doing this, then it’s one of the first things you should consider changing. It’s a quick change that will ensure all new subscriber acquisitions are valid under CASL.

Consent, Consent, and More Consent... It’s All About Consent!

While there are lots of different facets to CASL, if I had to boil it down to one thing, I’d say that the most critical factor is ensuring you have obtained consent properly. If you’ve done that, then you’re heading down a good path.

CASL currently outlines four different scenarios that would qualify as consent.

Consent Scenario #1: Implied Consent

This is the scenario that many people will already be familiar with as it’s the one that is based on an existing business or nonbusiness relationship between the recipient and sender. Essentially, if someone has bought something from your organization or entered into a contract with you then you have a “business relationship” with them. Whereas, if someone does volunteer work for you or becomes part of your organization, then you’ve got a “nonbusiness relationship” with them.

The critical part of this type of implied consent is the 2 year time limitation. From the moment someone purchases something from you, a 2 year window commences where you can email them and be in compliance with CASL without needing any other form of consent. On top of that, if that same person buys something from you again during that window, the clock resets and you get another full 2 years. However, as a general rule of thumb, at some point during that 2 year window, you would want (or need) to obtain explicit consent in order to keep emailing them after that window expires.

Consent Scenario #2: Explicit Consent

I suspect most email marketers are already actively engaged in this type of consent where the recipient gives you direct permission to send them emails. Most commonly you will have a signup form on your website that lets people join your mailing list. This direct type of consent is really at the core of CASL, which is why it’s important that you obtain good evidence to support your practices. Doing things like capturing the date stamp and IP address of a new subscriber when they join your list and then when they confirm their subscription (for double opt-in) will help ensure you’ve got a strong case should someone challenge if consent was obtained.

As I mentioned previously, make sure your signup forms require an affirmative action and not an opt-out action. So, if you’ve got a sneaky pre-checked box that auto-enrols people, you’re going to want to change that up ASAP because it won’t count in the eyes of CASL.

According to CASL, you can also get written or oral consent and while that is acceptable, it should be noted that these methods are far more difficult to prove. If you plan on using these tactics, make sure you’ve got a workflow that allows for the careful documentation of when, where and how consent was obtained.

Consent Scenario #3: Conspicuous Publication

This is a rather unique scenario that is very different than the two above. You can send someone an email if you obtained their email address and the following three criteria are also met:

(i) The email address is clearly published for viewing.
(ii) In the location where the email address is published, there is no specific statement saying that unsolicited emails are not allowed.
(iii) The email you’d be sending to that address is related to that person’s business or official role. [For example, you can email a university professor about a new book that is related to their field of expertise/interest, but you cannot email that same person trying to sell them concert tickets. It’s a bit tough to exactly draw the line on what is related and what is not, so we might see this further clarified CASL.]

Consent Scenario #4: Shared Email Address with the Sender

This is the “business card” or “networking” rule under CASL that lets you send someone an email if they willingly share their address with you. CASL doesn’t want to render the email address on a business card useless, so if someone shares their card with you and doesn’t say they do not want to be emailed, then you can email them and be in compliance. Be sure to document the how, when and where they shared their email address with you so you’ve got that on file in case you need supporting evidence. However, do keep in mind that if you want to start sending someone your monthly newsletter (and not just emailing them as a follow-up to a networking event) you should obtain consent using another method as well.

What Happens If I Break The Rules?

Shame on you! Now go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done!

But, on top of that shame, penalties for violating CASL can range from a maximum of $1 million for individuals and $10 million for companies.

It should be noted that anyone can bring this new law against a sender, it doesn’t have to just be the government or other legal agency against the sender. Of course, if someone goes down this path and it turns out they were wrong, then they are responsible to cover all court and legal fees.

Also, the reason I have been harping in the sections above about keeping evidence for how you obtained consent is because if you can show that you really made strong efforts to follow every aspects of the rulebook, then that will play a factor in any legal proceedings.

