We as marketers sometimes get hung up on what to name things, especially in our multichannel world where there are many technology-based strategies and solutions, often with overlapping attributes, and a lot of these approaches seem to move through their lifecycles faster than doped riders in the Tour de France. Change is definitely a constant in our personal and business lives, the economy continues to keep us on our toes, and email is right smack in the middle of business—or should I say, your digital company?

I had the pleasure of presenting this week with Jeanniey Mullen from the eec and Zinio, David Daniels from JupiterResearch, and Des Cahill from Habeas. We came together with just under 200 attendees for a live Habeas Huddle webinar entitled "Your Digital Company, Today and in 2013: How to Leverage Email and Online Trust for Success."

Some serious ground was covered in one hour with great data and insights from two studies from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Ipsos, as well as David's ongoing work at JupiterResearch. We also discussed a number of case studies, best practices and takeaways, and Jeanniey helped bring it all together with a historical view of email and how to think differently about this proven, vibrant channel in our changing, digital world.

For the sake of grounding, the EIU provided this definition/food for thought: "The digital company is one in which the use of information and communications technology underpins virtually all processes and activities, as well as all efforts to improve competitiveness."

One could argue that if your business has a data center, is using the internet to attract and retain customers, and you rely on hosted applications and services (i.e. web meetings, social networking, blogging, email service providers, etc.) for marketing, sales and customer service—then you're working in a digital company. OK, enough with semantics. Bottom line: Business executives worldwide say email is their No. 1 communication channel today and in 5 years, and consumers feel the same way when it comes to interacting with preferred brands online. Your customers are also more empowered with technology and expect control and certainty (trust) when doing business online and with mobile devices.

Check out the complimentary webinar and whitepaper just published by the EIU entitled "The digital company 2013 – How technology will empower the customer." The co-sponsors of the paper are AT&T, Concep Global, Habeas, Nokia, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SAP and WebEx.

Both webinar and white paper provide invaluable information that was packaged from quantitative and qualitative research (businesses and consumer trends) that I'm sure will stimulate a few great ideas and help you get ahead of the pack. Maybe it will even enable you build a strong business case for more budget and a promotion!

—Erick Mott of Habeas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Spencer Kollas of StrongMail Systems

Type the phrase "centralizing email marketing" into a search engine and you'll be served up an impressive number of results (at this writing, about 247,000). And it's no wonder—email marketing continues to rank among the most popular tactics that marketers use to reach their audiences.

The arguments for centralizing are compelling: Managing emails through a single platform enables companies to not only more effectively manage their brand and good sender reputation, but it's also much easier to manage the frequency of communication—no one wants to frustrate their audience to the point of unsubscribing. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

Not so fast. According to JupiterResearch, only 38% of companies have a single department handling email communication—while 24% have six or more. With all the benefits of centralizing email marketing, why aren't more companies taking this approach?

For some companies, it may come down to resources and priorities. For example, within very large organizations, email is used to communicate with many different audiences—employees, partners, end user customers, and prospects—among others. Each of these audiences has different expectations for how they should be communicated with and likely, a different group managing that communication stream.

Because email marketing was often developed as a grassroots effort within each group, it's not unusual for larger organizations to be actively using several different email platforms to manage their campaigns. In these instances, transitioning to a completely centralized approach requires almost Herculean effort.

However, in the absence of a completely centralized approach, there are still things you can do to streamline email communications and ensure a positive experience for your audience. Here are three specific tips that are reasonably quick and easy to implement:

1. Develop and share an email marketing calendar.

Wherever there's a risk of message crossover, establish a marketing calendar to track these campaigns and assign a calendar owner. Although the owner is ultimately responsible for keeping the calendar updated, all groups should participate in the calendar development and notify the owner if campaign dates shift.

My team uses a web-based calendar hosted on our intranet site; however, tools such as Google Calendar or even an Excel spreadsheet are simple, no/low-cost alternatives.

2. Ensure that all stakeholders are on all campaign seed lists.

Whether you're sending a campaign to a house or rented list, be sure and add the appropriate people to your seed lists. You may want to send test seeds to a smaller group for review and feedback, and then to a larger group for live campaign drops. This is additional insurance that everyone is aware of what messages are leaving the building.

3. Share examples of campaigns and results at cross-functional monthly or quarterly reviews.

At least once a quarter, get together and share examples of campaign creative and results. Even if you're mailing to completely different audiences, best practices are sure to emerge that you'll want to apply to your line of business.

If you work for a large organization, the idea of centralizing your email marketing may seem difficult, if not impossible. But by doing a little detective work and implementing some quick fixes that don't require a lot of administrative overhead, you can do a lot to improve the quality of your email communications and set yourself up for more formal centralization in the future.

—Cheryle Ross, the eCommerce Marketing Manager of Xerox Corp.

*Cheryle was invited to be a blogger for a day after sharing her thoughts in our Voices from the Email Evolution Conference post.

Much has been written in the blogosphere about the strange interview Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave at SXSW last week. A highly enthused audience combined with a poorly executed interview to create a fairly bizarre scene. The audience apparently took charge and relegated the interviewer, Sarah Lacy, to the role of observer. I wasn't in Austin last week, but Joshua Baer, Datran Media's general manager of emerging media, was in the audience and reported back that the interview was indeed out of control. I wish I had been there to witness.

