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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas S Kraemer writes: Email is a great medium for marketing. The area that I'm trying to crack is how to get people to provide their email address with permission for us to market to them so we can reach them through this efficient medium. What are some ways you have found to get the reluctant email provider to give you his or her email address for promotional purposes?

The eec community had this advice:

Jeanniey Mullen responded: The first rule of thumb is that people need to understand what's in it for them— in return for their email and permission, what will they get? The benefits needs to be material and clearly spelled out. Some of the ways that seems to work well for many groups are: transactional or service message opt-in opportunities, direct mail postcards, call center capture and in some cases online sweepstakes or polls.

Bryan Eisenberg responded: The key to getting email address from people is to understand that you are in an exchange of value. Not only to they need to get a good sense of what the future value of your relationship will be but what will the present exchange bring to them. If you can offer some immediate benefit—a small report, ebook, or something similar—you may give them additional incentive to provide an email address. All be clear with people about the frequency and type of content they will get helps.

Matthew Gordon responded: In my experience it is also important not to ask for too much information to begin with, region, age, sex, etc. Keep it simple: Name and email address. After you have established and created a relationship of trust with the recipient can you then request further information.

Read the rest of the responses and share advice of your own by visiting the Email Experience Council's Facebook discussion board. Other topics currently being discussed include "Rendering on BlackBerries."

–>Read more Collective Email Wisdom.

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

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

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

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

Do digital marketers view the function of the email similarly to that of the outer envelope in snail mail? Essentially, intrigue folks to click to the order page (open the envelope) as quickly as possible? —J.P.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Chip House: I think that using the simile of direct mail is helpful when trying to understand the critical components of a successful email. To answer the question directly, however, I don't equate the email itself to the outside of the envelope. Also, I don't believe that the sole purpose is to drive to the inside of the envelope—or to drive a click to a web page. These are both critical pieces of email, but not the complete package.

First of all, I see the outside of the envelope as the "from" address and the subject line. These items are most often seen by the end-user. Optimizing these "envelope fields" really is the most critical item to get your email opened. In the days of preview panes and image blocking, however, optimizing the top portion of your email with alt tags, HTML call-to-action copy, etc. is also necessary if you want the recipient to spend more than 3 seconds on your message.

Second, once the email is opened, certainly getting the recipient to click through to the order page quickly is the goal of many retailers. Others in publishing, or B2B marketers, may choose a more "curriculum-based" approach where they are educating via their emails, adding value and creating ongoing interest. These types of communications don't target a quick reaction, but rather seek to create a more educated customer/subscriber—one that chooses to pick your business over your competitors' for the long haul.

Jeanniey Mullen: This is an awesome question! For those of us in the digital space, who also have years of experience in the "old school" world of direct marketing, the similarities are quite interesting. A great example of this is what is known in the direct mail world as the "Johnson Box." I was going to write more about what a Johnson box is, and how it relates to email—but good, old Wikipedia does a phenomenal job—so check it out here.

The Johnson Box is just one example of how traditional direct mail successes are reused in email. If I were new to email and wasn't sure how to succeed, I would find the best direct marketer I know and take them for coffee—they could teach you a trick or two that could be applied to email and give your campaign a competitive advantage.

Chad White: While in most cases retail emails do act like the envelope for the landing page, they don't always. For instance, Saks Fifth Avenue sends their New York subscribers an email once a month highlighting in-store events at their flagship Fifth Avenue store, and MLB.com sends subscribers reminders to tune in to playoff games. In those cases, the email is like the letter rather than the envelope. This is probably the best way to think of email when the action prompted by the email takes place offline or in another channel.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we'll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

–>Read other Reply to All posts.

Is 'customer-centric' just a concept put into practice by the early adopters…or is there a point soon where we'll see quicker adoption of real data-driven 1:1 marketing?