When Does All These New Rules Go Live?

There is still no specific date set so at this point everything is an estimate, although there have already been delays so further delays are not out of the question.

Based on the current flow of events, Industry Canada should have the regulations finalized by the middle of this year (2013). After that, there will be a one year grace period for everyone to digest these new rules and prepare for the coming changes, which will result in CASL going live some time in the middle of 2014.

That being said, there’s no need to wait until the final minutes to start ensuring your compliance with CASL. Although certain parts of the proposed legislation may change, the underlying concepts about the ways you can obtain consent probably won’t change much. So, take a good look at your database now and start to figure out who you may need to re-confirm and what evidence you’ve got to support that consent has been obtained properly (in the eyes of CASL). Review all of your signup and capture forms to make sure that it is an affirmative (and not opt-out) action that enrolls someone on your mailing list. Lastly, doing a periodic top to bottom review of your organization’s email practices can usually either confirm you’ve got your best foot forward and are ready for CASL or highlight areas that you need to improve upon... and there’s no time to take those steps like the present!

* Note: This article is intended to provide general comments about Canada’s new anti-spam legislation. It is not intended to be a comprehensive review nor is it intended to provide legal advice. Readers should not act on information in this article without first seeking advice from their lawyer.

Robert Burko is CEO of Elite Email, a leading email marketing solution and proud member of the Email Experience Council that has been helping businesses of all sizes harness the power of email for 10 years. Robert has been featured extensively in the media for his knowledge of email marketing, social media and digital trends. You can also find him on Google+.  

In his recent Predictions & Unpredictions for 2013 blog post, Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg talked about how brands’ marketing and security functions will need to join forces to fight phishing. One key reason is that phishers and spoofers are continually getting smarter, applying an impressive range of best practices to make their emails ever-more compelling and believable.

• The subject line inspires real concern (especially if you really are a YBS customer!)
• The “Friendly From” is believable (see inset)
• The sender domain is correct (because the real sender is spoofing it!).
• Branding is consistent with the real YBS website.
• The language is professional sounding and there are no spelling mistakes.
• There is a strong, visible call to action – “Click My Account Activity”
• The disclaimer and contact details all appear to be 100% correct.

• It generated a perfectly respectable Spam Assassin score of only 1.5
• It only identified one potential spam trigger word – “Disclaimer”
• It even rendered well on most major mobile devices!

• Nearly 1 in every 20 of these emails successfully bypassing spam filters successfully delivering to recipients’ inboxes.
• Average Read Rate for these emails is 3.66%. This is is particularly startling given that:

1. YBS is a relatively small player in the UK with approximately 1% market share. Assuming that non-YBS customers will almost certainly ignore these emails because they are not relevant, Read Rates for the remainder can be inferred as actually being much higher.
2. In a number of instances the Read Rate is higher than the Not Filtered rate, implying that recipients are recovering these emails from their spam/junk folders and responding to them!

• An authoritative report produced by Cisco Systems shows that on average 99% of phishing emails get filtered, with the remainder generating a 3% open rate. This implies the YBS phishing emails are highly effective, out-performing the Cisco benchmark by a factor of 6.
• Cisco also calculated the commercial impact of a phishing attack at $250 (£155/€190) per compromised recipient. Using the report’s average click-to-open rate of 5%, with 50% of clickers giving up personal data, we can extrapolate the Inbox Insight data to infer an estimated commercial impact in the UK of over £1M pm – for this single scam alone!

• Read our Anti-Phishing Guide which contains actionable advice on how to achieve brand protection and secure your email channel.
• Make use of Return Path’s APS suite of tools and services to:
  • Identify potential brand abuse (Email Brand Monitor).
  • Proactively block phishing and spoofing activity (Domain Protect).
  • Facilitate prosecution or phishing site take-down efforts (Domain Secure).