I have been taking special interest in all things Facebook over the past several weeks, as I have been hard at work coming up with strategies for companies to employ when building social networking applications and messaging users who have installed these applications. I believe that the rapid adoption of social networking sites is creating a huge opportunity for emarketers to message some segments of their audience in new and exciting ways. Marketers who are slow to act, or are more skeptical about the power of these networks, however, may be in for a rude awakening.

It is no secret that Facebook and other social networks are changing the way some people interact on the web. For hard core social networking users, these sites have already replaced web portals as the hub of their online experience, and supplanted their email inbox as the primary vehicle for staying in touch with their friends and the world around them. This is a simple fact.

I am not saying that Facebook will replace email as the dominant social networking application for everyone—email is the original social networking application, and by far the most popular—but I am here to report that it probably already has for some segments of your list. And don't assume that it's only the underage segments. Charlene Li's January 7, 2008, Forrester Research "Youth and Social Networks" slides indicate that while the young certainly engage with these sites at a deep level (62% of those surveyed managed their online profile at least weekly), older members managed their profiles only slightly less frequently (54% managing at least weekly). Online social networking is not simply a youth phenomenon.

If you spend a few weeks immersed in a social networking site, you may understand why. Sharing photos is a pleasure, communicating with friends is easy, and marketers/groups only communicate with their users by sending useful, relevant opt-in messaging.

As email marketers we must be at the forefront of communicating with social networking audiences. These sites represent new inbox opportunities and it's our duty to determine how best to leverage them on behalf of our companies, clients and users. We are well versed in efficiently segmenting audiences and executing relevant campaigns, now we need to figure out how to extend our reach to all inboxes, or risk missing the boat.

How many of you are focused on the social networking sites? Do you have strategies in place for messaging these users? Has your company tested a Facebook strategy and gleaned interesting results? Either comment below, or email me directly at neinstein@datranmedia.com with your story, I am quite interested in learning more, and will incorporate any comments I receive in a future post on the subject.

—Nicholas Einstein of Datran Media

JupiterResearch reports that 62% of email campaigns are sent from more than one department in an organization. At its worst, 24% of emailers are sending from six or more departments. We know our internal email policies and procedures, but do our recipients and ISPs? To them, we're one company in the inbox. One organization communicating with them about promotions, order confirmations, passwords that need to be reset, and more. Likely, that email looks different and derives from a variety of different systems. We have no insight or management into how much email they get, what it looks like, and if content is integrated.

Email centralization is the answer. Coordination of every email stream makes a consistent communication in the inbox. By centralizing, we can manage email frequency by type of message, maintain consistent branding across messages, better understand domain deliverability, communicate with customers at their stage in the purchase cycle with our company, and much, much more.

Every day, I work with emailers looking to centralize their strategy and vendor relationships alike. Sometimes it's a long process of seeking for email programs and streams then getting multi-department buy-in. However, more often it's a relief to pass this task over to marketing. Marketing teams show revenue benefits of cross-sell in transactional messages and the cost reduction inherit with reducing multiple vendors. Overall, the recipient wins in a centralized strategy as we emailers move closer to the inherit benefits of one-to-one marketing.

—Tricia Robinson-Pridemore of StrongMail

In the marketing and advertising world, the consumer is in control. Understanding consumer drivers is critically important in driving success regardless of what role you have. When you overlay personal consumer drivers with channel specific and multi-channel marketing impacts, not only you will you succeed in the eyes of your customer, but you will also drive the relationship you have with them to the next level.

Recent research released by digital publisher Zinio and the Harrison Group enables marketers to go somewhere they have not been able to go before: into the minds of digital consumers. Attend this webinar to hear the latest benchmarks and findings captured for readers of digital magazines. But don't be deceived! While the study appears to focus on insights around digital magazines, this data is imperative to understand if you have or ever plan to advertise in a print publication or online, if you use email to promote book or magazine subscriptions, or if you send email.

The Digital Consumer—How Email and Digital Impact Marketing Choices
Hosted by the Email Experience Council
Thursday, March 20 at 1pm EST/10am PST

Speakers:
Jeanniey Mullen, the Email Experience Council's founder and executive chairwoman and Zinio's global EVP, CMO
Chad White, director of retail insights and editor-at-large at the Email Experience Council

–>REGISTER NOW for this no-cost webinar!

When the DMA's email marketing council merged with the Email Experience Council last year, we maintained the eec name in large part because many of us believe the consumer experience would increasingly take center stage in differentiating email marketers. We also fundamentally believe that if marketers focus on building an exceptional email experience they will not only develop deeper, strong relationships, but they would sell more—further accelerating the enormous ROI attributed to email. Our hope is that this council continues to provide our members with the tools and guidance needed to build exceptional email marketing programs. That guidance—which includes all our research, best practices, educational events, advocacy and the sharing of ideas—has no doubt been helpful to many of us and has often positively impacted our email efforts. However, we still have much to do, particularly as it relates to being able to learn from each other and showcase great email marketing practices that drive results.

