Email Marketing Results | Email Experience Council

Email Marketing and Social Media Are Top Areas of Investment in 2012

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 by eec Blog Contributor

eec Platinum Sponsor, StrongMail, today released the the results of its “2012 Marketing Trends” survey which provides unique insight into how businesses plan to budget and prioritize marketing dollars in the New Year. Conducted in November 2011, 938 business leaders participated in the global survey.

Survey Highlights

92% plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2012
60% plan to increase email marketing budget; 54% social media; 37% mobile/search (tied)
45% cite data integration as primary email marketing challenge in 2012; 43% lack of resources/staff; 40% content management
48% cite increasing subscriber engagement as top 2012 email marketing initiative; 44% improving segmentation/targeting; 32% growing opt-in email list
68% plan to integrate email marketing with social media; 45% with mobile; 17% with search

Marketing Budgets Remain Healthy; Email and Social Media Attract Increased Investment
Email marketing (60%) and social media (54%) were cited as the top two areas for increased marketing spend. According to the survey, 51% of businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2011, and another 41% plan to maintain current levels. Only 8% of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets, which is a slight increase over the 7% reported in last year's survey. Other areas of increased spend included mobile and search, which are tied at 37%. Direct mail (28%) and tradeshows (23%) are top targets for decreased spend.

Subscriber Engagement is Top Email Marketing Priority; Data Integration is Top Challenge
The top email marketing initiatives for 2012 are increasing subscriber engagement (48%), improving segmentation and targeting (44%) and growing opt-in email lists (32%). Data integration is key to achieving these top priorities, but it is also identified as the primary email marketing challenge in 2012 (45%), followed by lack of resources (43%) and content management (40%). These opposing data points represent an opportunity for email service providers to fill the gap with relevant services.

Marketers Focus on Integrating Email Marketing and Social Media
More than two-thirds of business plan to integrate social media and email 2012, versus 44% for mobile and email. The strong ties between email marketing and social media are also emphasized by the 47% of businesses that plan to increase investment in using email to drive growth in their social media channels, such as corporate Facebook and Twitter pages. The next popular areas of investment are batch promotional (44%) and newsletter (39%) programs, followed by real-time lifecycle marketing programs (35%), with an emphasis on winback (68%) and welcome (59%) programs.

Marketers Unclear on Value of Mobile Marketing
More than a third of businesses plan to increase their investment in mobile marketing programs such as mobile apps (30%) and SMS alerts (20%), but there is a lack of consensus on the primaryvalue of this emerging channel. Building customer and loyalty (35%) was identified as the top benefit, followed by expanded reach (29%) and awareness building (28%). However, this is offset by a similar percentage still trying to figure it out (24%) and a smaller percentage citing no value at all (7%).

"While email marketing leads the pack in terms of increased of investment in 2012, the data also reveals that marketers need to overcome key challenges around data integration and resource constraints," said Christopher Marriott, vice president of agency services at StrongMail. "Whether managing and optimizing existing email marketing programs or enabling integration with social media and mobile, there is a real opportunity for full-service email marketing providers like StrongMail to help companies get the most out of their interactive marketing investments in 2012."

Survey Data
Full survey data is available at: www.strongmail.com/2012marketsurvey

Four Common-Sense Tips for Using Social Tools in Email Marketing

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by Marco Marini

We exist in a best-practices driven industry. Email marketing has many variables and it's a constantly changing landscape with ISPs and regulations changing rules on us on a consistent basis. We crave the tried-and-true rule, the best practice known to deliver the best result, the sure thing.

We have plenty to learn and use, to be sure! Search for "email marketing best practices" in Google, and you’ll find far more than you could ever digest among the search results.

Best practices for using social tools in email, however, are yet to be clearly defined. In fact, given the pace of change in social media, with constant Facebook updates and new technologies like Google+, these so-called best practices might forever elude us.

Those proven techniques we can turn to with confidence, however, are common sense and come from the email marketing world. Today I offer you four common-sense tips for using social tools that will help you maximize your results: 1) Offer great content. 2) Be very, very clear. 3) Test everything. 4) Go both ways.