 

This year was my first trip to the Email Evolution Conference in Miami Beach Florida. I know, you’re thinking how tough it must be to pick up and fly down there from Toronto, but you gotta do what you gotta do. While there I had the pleasure of interviewing several email marketing thought leaders. Today, I thought I’d share a few of my favourite videos from the event. You can catch all the interviews at http://www.GetResponse.TV.

Dela Quist
Dela is always provocative in his thinking on email marketing. If there’s one guy in this whole business who keeps the rest of us on our mental toes, it’s him. He’ll challenge any idea and plays the devil’s advocate so well; you swear you can see horns growing out of his head. In this interview he explains the logic behind what is known as the “Open Reach Metric.” This is a metric which, according to Dela, will fundamentally change how you do your email marketing.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/r3C4I-DmomM/

Jonathan Margulies
Jonathan Margulies is a Partner at Winterberry Group and he feels we don’t have the optimum terms to best illustrate what we do and what we want to do with online marketing. You know the term, multi-channel, but is it really accurate? Jonathan doesn’t think so! He believes that the term “omni-channel”   or if you prefer “omnichannel” marketing is more fitting. In this video he explains why using better terminology is critical to the marketing industry.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/iQUb-8MejG0/

Sundeep Kapur
Sundeep Kapur is a marketing thought leader and all around nice guy. What I love about Sundeep is his genuine enthusiasm for helping others understand email marketing and online marketing in general. At his EmailYogi.com blog, Sundeep dispenses wisdom and insight on a daily basis. In this video we talk about the top 3 challenges facing email marketers this year and what you need to do to meet them.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/hyW9Mcxhl-Y/

Stephanie Miller
Stephanie Miller, VP of Member Relations DMA, is simply an amazing person. She loves email marketing and is devoted to helping email marketers navigate the rapids of legislation and succeed. The Email Experience Council (part of the DMA) has a lot to offer you if you are an email marketer. In this video, Stephanie lays out what’s in it for you and why you should be involved with the EEC too.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/zOEaNdwjXqM/
 

Matt Blumberg
Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath and Chairman of the Board with the DMA and the perfect guy to ask what are the biggest challenge is in 2013 for email marketers. Funny I should say “biggest” because as it turns out, Matt wanted to talk about something you’ve likely been hearing a lot about lately, “big data.”
http://getresponse.tv/watch/H4CF_j_rNhM/

John Caldwell
John Caldwell runs Red Pill Email and is a go-to guy for people looking for sage advice on email marketing solutions. He’s also an uncompromising voice for email marketing best practices. I asked John about the three most important things one should consider when choosing and email service provider.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/QZ1C4kn0ySU/

Chris Baggot
Content marketing is a big buzz term in online marketing today, but what’s it all about? I was lucky enough to corner Chris Baggott of Compendium at EEC 13 to talk content marketing, demystify it and offer some tips on how to make it work for your business.
http://getresponse.tv/watch/6vLSrmQyIPY/

Ken Magill
Ken Magill is not known for pulling his punches. In my opinion, he’s email marketing’s answer to 60 minutes and the Colbert Report, all rolled into one. This is the first time I had the pleasure to meet Ken in person and I jumped at a chance to engage him on what Ken calls the “Conventional Wisdom Buzz.”
http://getresponse.tv/watch/94dJbOdFHvw/

Jim

Jim Ducharme
Community Director
GetResponse Email Marketing
www.GetResponse.com
@hugeheadca
 

The annual Stefan Pollard Marketer of the Year award from DMA/Email Experience Council will be given at the Email Evolution Conference in Miami on February 8th (Not yet registered? Join us for great keynotes and amazing case studies and new ideas at emailevolution.org. Use code MACDT for a great discount.) This year, we had a number of nominations from many of you – our eec community – and the three winning candidates are all amazing marketers and “email geeks” – just the type of people that continue Stefan’s legacy of talent, generous contribution to the industry and effective mentoring.  
 