That is why I would like to start the New Year off with a new series for this blog entitled "You've Got Email." Each month, You've Got Email will highlight great email marketing programs from the consumer's perspective. I'll dissect best-in-class email practices ranging from exceptional preference center practices to compelling win-back marketing programs taken from a review of real email messages sent from hundreds of brands. I'll show the good, the bad and the ugly in hopes of inspiring you to do better. Best of all, because I am an independent consultant right now and don't need to worry about alienating a client or potential prospect, I'll be refreshingly honest in the hopes of pushing many of you to do better.

To be clear, I completely understand that many of you reading this still face some very significant data and operational challenges that prevent you from doing the kind of email you would love to do. However, in my experience, very few marketers have taken the necessary steps to bring about the changes needed within their own organizations to evolve their email communications. How many of you have really spent the time building a customer-centric marketing strategy, or leveraged cross-functional customer-facing teams to inform your email marketing strategies or tactics? Or even audited your existing company-wide email marketing initiatives? Be honest—you haven't—because if you had, we would be seeing a lot more great email marketing. So let's make this year the year we leave the excuses in the office and focus less on spam and deliverability and more on the customer. Because when you build a great email customer experience that is timely, relevant, wanted and valued, those old issues almost fix themselves.

Finally, I want this blog and column to be interactive, so send me your questions, challenges and even marketing programs you admire or want evaluated. In February we'll focus on building great email preference pages. Till next time,

—Michael Della Penna

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.

We're happy to unveil the schedule for the Email Evolution Conference, which is being held in San Diego, Feb. 12-13. This initial schedule includes speaker details on our four exciting keynotes:

1. Pete Sheinbaum, the CEO of Daily Candy, will be speaking about his company's successes with email.
2. Jerry Cerasale of the DMA and Eileen Harrington of the FTC will discussing the state of privacy and marketing laws in the U.S. and abroad.
3. Dylan Boyd, one of the main people behind eROI's blogs; Tamara Gielan, the author of the BeRelevant! blog; and Chad White, the author of RetailEmail.Blogspot, will be talking about our blogging efforts, why we do what we do and where we get our ideas.
4. And JupiterResearch's David Daniels, ExactTarget's Chip House, Microsoft's Craig Spiezle and the eec's Jeanniey Mullen will be…well, it's difficult to explain. But it's sure to be unforgettable.

Outside of the keynotes, the conference is organized into three tracks:
- Fundamental, which is geared toward the Email Deployment Manager/Coordinator;
- Intermediate, which is intended for Interactive/Direct Marketing Managers and Directors; and
- Advanced, which is for Executive Marketing/Advertising Leads and CMOs.

We've all been to conferences where we sat in sessions that were either totally over our heads or didn't tell us anything new at all. The three-track format is designed to ensure that all attendees are getting information tailored to their expertise levels. As you can see from the agenda, the sessions cover a wide range of email marketing topics, from acquisition and list management to multichannel marketing and our charity work with the Women's Bean Project. It should be very educational and a lot of fun.

We'll be releasing more details about sessions, events and speakers in the weeks ahead. We have lots of cool things planned, so stay tuned.

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

Yesterday's eec email drove quite a response! If you didn't read the introduction which talked about the realities of errors when you work with email, and the positive learnings you can extract from a not-so-good situation, you missed a good article and should read it when you have a chance.

For those of you who read the intro, we were thrilled to receive lots of replies from people in the eec community who shared their stories of disasters, recovery plans and QA policies. Chad will be blogging about those collective learnings next week.

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Being the eec, and always approaching our efforts with a test to learn/push the envelope strategy, in yeterday's email we specifically put an invalid link in our main call to action ( update your profile). We wanted to see who would catch the ironic messaging (and who is clicking through).

We would like to congratulate Dylan Boyd from eROI, Rachelle Johnson from iSpectrum Marketing, and Denise Chenier from Relevant Communications for taking the time to email us about the profile link. The three of you deserve a round of applause for helping us to research the impact of certain types of errors in emails. We plan to include the impact of errors in next week's blog posts as well.

Have a great weekend!

Jeanniey and the eec Team

Before DMA07, we solicited questions from our members and subscribers, promising to post them in our booth at the show and recruit email experts in attendance to answer those questions. We got some great questions and tons of great answers:

1. How important is it for email creative to match the same look and feel as the order page/landing page?

Marc Pitre, Wampower.com: It's critical to keep the branding consistent between emails and landing pages. Both the creative and the message itself must be consistent to be impactful to the end viewer. It's too easy to dilute your message, so keep it consistent.

Andrew Osterday, Premiere Global Services: Landing pages are often ignored or an afterthought, but can have a strong impact on conversion. The flow from email to landing page should be seamless in both messaging and look and feel. Consider custom landing pages rather than linking to the site.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Very. Especially in promotional messages and prospecting. Be sure that the offer in the email is front and center—don't make me scroll. Using a custom landing page can improve conversion rates up to 50%. Definitely worth the investment in optimizing landing pages—they are the fulfillment of the promise created in your email message and it should be a seamless experience.

Michael Fishers, Alterian: It is very important—lack of matching in look and feel produces confusion, feels uncoordinated and impacts response accordingly.

Joel Book, ExactTarget: Providing creative continuity between the email and the associated landing page is vital for driving response and conversion. According to Forrester Research, "92% of business decision-makers go online to research products and services before buying offline." By using email to deliver relevant offers to customers, marketers are accelerating the buying process. The key is to make it easy for the customer to buy—having consistent look and feel for email and landing page achieves this objective.