Is it a data/data modeling issue? Is it an analytics issue? Is it a ROI issue? Is it a content issue? Is it due to internal resource constraints? Is it due to lack of subject matter expertise? —R.E.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Tricia Robinson-Pridemore: Customer-centric messaging is the same "behavioral" "interactive" messaging paradigm we've been chatting about for years. It's being done by some F100 and Web 2.0 organizations. F100 companies are running it out of marketing and Web 2.0 companies manage it out of their technology/customer behavior/e-commerce groups. The two biggest reasons it isn't more widely adopted are data synchronization and strategy. Customer data is all over the place in organizations. Stored in multiple databases, e-commerce systems, web analytic systems, and *still* often in flat files (a.k.a. Excel spreadsheets). To make that data useful and in any way operational, email systems need to talk to that data where it resides or marketers must synchronize and consolidate that data.

The other current spoiler for customer-centric messaging is lack of strategy. In a recent JupiterResearch survey of email marketers, the number one most important challenge they cite when working with email is "defining an email strategy." If determining a strategy for email is tough for them imagine what making a real data-driven 1:1 marketing strategy is like? Although important, technology will only be as successful as your messaging strategy. Find the right partners who have creative, experienced experts to help build your messaging strategy and your technology implementation.

Chip House: I think we're seeing true customer-centric communications now. Just think about the real-time, transactional messages that are driven by customer actions (buying something, signing up for something, or going somewhere). Going deeper here includes email messages triggered by information captured via web analytics data, such as product category visited, or a shopping cart abandon. Certainly there are barriers to scaling this type of customer-centric communications into some organizations and business process, but if there is a reason we don't see broader adoption I believe it has to do more with the fact that it takes a concerted effort for marketers to actively leverage and integrate the available technologies and data to drive highly-relevant communications. In the end marketers need to spend more time with their database experts and focus on developing "one view" of the customer, and reacting to the customers' wants and needs and behaviors. Too many marketers resign themselves to sending another weekly email focused on the "specials" highlighted in the Sunday circular.

We could really write books around this topic, so I'll stop there. The answer is that in the world of technology, the CMO and the CIO have to start working closely together to leverage current technologies.

Chad White: In retail email marketing, I see a lot of broadcast emails. And to a certain extent that makes perfect sense—sales notifications, for instance. But there's plenty of room for a lot more tailored communications. Offering more niche newsletters is a huge step toward 1:1 marketing. Only 28% of major online retailers offer more than one newsletter, according to the 2007 Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study. For example, Barnes & Noble offers 21 different email newsletters so people can get content and promotions about just the kinds of books and music they enjoy. Giving customers the ability to express their preferences is a relatively easy way to boost relevancy without diving into behavioral analytics, which may be beyond many retailers' current capabilities.

While expressed preferences can get you far, to get any closer to 1:1 marketing retailers will have to rethink what they consider to be their inventory. They need to move from a product-centric view, where goods are the inventory and retailing is about finding customers that want those goods, to a customer-centric view, where customers are the inventory and retailing is about supplying the goods that your individual customers want. To do that, retailers will need to consolidate all their far-flung customer data first.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we'll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

–>Read other Reply to All posts

How do you value and report your email channel ROI to C-level executives? Some companies have been very successful in reporting how email channel initiatives generate incremental revenues—such as the average ecommerce business with 10%-30% of annual sales revenues from its email marketing program (i.e., for a large retailer that is $25-35 million per year). However, most organizations have still not accounted for the many cost-savings email breeds nor do they include, for example, hold out groups to demonstrate the impact on Lifetime Customer Value when email is removed.

The time is now to advance our accountability and success in showcasing the full value of our efforts and their impact across all channels in the marketing landscape. The Direct Marketing Association published an economic-impact study which stated, "The ROI for email marketing was $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all non-email-related online marketing was $22.52, less than half. And yet marketers only spent around $300 million on email marketing efforts, compared to $12 billion for non-email-related marketing—$12 billion to get a return that is less than half of what can be achieved in email."

How can we come together across media channels to report a more complete picture to C-level executives (CPA, Revenue, AOV, Satisfaction, LTV)? Thoughts? Ideas? Comments? —Barry Stamos, senior director of strategy, Responsys

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Chip House: This, I believe, is all about human nature. We all gravitate to the things we know—to our comfort zone. So when the DMA reports the latest in a string of statistics that shows higher ROI for email, it doesn't really surprise me. It also doesn't surprise me that C-level execs (often even CMOs) seem to forget email when it comes to doling out marketing spend. Their comfort zone drives their marketing spend allocation, and unfortunately their own CFO's aren't calling them on the disconnect. Ultimately, shame on both of them.