We circled back with 2012 Award Winner Meg Reynolds of REI. She is still shining and humble in receiving this honor from the DMA/eec community. 
 
Meg:  I have been so honored to receive the Stefan Pollard Award. I’ve since moved on to a role at REI that is not focused on email marketing, but I rely on those same experiences all the same. 
 
SAM:  What are you doing now?
 
Meg:  I’ve found new challenges leading the Marketing Campaign Planning team at REI. I’ve learned a lot in the past year; it’s energizing working with many programs, channels and cross-divisional partners.  I’ve even learned a bit about myself. I’m still finding my way in a new professional community.  Hopefully that will come in due time, I’m a new kid in this role!

SAM:  Is it good to be “beyond email”?
 
Meg:  I do miss my email role and the confidence of knowing the ins-and-outs of a medium. I miss highly  measureable program performance and knowing whether someone is BS’ing me a little bit. And, of course, I miss a community of creative and passionate folks to turn to with every challenge. So give my best to that wonderful community. I continue to support it where and when I can. I open my time to young professionals and students about opportunities in digital direct marketing.
 
SAM: Any advice for email and other data-driven marketers for 2013?
 
Meg:  Respect your subscribers, enjoy your peers, and show-up when you are nominated for an award.  Even when you don't think there is a one-in-a-million chance of winning. All the best to the wonderful, supportive professional email community.

By Stephanie Miller, DMA's vice president of member relations

 

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

 

 

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

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.

April Mullen is one of the star members of the eec's Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable. We asked her to share some of her enthusiasm for the eec and the Roundtable by answering a few questions:

Why do you volunteer with the DMA/eec Cross Channel Roundtable?
It is getting increasingly difficult in today’s marketplace to stand out against the competition during a consumer’s considered purchase cycle and marketers are deeply challenged by this.  In the Cross-Channel Integration Roundtable, we’re really thinking of how several channels can interact to create a consistent and positive experience for consumers to overcome the challenges.  If a handful of marketers can gain valuable insight from what the Roundtable is doing, then everything we’ve put into it has been worthwhile.

How do you use the info you gain from your DMA/eec experiences, either internally with your company or for your personal career goals?
My experience with the eec has afforded me opportunities to regularly gain outside perspectives and allowed me to apply fresh ideas to my own marketing programs. 

What is your advice for someone looking to get active with a Roundtable?
Don’t hesitate to get involved in industry organizations, specifically small groups like the eec Roundtables.  The networking and knowledge you will gain from your experiences will help you grow as a marketing professional.  Plus, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re helping to shape the future of email marketing. 

April Mullen
Branding and Marketing Communications Analyst – Email Management
Scottrade

Thanks you for your dedication to the eec, April!

If you're an eec member and you're interested in joining one of our Roundtables, please contact Ali - ali@emailexperience.org.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you're ready to test…

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

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

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

- Kevin Senne, Premiere Global Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Marco Marini, ClickMail Marketing

With over 150 email service providers (ESPs) to choose from, how can you possibly pick the best one? Or be confident that your current ESP is the best fit for your business and email marketing initiatives? There's no single right answer. ESPs differ from each other in many ways, meaning you can't make an apples-to-apples comparison.

Despite the overwhelming number of choices and the complexity in making a choice, there is an email service provider that's right for you and your company's email marketing program. Determining which one means knowing what matters most when shopping around or evaluating your current ESP.

Every email service provider has its strengths and weaknesses. You can't change that. But you can be aware of which strengths are absolutely critical to your business and which weaknesses you are not willing to accept. That means you have to start your ESP search internally, by really delving into what drives your email marketing program now and in the future. You also must take a hard look at your company's capabilities, including that of your staff and any existing technologies you'll want to integrate with. (For advice on evaluating your needs, see the ESP RFP tips from a recent presentation by eec member, Kara Trivunovic, and reiterated in the ClickMail Marketing blog.

For help in evaluating what matters most to your program and knowing how to score ESPs on those factors, download "Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP."