2. Do the same elements found in traditional printed letters (salutation, closing, signature, p.s.) work for emails?

Melinda Krueger, Krueger Direct: Yes, to the extent that they reflect a personal, one-to-one approach to communication. Corporate "billboards" are easy to ignore; personal correspondence is not. Consider the "voice" and use the personal pronoun!

Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso: Yes, depending on personalized and relevant the message is. Personalization doesn't necessarily mean name, but rather actual content.

3. What do you consider best practice when it comes to accessing and changing email preferences? On one hand, it has to be easy for subscribers to go and edit their subscriptions. On the other hand, no one else than the subscriber should have access to change the subscriber's information. Do you recommend a login, a verification email with required action before changes take effect, a notification email notifying the subscriber that changes have been made, etc…?

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: The simplest means is to include a link in the subscriber's email so that only they can click through to the preference center/update profile page. For sites that link registration (e.g., an ecommerce site), you can link the two processes. A notification email that confirms the changes is always a good idea.

Jeanniey Mullen, Email Experience Council and OgilvyOne: The preference center is a critical element of a successful email program. It can increase the life and engagement of your consumer. Keeping access to preference centers secure is critical but so is keeping access simple. Most companies offer encoded links to preference centers that allow you to bypass the logon elements. If you are using a secure center, password retrieval features are key.

Joel Book, ExactTarget: The key to using a preference center to gather customer needs and interests is to ask for only that data which is needed to deliver relevant and timely information through email. It is critical that you explain why you are asking for this information, how it will be used, and how the customer can update his/her profile. Remember, you are building trust.

Melinda Krueger, Krueger Direct: Consider a 1-2 punch. First capture the impulse to subscribe, then, as an optional second step, ask for more information. Consider offering an incentive (tied closely to your email value proposition) and explain that you are asking to avoid sending irrelevant emails.

4. Is there a proven happy medium between images and text in an email? Do too many or not enough images reduce response?

Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso: Email marketers today need to design their emails with the assumption that their recipients' have their email clients set with the images turned off. This means that the recipients should be understand the gist of the message without its images. Images should be used to enhance text, not replace it.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: The "happy medium" is per industry and depends on both your content and the reader in which the person will be viewing the email. For example, a B2B email that's likely to be read on a Blackberry should be all or mostly text. But retail emails where product images are so vital should be mostly HTML.

5. How can you tell if an email is being read in a preview pane only then deleted?

David Daniels, JupiterResearch: If someone clicks in a preview pane, can you hear them? It is all about behavior. If there are no clicks, there's no engagement, so attempt tactics for reactivation (survey, sweepstakes, etc.). The only real way to determine if an email has been read is by clicks.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Great question! Technically, there is probably not a way to get 100% pure data unless you put a "pixel" that is triggered by the scroll. However, you could track performance by proxy in one of two ways: (1) by putting a "morse type" link at the top (visible even when images are suppressed) that promotes the offer and "opens" the email, or (2) by analyzing clicks on text links below the fold which are not visible when images are suppressed. Frankly, I'm not sure why this measure is valuable if your preview pane is optimized, it will drive engagement, not a deletion.

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: Open rates are tacked via a tracking 1-pixel image. So if images are enabled and a reader "views" the email (whether it is opened or not) it will count as an open. If images are blocked and the email is viewed in the preview pane (or fully opened), it will not count as an open. As a result, click-through rates are a much better gauge of email activity.

6. Can a newsletter sell or is it better for branding?

Jordan Ayan, SubscriberMail: Email marketing is about building relationships. If you approach it as a sales medium, you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Can you sell with email? Absolutely, but for long-term success, you have to focus on delivering relevant content that highlights your brand and keeps recipients wanting more. Then they will give you permission to sell them electronically.

Kara Trivunovic, Premiere Global Services: A newsletter can sell if it is done right. The newsletter should be editorial in nature, with a majority of the content being relevant, value-add information. If sales copy is going to be included, it should be done as a soft sell, wrapped in editorial when possible.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: Yes! Optimize to do both: (1) Educate customers about the full benefits of the products. (2) Engage subscribers to interact with your company, website, sales team, blog etc. (3) Lead prospects down the sales cycle by educating and asking questions.

7. Is it practical/realistic to budget for file growth from viral marketing? Can we count this as a tactic, or is it just "either."

Michael Salin, M.J. Salin & Associates: Yes! Emerging marketing genre are heavily based in viral practices…word of mouth, social networking. You should test and quantify viral programs – consumer talking to a consumer is the highest/strongest marketing communiqué. Quantify the send and free creative is a way to promote the idea.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: You can definitely budget for viral growth. In general, you can expect pass-along rates of 1%-2%, but it depends on the prominence of your send-to-a-friend links and how often you encourage readers to forward your emails. For instance, some retailers have "friends and family" event emails where part of the messaging encourages recipients to forward the discount offer to others. Doing emails like that will boost your pass-along rate.

8. If no legitimate ESP will allow the use of purchased lists in their system, how do data brokers and email appenders who focus on this market stay in business?