Offer Great Content

No matter how much the email marketing industry changes, this common-sense tip will always be. And when you're seeking sharing to social, your content has to be so great that people want to and willingly share it. That idea isn't new. We've strived for "share worthy" content in the past. We had another name for it was all, because what we want back then was a forward. Now we want a share. Great content leads to greater use of your social media links by your subscribers who want to tell their network about your email.

Be Very, Very Clear

When you include social media buttons, be sure to ask for the action you want and let the person know why they should click. A plain, standalone Facebook button will garner only so many clicks compared to a Facebook button with words that ask for action and offer a benefit: "Like us on Facebook for fabulous fan pricing." Everybody knows what a Facebook button is, but not why they should click on it. Ditto for Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social media buttons.

In addition, words help you to be clear on the purpose of a button. A button for sharing is not the same as a button for liking, after all.

Also be sure to put the buttons where they make the most sense...for your subscribers. Figure out when/where in your email your subscribers are ready to take action. This you might only be able to determine by testing, which takes us to...

Test Everything

Is there a magic spot for your "like" button that will generate the highest number of new Facebook fans? Probably. Can I tell you where that is within your email? No. As far as best practices on technical details when using social media tools, these can only be determined by you. If I could sit here and tell you placing the Facebook icon in the lower right corner will drive the most "likes" on your Facebook wall, I would. But I can't. It all depends. Testing is the only way to optimize placement of social media tools like a Facebook button for your particular business and audience. In fact, testing is the only way to optimize every aspect of your social media tools, from where you put the links to which links you offer. So test. Everything.

Go Both Ways

Yes, using email to drive subscribers to your social media sites or to share is smart marketing. Also be sure your email to social works as your social to email, as well. Your social sites can promote your email subscriptions and offer email signup forms.

And One Last Note...

Even when integrated as part of your marketing matrix and going both ways, email and social differ. And taking a customer relationship into the social realm can certainly alter customer expectations. Once you’ve crossed the social media line, you might need to revisit the tone and personality of your email communications. You've taken the relationship to a new level of intimacy via social channels, and using a corporate or more formal tone in your email marketing might run counter to the warm fuzzies a subscriber now feels for you.

Following these four tips should help you determine your own best practices for using social tools in email...meaning those practices which work best for you and your goals.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Make It a Mobile Mentality

Thursday, September 8, 2011 by Marco Marini

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

We have to have a Mobile Mentality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're not limited by mobile, only required to think differently. Your email rendered on a smartphone or PDA is not an end in and of itself, only one step in the process you ultimately hope will lead to a conversion. Where does one go from an email? To a landing page...

Mobile-friendly emails need mobile-friendly landing pages. Otherwise, you might lose that hard-won click through. Some might wait until in front of a computer before clicking through, but if someone wants to take action while on the go, we want to make it easy for them by designing a landing page that works on a mobile device. With that in mind, here are a few tips for making landing pages as mobile friendly as your emails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Learn More About the 2011 Responsys Big Australian Report

Tuesday, September 6, 2011 by eec Blog Contributor

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

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

Other key findings include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Best Practices” & an Email’s Effectiveness

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 by Rory Carlyle

In the email world, we marketers hear a lot of things about: relevance, timely delivery, engagement, consistency, click-through rates, the infamous 43-to-1 ROI, all the “ility’s”, and all this geeked-out mumbo-jumbo around making our messaging effective. For about two years now I’ve also heard about how ‘email is dead.’ Well, world, it’s not.

Know how I know?

Big brands continue to push emails out at an ever-increasing pace and social media continues to rely on email to keep constant communication with crowds of fans and customers (follow notifications, friend requests, network activities, event updates, weekly activity summaries, top discussion headlines, etc-etc)

Since the beginning of February 2010 I’ve received 53 emails from BananaRepublic.com. That’s almost 2 emails a week for 26 weeks of this year. Too much emailing? Maybe for some. I’ll probably end up with 120 to 130 emails from them at the end of the year, which works out to be roughly 2.5 emails a week and I’m not really concerned with unsubscribing.

Why does this message cadence not bother me, but maybe cause others to unsubscribe?

1. I know this channel gives me 30-40% off on each send

a. Sometimes up to 50%

2. Shopping online has “Free Shipping Every Day”

That sounds like a good deal to be getting twice a week, right?