This whitepaper is a compilation of a decade's worth of knowledge and insight, gleaned while helping clients choose ESPs that fit the email service provider to the client's needs. This comprehensive whitepaper covers 20 factors for you to consider when choosing an ESP, including why each factor matters and what to look for. It also includes a scoring sheet you can use to evaluate ESPs against these 20 factors. This resource will help you take a thoughtful, informed approach to your ESP selection, so you can compare apples to oranges and still make a wise choice, Whether you're in the market for a new ESP now or want to see how your current one stacks up.

When every marketing dollar matters now more than ever, every little improvement you make to your email marketing program matters too. Choosing the right ESP, or being sure the one you're with now is the best fit, is one critical component in making sure you're maximizing your program's effectiveness…and ROI. Don't overlook the importance of this partnership. Use every resource you can to ensure an informed decision.

- Marco Marini, CEO, ClickMail Marketing

Sponsored by:

Long before retailers hang any wreaths or tinsel in their stores, they send out emails promoting their Christmas deals to their subscribers—lots of emails! Last year the Email Experience Council tracked more than 3,300 emails from more than 100 top online retailers during the fourth quarter and released daily reports on strategies, tactics and trends via the Retail Email Blog. Based on that monitoring, the eec has produced this helpful roadmap to the email holiday season so retailers and other B2C companies can better formulate their campaigns this year.

This guide includes benchmarks and advice on when to begin your campaign, how much to increase your email volume, which days to send on, and how to stand out in the inbox during the holidays. For instance, last year 88% of major online retailers increased their email volume during the holiday season, with retailers boosting their send volumes by 45% on average.

It also discusses and provides examples of the "16 Phases of Christmas," the 16 strategies that retailers use at different points in the holiday season. Those strategies include promoting e-gift cards and "buy online, pick up in store" services.

"As marketers, it is important that we learn from past behavior—both our own and that of our peers," says Andrew Osterday, Director of eMarketing at Premiere Global Services, the Guide's sponsor. "Looking at your successes and failures over the course of previous holiday seasons will help you to avoid the pitfalls and repeat the windfalls. Further, examining the trends among peers' campaigns can help you benchmark yours and inspire you to try new strategies and tactics."

Other key findings from the guide include:

● Seventeen of the top 20 biggest retail email days of 2007 came in the weeks before Christmas. Those days included Cyber Monday (Nov. 26) and three of the four "Echo Mondays" (Dec. 3, 10 and 17)—the Mondays that follow Cyber Monday. Unlike in 2006 when the day after Christmas was the most popular day of the year to send retail email, last year Cyber Monday was the most popular, with 68% of retailers sending at least one email on that day.

● During the five days before Christmas (Dec. 20-24), 32% of top online retailers mentioned e-gift cards in their emails at least once last year.

● From Nov. 1 until Christmas Day, 19% of major online retailers used animated gifs in at least one email last year.

● Just as some online and multichannel retailers promote Thanksgiving Day sales to get a leg up on offline competitors whose stores are closed on that day, some will also begin their post-holiday sales on Christmas Day and promote them in their email campaigns.

Get the Full Report
Visit the Whitepaper Room to download the full 43-page guide, which is free for eec platinum members, available at a discount to eec gold and silver members, and available for $219 for non-members. Not a member? Learn more about becoming a member of the Email Experience Council.

Welcome messages show some of the highest open rates in the email world. We're surprised by how many senders neglect to even send a welcome or, almost as bad, send lusterless messages that feel downright unwelcoming.

When people invite you into their home or office, you know whether you feel welcomed even if it's tough to pinpoint exactly why. Do your hosts reach out to you with a handshake or hug? Do their tones and expressions tell you they're thrilled to see you? Several subtleties contribute to welcoming you into a new place—why should welcome emails be any different?

To help you make the most of your welcome, we at the Email Design Roundtable have added a Welcome Message Checklist to our Email Checklist series. With so many details to think about, our checklist offers a collection of ideas that you can easily apply to your own message style.