Craig Swerdloff, Postmaster Direct: Our experience has been that top-tier ESPs will send for lists that offer list rental, assuming certain requirements are met. They include explicit permission from recipients, proper list hygiene, good reputation scores, and compliant/unknown user rates within allowable thresholds.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: The owner of the data sends the message on your behalf—so the initial mailing is from the data source inviting the subscriber to opt-in for email from you. Many marketers who send mail in-house, use internal append very successfully. There are best practices to ensuring your sender reputation is protected.

Loren McDonald, J.L. Halsey: List brokers manage the email databases for companies whose list members have agreed to receive third-party offers. The emails are sent "from" the list owner to the list member. Once the subscriber opts in to specific a marketer's program, they have given permission to the marketer. At that point, ESPs will allow the company to send to the subscriber.

9. What is the single most popular offer that drives people to register and share their information? We are desperately trying to collect emails from our customers and it's been very challenging.

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: As is true in all direct marketing, offer something perceived value for free. But the question should really be around how you can construct a powerful email experience that will entice and engage your prospects. While many will sign up for something that is free, your response and ROI will only come when the email program itself has consistent value.

10. What is the right frequency for retail email programs? It seems like many retailers are at 2x+ per week. Does not mailing at that frequency hurt my chances?

Austin Bliss, FreshAddress: Unfortunately, there is no "right" frequency. You should send on a schedule that provides value to your recipients—e.g. if you have daily sales, you can send daily. But if you have nothing to say 2 times a week, you shouldn't mail at that rate because you will have incurred complaints/unsubscribes.

Chad White, Email Experience Council: There are lots of factors to consider here, including the frequency at which your products tend to be purchased, the content of your email (both promotional and service-oriented content), the length of your email, etc. For example, Blue Nile emails once a month, recognizing that jewelry is not a frequent purchase. Home Depot, on the other hand, sends once a week, targeting subscribers' weekend projects. And then there's Neiman Marcus, which emails 7+ times a week, engaging its fashion hungry subscribers with info on new products, store events, discounts and video and article content.

11. If you send five or more emails to the same recipient and they aren't opened, does your domain/IP get reclassified as spam by the ISP? This obviously isn't standard across all ISP's. If this is in practice by some, which ones are they?

Stephanie Miller, Return Path: List quality is definitely a factor in sender reputation. Having a large number of non-responders on your file could reduce your "score" among ISPs/receivers. ISPs generally don't publish the "rules" that they use, as publishing them would expose them to abuse by spammers.

HAVE SOME INSIGHT TO ADD? Please comment below, just be sure to include the number of the question that you're answering.

The ExactTarget User Conference unveils the dawning of a new technological day, and re-inspires the market with email.

I attended Day 1 of the ExactTarget user conference (Connections 07) today and … Wow… is the best way to describe the event. With over 650 people in attendance (some were turned away), including over 75 agencies, the conference was a big hit.

Eec member Chip House, from ExactTarget, can do a much better job than me of giving you the details of the event, but I will say this: The commentary on ExactTarget's new partnerships, technological features and approach to email was inspiring.

I was personally involved in a panel on deliverability, which Chip moderated, and he deserves a big bottle of gin for dealing with all of us. After a fantastic opening, the panel was turned over to Craig Spiezle from Microsoft, David Daniels from JupiterResearch and me. We discussed the key issues everyone needed to know regarding the technical side of deliverability and reputation, the marketers' view of relevance, list hygiene and reputation, and the agency/consumer side of how to take all the knowledge and do something productive with it (like increase funding for email in your organization, or integrate delivery into the planning process). The content was top notch and even included, at no additional cost, a very nice improv from the three of us. Let's see, there were jokes about how Craig just never stops talking :-P, how David Daniels not only loves his Bloody Mary Deliverability cocktails, but how he is also God and controls the lights, just to emphasize his points. This was probably the most fun I have had on a panel in awhile—and the content was good too.

I've asked a few of the conference attendees to write me on Facebook and let me know how the next two days go. And I'd like to shout out to the ET team and ask them to share as much as they can from the conference with the eec community. It's great stuff!

—Jeanniey Mullen

Do we KNOW that emails with graphics get better response than text-based e-mails? Could it differ from industry to industry? —M.H. (from Lead Generation Roundtable webinar sponsored by Bulldog Solutions on Aug. 14)

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Jeanniey Mullen: This is a great question, and the answer is totally dependent on the type of email message sent.

From prior research, it appears that truly service-based emails—like welcome emails, confirmation emails and the like (ex. Your online payment has been posted)—do not perform any differently whether they are text or include graphics.

However, service-based emails that have soft sell elements—i.e.,. opt-in to our email program, or people interested in this are also interested in this—perform 2-10 times better with graphics to help focus attention.

As far as general marketing messages, I think this is a great question to re-study in the marketplace. Years ago, many tests were done and in most cases HTML outperformed text. However, in today's handheld world, text may begin to show additional benefits.

Chip House: R.J. Talyor from our strategy team weighed in with some great info we have related to mobile rendering:

—Across six different combinations of text and HTML emails, the highest click-through rates across three client email tests were achieved by maintaining an HTML version while improving the text design. This approach was achieved by maintaining the HTML version while altering the text version to include a brief (1-2 sentences) teaser followed by a "View as a Webpage" link after.