However, given the chatter about the “relevance,” “ility’s,” and always testing “creative” subject lines – don’t you think a huge brand like Banana Republic would do better than these stats?

1. 40 of 53 contain this exact phrase, “+ FREE Shipping Every Day” in the subject line – 75% of mailings.

2. 28 of 53 contain “__% off” in the subject line – 53% of mailings

3. 42 of 53 contain a single or multiple ALL CAPS words in the subject line – 79% of mailings

4. 11 of 53 come from the same email address with a different From Name – 21% don’t contain a consistent From Name

Also, the cadence of emails month-over-month is inconsistent. Does this look weird to you?

1. Feb – 3 mailings received

2. March – 3 mailings received

3. April – 7 mailings received

4. May – 17 mailings received

5. June – 15 mailings received

6. Up until July 15th – 8 mailings received (on track for 16)

I understand that January through March is close to the end of the year holidays and New Year’s Eve, but almost tripling cadence in May after a handful in April seems like a serious ramp, yes? I’m sure tax season, summer, and Easter play into the ramp, but an almost 3x ramp none-the-less.

Check out the day preference too:

Monday wins the day for sends followed by Thursday and Friday. Overall, the sends are spread over 7 days a week sans a few step-sends on Saturday. My guess: Banana does what drives purchases, not what “experts” recommend. Monday – drive customers in when foot traffic is naturally slow, Thursday and Friday are pre-weekend deployments to keep the stores busy.

So, What’s the Point, Rory?

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

Looking at this data and then watching the industry evangelize practices just shows that there’s a disconnect between the reality and the spin. If you’re out there spinning email marketing best practices and you aren’t actively sending emails that apply all of your practices – stop it. Banana Republic is a great example that the only constants in their subject line messaging are “Free Shipping” and “__% off”. Everything else (application of subject line best practices, steady time of send, predictable day of send, and all other attributes of “setting expectation”) is off-kilter.

Which means, don’t over analyze your email marketing. Find your own best practices and stick to your guns. Test until you find a great spot and then leverage that configuration until something better shows up. If you’re always testing you’re not always focused on generating revenue. Test, Optimize, Execute – then milk it for a minute.

Last thought: why can’t you use email as a CPM-type channel? If Banana Republic gets a dismal open rate on emails but continues to increase revenue after each deployment, email still works. If the subject line, “Save 45% today in stores + FREE Shipping Every Day” drives sales, who cares about opens?

Viva la Email.

- Rory Carlyle
BombBomb

What Are the Standard Features Any Email Marketing System Should Have? It Depends

Tuesday, July 5, 2011 by Marco Marini

If you ask which standard features to look for in an email marketing system, you’re asking the wrong question. The correct question is what do you need. Here’s why…

"It depends."
Recently at a marketing conference, one of the speakers stated that consultants are notorious for starting their answers with phrases like, "It depends."

Clients might think that’s a runaround. It’s not. Quite often, the answer to a client’s question isn’t, “If you do X, you will get Y”. Quite often it’s, “It depends.”

That’s also the way to start off any answer to any question about the features to look for when considering an email marketing system. It depends on what your needs are.

If choosing an ESP or email marketing system meant looking for standard features only, we likely wouldn't have over 100 ESPs to choose from. If there were standard features that narrowed down your choice and made comparisons easy, many of us would likely be out of business.

In reality, email marketing systems come with a wide range of capabilities in order to fulfill a wide range of business requirements. As a result, comparing email marketing systems or ESPs is like comparing apples to oranges.

If you can't simply start with a checklist, then where do you start? You start with your requirements. That is your checklist. The question shouldn’t be, "What features should we look for?" Rather, "What features do we need?"

Two factors you must consider
There are two factors you must consider no matter the ESP or email marketing system. One is the deliverability rate and the other is uptime. No matter the provider or system you choose, the deliverability rate and the uptime have to be as high as possible.

Uptime is easy to determine: Ask.

However, with deliverability "it depends" because it will vary for everyone. If one ESP gets a 97.3% deliverability rate for one customer and list, it doesn’t follow that they’ll achieve that same deliverability rate for another company with a different list. To make sure you choose an ESP or system with the highest deliverability rate for you, try and take your choices for a test drive, using the system to mail to your own list to test deliverability.