We drew our inspiration from emails we received that delivered the most on that warm and welcomed feeling:

Stephanie Miller of Return Path loves Sephora's welcome email, which does what a welcome message should— confirms the sign up, makes the subscriber feel delighted to have signed up and gets recipients shopping. And it does this all in a well-designed format that is similar to the regular messages Sephora sends. Sephora gets bonus points for their touch of personalization: adding a first name here makes the email feel like a visit to a store where the clerk knows you. Omaha Steaks adds the same personal touch to their message, and they also throw in a special offer that shows the recipient that they're now on the inside track.

Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon: First of all, I love Virgin America.
Second of all, I love this eleVAte welcome email for at least two reasons:
(1) It includes all the details I need to revisit the site, which inspired me to actually keep and file the email away.
(2) Welcome emails are sometimes made to do too much, which turns into a law-of-diminishing-returns, over-messaged mess. This one is super-simple, which makes the three icons and buttons to book, edit preferences and view routes POP!

Chad White of the Email Experience Council: When I did the data collection for my Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study last year, I saw a huge range of welcome emails in terms of engagement. Unfortunately, I saw a lot of emails that looked like Foot Locker's welcome message—boring, text-only, weak branding, and almost nonexistent calls-to-action. Fortunately, there were some retailers that recognized the engagement opportunity that a welcome email presents. For instance, Circuit City's welcome email focused on making sure that subscribers had indicated their preferences and were signed up for the newsletters that were most relevant to them. And HPshopping's welcome message does a good job of covering lots of different bases succinctly. The best advice I ever heard about welcome emails was: "Give them a reason to save the welcome email." Hopefully this checklist will help marketers achieve that goal.

Share your worst and warmest welcome message experiences by commenting below.

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

The Truth about Email Marketing, an email marketing book by Simms Jenkins, eec member and the CEO of BrightWave Marketing, will hit book stores on Aug. 1. Ahead of the release, the eec's Chad White had the opportunity to ask Simms about the book and the truths he reveals:

Chad: What is the most surprising "truth" in your book?

Simms: This will depend on the reader but for many email newbies making the transition from direct marketing or another world, Truth 21: Length and Your Call to Action may be surprising to some. So many emails I receive these days are brutally long and bury the calls to action. I think many major retailers are guilty of taking their offline ad campaigns and forcing them into email templates. Frankly, that doesn't work, so hopefully this truth sheds some light on optimizing layouts and messaging.

I also cover what the future of email (Truth 49) and what it may look like. This may have surprising thoughts for many. Here's the complete list of truths.

What are some of the email marketing myths that you debunk?

One of the most important and obvious to you and your readers may be the notion of permission email and how that draws a line in the sand of where you stand in utilizing email marketing. It must be a part of any conversation about email marketing regardless of your knowledge and experience. I think some people forget and that is an important part in setting up this book as an end-to-end guide about what makes a successful email marketing program.

On the other end of the spectrum, I address how email marketing can exist within the current world where social media grabs much of the spotlight (Truth 48: The Impact of Social Media on Email). The truth is we always hear about how email is on its deathbed but it still acts as the communication hub for many companies and specifically, should get a major boost because of the popularity of LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

Email marketing is evolving quite quickly. To which recent change have people been the slowest to adapt?

I am still utterly shocked about how email marketers fail to change and adapt to a world where 50% of consumers block images. One would think that companies would change their messaging strategy, optimize their creative and deal with this very significant and real challenge. However, many are not.

Your recent study that cited tangible revenue that is left on the table should get people's attention, but I have my doubts. I speak quite frequently to diverse audiences and meet with some of the top corporations and many are flying blind or clueless when it comes to how their emails render in many of their subscribers inboxes. What if their TV commercials were showing up blank during prime time? Do you think they would address that?