—With the increase of smartphones in the market (current penetration is 7%), sending an email with the most flexibility is imperative. Sending as HTML or text only can alienate or frustrate subscribers whose email client or device can only display in one or the other.

—Based on testing with three email marketers (one B2C marketer; two B2B marketers), we recommend sending in multi-part MIME with the text version optimize.

Amy Bills: The answer to the images vs. no images question isn't the same for every communication. You need to consider the specific communication and call the action of the email. What are you trying to accomplish? What is the recipient expecting? I know it's not the magic answer, but to a large extent it comes down to testing what works for your audience.

Let's say your objective is to initiate a dialogue, engage prospects in a conversation, maybe introduce them to your company. For this purpose, in a B2B context, I do think that images can serve you well. They can be used to call attention to certain calls-to-action, present a polished face for your company. The example I'd use is Marketing Watchdog Journal, Bulldog's monthly sales and marketing newsletter. This is a lot of people's first real communication with Bulldog, so we're very conscious of how it looks and how robust the content is. We've been testing a streamlined version that eliminates all images and some of the design elements. Click-throughs are lower than on our fully designed version.

On the other hand, one of our Web designers loves a simple, text-only email he gets from Motley Fool. As a subscriber, he's already sold on their advice. He wants it succinctly presented so he can choose what he wants to learn more about.

Stephanie Miller: It does vary and in some industries like tech, text works better. This can be easily tested for your file. It's always a good practice to offer a choice of format (text, HTML or mobile).

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

Both SubscriberMail and Blue Sky Factory recently released lists of words that shouldn't be used in emails because they're likely to trigger spam filters. But I see some of these words—like "free" and "discount"—used routinely in the subject lines of commercial email that I receive. If I have a good reputation do I need to worry about content filters? Am I staying away from these words unnecessarily? —S.G.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

J.F. Sullivan: The answer should be no. If you have a good reputation then you do not need to worry about content filters. The actual answer is another question, as in it depends on two things: What's your definition of a good reputation, and which content filter are we talking about?

Everyone in the email marketing (and message security) ecosystem has a different view of what a good reputation actually means. For some it's as simple as making sure they are not on a blocklist; for others it may be that they are in compliance with a specific Sender Authentication implementation. In order to answer "yes" to the question, it may be more useful to provide a checklist summary of what a good reputation constitutes. So, if you can say "yes" to the following reputation aspects:

1. You have a good public reputation (not on blocklists, or have upset any ISPs).
2. You have good legislative adherence (e.g., CAN-SPAM compliance).
3. You have good infrastructure (e.g., DNS, MX records and the like).
4. You have good identity (e.g., you have a correctly configured SenderID record).
5. You have best practices (e.g., list scrubbing, opt-in, etc.).

…then yes, you do have a good reputation so you will not need to worry too much about content filters. And while your good reputation will work, say, 80% of the time, your actual delivery will still depend on the content filter you encounter to some degree. A subject of much longer blog entry for another day…

Rob Fitzgerald: You always need to be aware that filtering exists, but I don't think you need to be ruled by that existence either. It's interesting to lay out all the various releases, of all the various words that shouldn't be used within in an email, and see how incredibly long that list is. Sometimes it makes me wonder how you can actually put a string of sentences together without actually using any of them. Practically speaking, you have to use some words that may be "known" filter words. I don't think that should give you pause to run the campaign for fear of a lack of response. We've sent out many campaigns with the word "Free" on them that have performed very well.

I tend to look at it this way—it's all about moderation. Put together a creative with a lot of words that trigger filtering and it could be adversely affected. Give that same creative a diet, and keep some of those same words included, but not all of them, and I think you'll be OK.

Stephanie Miller: Despite the frequency that I receive this question, there is still no magical list of words to avoid, nor is the use of marketing terms like "free," "discount," "special offer" and "click here" an automatic block. Don't misunderstand. Those words can get you blocked. However, judicious, responsible and clear use of them usually won't.

Why? Because spam filters dynamically update to reflect current market conditions and spammer behavior. The only way to ensure your content does not depress inbox deliverability is to run every email through a series of popular message filters to determine your spam score before sending to your entire mailing list. You can do this through a service or on your own by setting up multiple accounts at different ISPs.

Here's how to optimize your message for response and deliverability: Write the copy as a marketer. Sell. Build the relationship. Clarify the offer. Make the call to action very clear. Then, test it. If you fail the spam filters, adjust it. Before you hit send, even if you pass the filter test, be sure to give your message AND subject line a "smell test." If your readers or subscribers will think it's spammy, so will the receivers. If you are using all capped, repetitive words that filters watch like "FREE SHIPPING THAT'S FREE" or using strange punctuation like ***NOW ON SALE***, then you are likely to be blocked.

Chad White: Inspired by this question, I did a little real world research and found that major online retailers have used many of the "dirty" words on SubscriberMail's list of words to avoid using in subject lines. How many have they used? They've used 27 of the 100 in the past two months alone. Some of the words—like "Free," "FREE," "Offer" and "Buy"—they used a LOT. So it's clearly possible to use these no-no words in subject lines under the right conditions. Based on that I'd say that you should explore using them but test to make sure your emails are getting through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Amy Bills

Aside from testing, are there any minimal requirements that any email marketer can follow that will improve display on a Macs, PCs, and/or mobile devices? Or are there completely separate standards for each email client? —K.G.