Direct marketing, and online marketing specifically, is inherently very measurable. Take keywords; you can easily track impressions, clicks, conversions etc.—and choose from multiple tools with which to do so. Banner ads—same thing. In fact, with banners, your media buyer/or network takes care of most of the targeting hassle. Perhaps offline media, as well as other online media, get more respect from the CMO simply because they are easier to grasp and don't require the strategy, planning, list-building, deliverability expertise, etc. that a successful email campaign requires. So, not only do we gravitate to our comfort zone—we do what's quick and easy. Email marketing often isn't quick or easy, and to many it carries a stigma.

So how do we value and report the high ROI of our email channel in a way that resonates with a C-level exec? First, you'll need to show him the stats. Show him all the stats. The DMA number above is just the starter. Another showing the disconnect for online vs. offline spending, from the folks at Forrester, shows that though people spend 29% of their time online, it gets just 8% of the marketing dollars. Disconnect? Umm, yeah!

Second, prove it to your CMO yourself. Monitor your own spend on a handful of offline and online media and see it for yourself. If you're not tracking ROI individually yet, you're not doing yourself any favors.

Stephanie Miller: Good for you, Barry—this is exactly right. We as marketers have hidden behind the "email is cheap" myth for too long. We've dug ourselves into a budgeting hole. We promoted email as cheap, so it got a small budget. When we were charged with making the channel earn higher return, we just sent more email—not better, more targeted, more relevant email, just more email—because there was no significant budget hit. Now, when revenue expectations for the channel are growing, we find that we have to apply our marketing skills again—inventing and optimizing compelling subscriber experiences in order to generate growing revenue. This requires a budget for creative, testing and analytics in addition to the commoditized fees for delivery and list hygiene. It requires that we consider the email channel for more than just broadcast promotions, but as part of a multichannel experience that includes web and offline experiences and direct sales and education touchpoints. That means we need to measure it and budget for it just like other direct channels. All this should be welcome for both marketers and subscribers.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we'll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

–>Read other Reply to All posts

We are engaged in email in New Zealand, where due to relatively low internet usage, and recent law changes, list growth is quite a challenge. We do have one particular challenge which I would welcome any input on, as follows:

We publish an email newsletter for the police. They aim to reach community stakeholders, but are unwilling to allocate budget to traditional media to spread awareness and generate additional sign-ups. Their website drip feeds a certain number of new recipients —approx 1% increase per month, although half of that is eliminated by those who opt out each month —so growth is slow. They believe that using the existing list, a viral campaign can help. Does anyone have any inspirational input? —Jerry Flay, managing director of Inbox

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Stephanie Miller: Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. It's difficult to predict what sort of viral campaign will have a meaningful impact. Without knowing anything about the program I'm hesitant to offer a specific idea, but consider a simple trivia quiz about the community like "how many miles of roads are there" and "how long does the chief of police serve in office." If the quiz is challenging but also surprising, it will get forwarded. Even without some special content, certainly test just asking every current subscriber to forward an invite to two friends. Perhaps offer some recognition in the community for doing so. But at the end of the day, the program has to be worth signing up for—if the goal is to build awareness and support, then the messages must be interesting and relevant. If they are, then subscribers will engage with them and share them.

Chad White: Sounds like you should communicate how the police and community stakeholders have been working together with great results. Some inspiring success stories may cause folks to forward the email along and spur greater involvement. So tout your greatest successes and undertakings. Also, how about providing tips and advice that would be useful to the community? Or doing a survey or fundraising activity that would leverage your email program? If you provide the right kind of information and clearly prompt your subscribers to share the information with friends, you should be able to exceed the average 1% to 2% pass-along rate.

Jeanniey Mullen: Viral marketing can be one option, but only if you have something to say that your readers will "bond" with and share with others. In other words, if you want something to be passed along, ask your current readers to help you determine the content.

Even at that though, the pass along rate will be relatively low, so you should look for ways to integrate email with, for example, a blog or social network in order to assure success.

Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.

Have a question for the Voices of Email? Email Chad your question at chad@emailexperience.org and we'll REPLY TO ALL by posting the answers so everyone can benefit.

–>Read other Reply to All posts