The most shocking aspect of this issue is when I am told that the company is aware of their emails showing up as a red X with no links, branding and messaging but they have their hands tied due to political and organizational issues. That screams to me the need for more education, awareness and participation with groups like the eec.

What's your best advice for folks that are new to email marketing?

The best part of our industry is the amount of great thought-leadership and free resources. Whether it is your blog, the eec newsletter, Email Marketing Reports, EmailStatCenter.com—the list goes on and on. You can find many of the best listed on the book's companion website's resource center. The amount of places to learn and network from peers is incredible. It is pretty unique to have an industry where so many high-level executives blog frequently—and not just fluffy PR-related blog posts.

The other exciting thing about diving into our industry is because it is still relatively a young one and changes so frequently, the opportunity to have an impact on your company and the industry is a very real and attractive one. We need so many more passionate and energetic professionals, so it is a place that one can enter today and become a leader rather quickly given the right situation. That can't be said for all industries.

Email marketing's reputation as being "cheap" often leads to budgets that are undersized compared to email's ROI. Do you have any advice for helping marketers communicate the value of email to their bosses so that they can get larger budgets?

The Truth about Email Marketing has two entire sections on budgeting and ROI and organizing a proper email team so this is covered in depth and is one of the most frequent issues that I tackle on a daily basis. We in the email marketing industry are certainly a victim of our own success, at times, as the depth of measurement and efficiency of email often overshadows the potential for deeper investment and greater sophistication, all of which lead to more relevant and valuable emails for subscribers.

I am a believer in using your metrics to champion your success and your potential. Not enough email marketing pros use their email analytics outside of showing open and click-through rates. The biggest breakthroughs we see with our clients is when we can show the impact email has on broader business goals, like product awareness, loyalty and revenue. CFOs don't care about open rates but you can have their ear when you show the crossover impact and power email can have on a business.

Thanks, Simms.

My pleasure, Chad. And as a special offer to the eec community, I've arranged an exclusive deal through the publisher to make The Truth about Email Marketing available for 25% off, plus free shipping. Just purchase the book through the FT Press store and enter the discount code Emailmark01 during the checkout process.

–>For more books on email marketing by eec members, check out our listing of Books on Email Marketing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STRATEGIES TO RE-ENGAGE INACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier this month a federal judge ordered a Las Vegas-based company to pay a whopping $2.5 million fine for making false advertising claims and sending illegal email messages in violation of the FTC Act and the CAN-SPAM Act. The company was sending unsolicited email to people promoting human growth hormone (HGH) related drugs (you know, the stuff that Roger Clemens never took).

The judge found that the defendants violated the FTC Act (which outlaws fraudulent and deceptive business practices) because their ads falsely claim that the drugs cause rapid, substantial and permanent weight loss, in addition to having anti-aging qualities.

But what makes the case most interesting for our Roundtable's members, of course, is the CAN-SPAM component. The violations cited by the FTC are very basic; they're not "high-tech" offenses such as using open relays or forged headers to physically distribute spam. What this particular company got hit for was, in large part, three very simple CAN-SPAM violations: (1) using misleading subject lines; (2) not including a valid postal address in their emails; and (3) not including—or facilitating—opt-out functionality.

So for anyone who ever doubted that the CAN-SPAM Act had "teeth," make no mistake about it: The FTC can and will make use of the full scope of CAN-SPAM to bring cases against offenders, and it ain't hard to do so.

Our advice: Never overlook the basics. Check, check and check again to make sure that your email programs are 100% compliant. Make sure strict governance and procedures are in place. Because all it takes is one untrained new email marketing associate to click "send" without including a postal address and the FTC will come knocking on your door.

You can wag your finger at the camera and claim "misremembrance" all you want, but regardless of whether you're pushing HGH in baseball locker-rooms or email inboxes, no one's going to believe you.

—eec Advocacy Roundtable co-chairs Jordan Cohen of Epsilon and Robb Walters of Costco

–>Read other issues of the The Email Advocate.