The Voices of Email had this advice:

Deirdre Baird: First, ensure the HTML is valid according to either W3C or WDG standards. This is the single best protection for universal rendering.

Second, try to ensure the integrity of the message (branding, calls-to-action, etc.) are communicated even if images do not display. While alt tags are useful, they do not display universally in all email clients, so do not rely exclusively on alt tags as an alternative to image display.

And third—and this is more of an FYI—some mobile readers display the HTML version as text instead of displaying the Text part of a multi-part message (as many assume). If a significant percentage of recipients are assumed to be using mobile devices to read emails, then consider not only the text part of your multi-part but also what the HTML part will look like when rendered as text. If possible, ask customers at sign-up if they'd like a "mobile version" of the email and/or create a mobile version that folks can subscribe to.

Chip House: The goal is properly recognizing the differing needs of your subscribers and customizing the content and format to best meet their stated or observed needs. The first way to do this is to ask their preferences (HTML or text) at the time you capture the opt-in. If you don't get that information, then you have to try to optimize for how you want your subscribers to use and/or respond to your communication.

Let's look at mobile first. The challenge appears bigger than it actually is. For example, when you look at the total possible number of rendering combinations for mobile devices, which vary by mobile phone manufacturer, top ISPs, mobile data providers and mobile operating systems, you get 3,780 unique rendering possibilities. However, what we've found via our research is that 56% of users are less likely to read commercial email and/or newsletters on their mobile phone as they are on their laptop or desktop. The message there is you need to optimize the email for both the mobile and laptop/desktop computer environment. In fact, our testing showed that commercial email sent using multi-part MIME (includes both text and HTML parts) was the most versatile format. By this I mean it is most likely to render as HTML only for those systems that can display HTML well, and render as text elsewhere—such as on many mobile devices. However, the advantage of multi-part MIME over text here is that when a user saves or flags your email to look at it on their desktop/laptop, they'll get the graphic-rich HTML version you'd love them to see—which is also likely to deliver a higher click rate.

Testing the rendering of your email campaigns across a number of email clients and ISPs is the best way to overcome the difference in those systems. We use Pivotal Veracity's eDesign Optimizer heavily for this purpose, which allows for preview in a number of different mail clients (including Mac). Each has its own unique page break and image rendering rules, for example, which need to be optimized around. With a little testing, however, you'll be able to get your HTML in tip-top shape for nearly all recipients.

Stephanie Miller: Let me focus on optimizing for mobile. What actually renders on a PDA or Smartphone is determined by four factors:
1. The operating system and software (e.g., Palm OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile)
2. The service provider (e.g., Sprint, Verizon, T-mobile, etc.)
3. The device itself (e.g.: Treo, Blackberry, HP IPaq, iPhone, etc.)
4. The user's settings

Yes, it's messy. And totally different than reading email on a PC. There is a temptation to just deliver text to mobile users, but I don't recommend this. First, because it's hard to know who is a mobile user (there is unfortunately no "sniffer" that tells the sender what device is being used (PC vs. mobile). Second, because mobile users are not just mobile users. They also read email in their PC-based email clients, where a nicely formatted HTML email still yields higher responses in most cases.

The best bet is to rely on Marketing 101—Know Thy Customer. Ask subscribers if they regularly read your newsletter or promotions on their PDA. Many mobile device users sync their device back to the PC and read newsletters there rather than on the road. If you believe that many of your subscribers read your email on their mobile device, then offer a mobile-friendly format (simple HTML with text) that can be selected at sign up or in your preference center. If you believe that many of your subscribers are sometimes mobile readers but often PC readers, then format your HTML (particularly the masthead and preview pane) to minimize the number of image links and other code that readers must scroll past to see the actual content.

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

Participation in the eec's Roundtables makes you smarter, better connected, and more in-the-know, beautiful and recognized in the industry. But who's got time for that when we can barely get through the week? Who are these people who seem to be able to find time in their own hectic schedules to move the industry forward? This week in the Spotlight is one of them—Lauren Skena, co-chair of the Research & Intelligence Roundtable.

If you are like most people, you can't bear to recycle or throw away those National Geographic magazines—there is something faintly unpatriotic and painful about parting with the iconic yellow-bordered covers. Of course, keeping the magazine in a corner of the cupboard is not the same as reading it and acting on the articles. Behind that citron-hued brand is an active Society that wants to involve you in nature, community and world preservation.

Given the ability of email marketing to connect and engage with subscribers, it's no surprise that email has become a primary method of communication for the National Geographic Society. Lauren Skena, manager of e-marketing, runs the email program from the D.C. office and despite the strong brand and reluctance of many readers to part with their stacks of printed magazines, she faces the same issues we all do when it comes to creating email relevance, governing frequency, going multichannel, optimizing deliverability and battling for mindshare in the inbox.

Lauren says she acts as a gatekeeper between subscribers and the 25+ divisions of the Society that use email as a form of communication. "It's like an in-house agency," she says, "where the multichannel direct marketing is handled for all the National Geographic departments from TV, film, online, catalog and the magazine and website editorial groups to special projects like our current Genographic project."