Unfortunately there isn't any one checklist that’s going to help you find the features you must have, but finding an ESP with an uptime of 99.5% or higher and high deliverability among its IP addresses is key to finding an ESP that is going to serve your best long-term.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Build vs. Buy: The real cost of building an email solution

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 by Marco Marini

The trend for several years now has been away from building and toward outsourcing, yet some organizations still think building an in-house email marketing solution is the way to go. The market offers numerous ways to build your own in-house solution. But what's the real cost?

Some organizations have so much IT talent that they think they can build their own email marketing system. A perceived cost savings typically drives this decision. Would they consider building their own print shop? Probably not. It's a matter of sticking with your core business vs. being your own vendor.

There are so many possibilities for email platforms these days. ESPs have been around for over a decade. They are a tried-and-true way to go as the "buy" option for companies preferring to outsource the infrastructure. If an ESP isn’t for you and your organization plans to build, I offer some factors to consider to help you determine the real cost.

There's a real cost to building that must be considered. It's a capital expense vs. an operations expense. But building comes with operational expenses too…and the cost of not having certain competitive capabilities.

"Building" can mean a variety of approaches to your email marketing system. It might mean you're buying a server from StrongMail or using an online solution like Amazon Cloud. It can also mean you’re building from scratch. There are sending solutions where sending is hosted but you still have to do the front end. No matter the route you go, if you build, you will have to manage the hosting, maintenance, firewall, integration and more. Much more. When you “buy,” you’re outsourcing the infrastructure and getting invaluable additional benefits as well, including deliverability, currency and relevance-enabling tools.

Deliverability
Deliverability is critical. It directly impacts your email marketing ROI. If an email isn't delivered, you have zero potential for an impression or sale. In fact, you don't even get to work a little brand awareness in there. An undelivered email might as well not exist. When you buy—meaning outsource—your email solution, you get a team of postmasters who will keep your email deliverability rate up. When you’re doing this in-house and you run into an email delivery problem, you’ll either have to hire a consultant to help or be willing to dedicate your IT team’s time to figuring out the problem – which is not easy to say the least.

Currency
Plus there's staying current. ESPs are constantly evolving, continually adding new features to keep up with email deliverability requirements and consumer expectations. If you build your own, you are essentially freezing yourself in time. For some organizations, the incremental cost for email goes away. But you still have IT costs. It's a business decision and there are tax implications as you consider capital vs. operating expenses.

Relevance
To compete in the inbox in 2011, you must have relevance-enabled tools. Those tools used to cost thousands of dollars. Today they cost hundreds...when you outsource. Relevance-enabled technologies include trigger-based and event-driven emails, lifecycle and drip campaigns, and dynamic content. You can build out these capabilities, but the undertaking is massive. And massive means pricey because you're talking payroll costs and lost opportunities while you wait for your solution to be built and deployed.

Top-tier ESPs have this relevance-enabling technology built in to their platforms. That means "buying" instead of "building" lets you take advantage of these competitive advantages from day one.

Relevance also requires website analytics resulting from a recipient interacting with an email. Many web analytics platforms can track this at a macro-level, but the real value comes when the data is tied to a specific email address. If you don't have the tight integration required to give you insight from web analytics, or integration with your CRM system, you won't be able to do truly relevant, targeted email marketing.

How long will it take to build and deploy?
If your IT department says it will take six months to build, plan on 12 to 18 months before you're fully functional with all the features you want. Can you wait a year and a half for a good email marketing system? While your competition is emailing your target market, you won’t be…or at least you won’t be at the level of effectiveness you want, meaning your competition will likely win out.

Don't forget the payroll costs
Consider the staff time and associated payroll costs. If you're going to build and maintain in-house, you’ll need at least two staff people trained so you'll always have someone on hand if problems arise. In addition to the IT aspects of building and maintaining an email solution, at least one of your employees must have expertise in email areas like privacy, working with ISPs, deliverability issues, protecting your online sending reputation, being CAN-SPAM compliant and more. If you plan to design your own emails or use rich media email, you’ll also need someone who is an expert and who will take into account rendering issues in different email clients and on handheld devices too. That’s three staff people. What does that add up to when you add in all the benefits, taxes and other costs of adding a body to your payroll?