There is a lot for email to do. While the mission of the Society is to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge while promoting the conservation of the world's cultural, historical and natural resources, the Society also wants to sell subscriptions, films, educational guides, maps and travel adventures.

"I often have to be the one to say, 'No, you can't have that date for an email campaign,'" she says in regards to keeping a central email marketing schedule for the society. "All of the divisions and the philosophy of the Society center on protection and respect of our members and subscribers so most of the groups understand the need for frequency caps, respecting permission grants from other divisions to essentially 'borrow' their names and limits on the types of messages that drive ISP complaints.

"It's all one brand, but email in particular creates opportunity for the divisions to work together. We do a lot of cross promotion in newsletters," Lauren says. "We don't allow use of another division's permission group, but, for example, we encourage the Travel group to include Adventure Magazine messages, etc. Email and the database are a strategic asset for upselling and creating memorable customer experiences overall."

Leading one of the DMA's Email Experience Council's roundtables was a natural fit for Lauren, as the DMA brought her to the National Geographic Society in the first place! Prior to her current job, Lauren worked for the DMA, marketing events to members. At a DMA conference, she met the Society team and agreed to join just as email marketing began to be a focus area in the direct marketing group.

"I've always been a fan of National Geographic and, personally speaking, The DMA was supportive of my joining such a good member and great organization," she says of the transition. "It's natural for me to want to come back and participate, as I know firsthand the good work the DMA does in the community."

"The Society supports my involvement 100%—I always hear support and ideas," she says. "My director and vice president always encourage involvement within the community, including active participation in applicable groups, speaking opportunities and networking events."

Lauren chose the Research & Intelligence Roundtable because she knows how much research can be helpful to members, and frankly, saw some holes in the current benchmarking and available research that she hoped to fill. She wants to know what consumers are thinking and feeling about email—and to turn that information into actionable insight that email marketers can use today.

"I'd also like to publish benchmarks using the membership as an industry panel. I see a quarterly report that addresses problems that email marketers are trying to solve and identifies what is missing in the available data stream," she says. "Ultimately, I'd like this Roundtable to help make the DMA research and Annual Report more relevant to the email marketing community."

The R&I Roundtable has some major goals that are achievable and aspirational, but Lauren and her co-chair, Todd Purcell of American Express, want to create opportunities for members to do both small as well as larger involvements. Lauren plans to split the Roundtable into small working committees of two or three people, so that the work is manageable.

"There is so much that we could do, and it can get overwhelming," she says. "It was hard to put the mission together! But separating out the projects will help us achieve more and allow each member to have a rewarding experience."

"There is room and opportunity for all types of members," she says. "For example, my co-chair, Todd, brings a wealth of business experience as a user of research, and our companies are so vastly different it allows our two perspectives to balance and expand on each other."

Lauren also takes full advantage of the eec affiliation, speaking on a panel at the DMA's Email Summit this past May and serving on the Advisory Committee for the February event. The newly merged eec is in a powerful position, she says. "It's good to have everyone together, and to have one larger group that is working on one set of initiatives, rather than two groups working on similar initiatives. Frankly, the DMA has to be more involved in the online space and this is a great way to push that forward."

Lauren's advice to all of us is to get involved. "Get involved and see what is available," she says. "The networking possibilities alone make it worth being active in a Roundtable. You'll meet people who may be able to help you along the way. Plus, you get referrals, vendor reviews, all the whitepapers and research."

"Show this to your boss and offer to be involved," she says. "You just can't get this sort of career and program value with a passive membership."

How exciting! Our first all-hands call to action. I need to ask something of you. Please take 2 minutes to help educate Al DiGuido on the mission and value the eec provides our industry. You can reach him here (it would be great if you shared your letter to him by posting it in a comment below). Today, he wrote a very inaccurate ClickZ article regarding our mission.

For those of you who are newer to the eec, our history is very rich and built on the highest levels of integrity, and geared toward leveraging email more strategically and intelligently in order to create increased impact in the industry. Apparently, Al didn't feel it was necessary to spend any time on our site or with our members before he wrote his column.

I've already taken the time to email Al. Here is an excerpt from what I sent him:

There are clearly a number of eec efforts that you are significantly misinformed about. There is specifically one area of the eec that would be very close to your heart based on your philanthropic interest. Maybe in your next column you could cover the good that is being done in our industry.

Over a year and a half ago, 26 people from various companies joined forces to do something to unite the email marketing industry and "celebrate the ROI value and impact that email has through education and evangelism." We entered into this effort with a conscious focus on proving email's ability to drive sales and increase brand advocacy by selecting a not-for-profit organization and volunteering our time and resources to demonstrate the value and impact email offers. We did something good for a number of people, all by using email.

Today, these efforts and our eec community has grown to become the largest global email marketing network there is. We still keep a special attention on selecting and supporting one not-for-profit company through the use of email. We still keep a very close and familial way of interacting with each other in a manner which DOES increase returns. And we do it all by collaborating with other groups, agencies and networks—not by bashing them.

Please let Al know that you value the community, initiatives and research generated by the eec. Thank you for your help in keeping our community strong.

Sincerely,

—Jeanniey Mullen

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are we doing to make things easy for consumers?

—David Atlas