Unless you are sending hundreds of millions of emails monthly, outsourcing is cheaper...and safer. Building might look cheaper at the outset, but the cost is going to be higher than you anticipate. If email isn't core to your business, outsource. If it is core to your business, absolutely critical, maybe build. Maybe. But consider every single cost.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Save Time and Money by Integrating Your Email and Blog

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 by Marco Marini

Email marketing and blogging share one core feature that neither can exist without: content.

Creating content takes time and effort. For email, you have offers to formulate, copywriters to hire, drafts to review, words to tweak, calls to action to polish. For blogs, you have keywords to use, writers to manage, and frequency to maintain.

You can save yourself time and effort by repurposing content between your email marketing program and your blog program.

When you create something once and use multiple times, you’re getting more bang for your buck. You can also get more out of user-generated content, and other types of content like video and photos this way. Since blogs require a lot of content to be effective, you want to tap into every source possible, including your promotional emails and your informative, newsletter-style ones.

At ClickMail, we archive every email newsletter on our website, write a follow up blog summarizing the article and provide a link on our blog to the archived issue. We’ve served our list by providing valuable content with the newsletter, we get the SEO benefits of the additional content by posting the newsletter on our website, and we get the blog content, additional SEO benefits, and a link back by posting a blog. We’ve accomplished all this by simply repurposing one newsletter article.

You can also save money while generating blogs and emails by tapping into your customers for free content. For this user-generated content—which tends to be more relevant to your audience, as well as objective—solicit feedback post-purchase using email. Use any testimonials in your blog, email newsletters, and promotional emails; or let customers contribute to your blog and draw from that content to repurpose it for email content, too.

To save even more time and money by repurposing content, think beyond posts and articles to announcements, webinars, podcasts, video, photos, press releases, customer testimonials and reviews. Consider all content potentially email and blog-worthy with edits to make it appropriate to the channel. If it works in your blog, it can probably be repurposed in your email. If it works in your email, it can probably be repurposed for your blog.

Also remember that your blog works as an SEO tool, helping people who don’t know about you to find you. This may lead them to sign up for your emails when they see your blog on the search results page, click through to it and then your website, and like what they see. So repurposing email content in your blog might just help you grow your in-house email list, too.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

We Need Your Help - Take the eec Engagement Survey

Wednesday, November 10, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

Measuring and monitoring subscriber engagement is a hot topic in the email marketing world these days.

The eec’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable has launched a survey to identify how email marketers are addressing subscriber engagement within their own email programs.

Individual responses from the survey will be kept confidential and survey respondents will receive aggregate summary results to see how they stack up. The survey should take about ten minutes to complete – take the survey now.

Thank you for your participation!

Time for a Better Discussion Around Best Time to Send

Tuesday, October 5, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

Despite some of the buzz you might be hearing, don’t think the “best time to send” discussion can be tabled as no longer relevant. To maximize your email marketing ROI, you must still discover the day and the time that give you the highest response rate and return on your investment.

Are you already operating off of some “best time to send” assumptions? As marketers, we want to default to industry best practices and well-publicized case studies. But as email marketers, we are able to—and must—test, not take for granted. Rather than rely on the results of others, we must discover our own. And there’s a real danger in following the crowd. When they say Tuesday is the best day to send and then everyone sends on Tuesday, then what? Tuesday leads to crowded inboxes.

The fact is, the industry doesn’t determine your best time to send; your audience does. And you can only learn that by testing.

Beyond knowing it’s the audience who decides, you must also be clear about what you’re measuring. Number delivered? Opens? Click-throughs? Conversions? Total revenue? Then instead of asking “What’s the best time to send?” the question could be, “Which day and time gives us the highest (insert metric here)?”

Know what your metrics really mean. If your metric is revenue, remember that an email opened is not necessarily an email acted upon. The recipient might be curious enough to look beyond the preview pane, but not ready to buy.

This is especially true with mobile devices. Sure, mobile means 24x7 access to email but that probably doesn’t impact your optimum send day. Just because people see their email 24x7 doesn’t mean they respond to it or even really pay attention to it. A relatively safe assumption is that people are less likely to respond to a marketing email on their PDA or BlackBerry. They’ll wait until they are back at their computer to actually respond to—or buy—something.

Also keep in mind that depending on how your audience is segmented, you might have more than one best time to send. For example, the stay-at-home mom can get your email during the day because she’s online and checking her inbox while the kids are at school. But the working mom has to get it after the kids are in bed and she’s catching up on personal email before she turns out the lights.

To determine your own best time for sending by testing, first be clear on your goal. Which metric are you aiming to improve? Then test to that metric, segmenting as much as you can to optimize the delivery day and time for each of your different audiences.

One of our clients is a national home builder. Through testing they’ve learned Friday is the best day to send emails about open houses because they know their audience is planning to spend Saturday touring new home models. Or consider the outdoor equipment retailer that also sends their promotional emails on Friday afternoons. They’ve learned their young, male audience doesn’t plan their weekend activities until Friday afternoon, so the retailer times their emails to coincide with when their audience is beginning to think about Saturday’s fun. If these two companies followed the crowd, imagine the negative impact on their email marketing ROI. They’d be emailing on Tuesdays…and getting totally ignored.

The success of these email campaigns is testament to the importance of knowing when your audience will be most likely to respond to your promotional email. Maybe it’s time for a better “best time to send” discussion, not an end to the discussion.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

The Very Real Risks of Aggressive List Growth Tactics

Wednesday, September 15, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

We all want a big email marketing list, but we also want to respect subscriber interests, protect the assets of our email program and maintain a solid foundation for revenue growth. There is a bit of a high wire balancing act sometimes when our organizational goals include having *both* a large and active file.

At this month’s meeting of the eec's List Growth & Engagement Roundtable, a group of industry practitioners discussed a common – and often uncomfortable – situation of email marketers everywhere. The boss says in that big, growly voice, “Get me a big file of email subscribers - now!” Yet, the types of tactics that grow a list aggressively can have real risks for response, loyalty and inbox deliverability – which puts your entire program in danger. No level of growling will change that result. Here are some ideas from the group about how to approach this somewhat tricky balancing act.

“I remember a million member push program from one of our clients that was successful in building a big file, but created inbox deliverability and sender reputation problems for many, many months,” says Nancy Harris, Sr. Manager of Deliverability at Fishbowl. A restaurant wanted to get one million subscribers in their restaurant e-club (a loyalty program). The promotion was intended to encourage current members to invite lots of friends in order to win a big cash prize. The new member would receive a free meal for joining the program. “It worked on one level,” Nancy says. “It was successful in reaching a lot of people and they did reach their goal of one million subscribers..

“The problem was that the list quality was terrible. We immediately saw blocking and blacklisting due to unknown users (bounces) and complaints, which took us more than a few months to correct.   Not only did this client have ongoing inbox deliverability issues, but there were also questions about the quality of the people who became new members. They were not really interested in dining at this restaurant regularly, or receiving ongoing email communications from them.”

If that restaurant did the math, they may find that this program was successful in the short term. It cost them some number of tens of thousands of dollars to set up and run the promo and they got a million new members. Remember, too, that email is a lot cheaper to send than printed postcards – and it’s very efficient in terms of time to market, so this ROI was returned quickly. The cost per new member was very small.    Short term, that could make sense. However, long term, they destroyed their sender reputation and did not receive revenue from the majority of the new members – these people were not committed to the restaurant and did not frequently dine there.

This business cycle issue haunts many an email marketing decision, says Stephanie Miller of Return Path.   “Short term, you can broadcast to your file and you earn revenue. Long term, however, you may see serious consequences, all of which have a real cost.”

Consider these factors in determining the cost of the new subscriber acquired through a sweeps or promotion like the million member push described above:

Depressing your sender reputation due to high complaints (which limits your email marketing opportunity for all subscribers by limiting access to the inbox) – this could be a drop in inbox placement of 10% - 50% of your file every time you mail;
Churning your file – people who leave by complaints, unsubscribe or filtering – and need to be replaced at some cost per subscriber;
Lower loyalty of good customers by bothering them with irrelevant promotions – the cost of this could be a penny a person or it might be higher depending on the type of brand relationship you need for your business;
Losing the opportunity for future email marketing because they unsubscribed, complained or are just ignoring you from now on.

“When you calculate the true cost of the aggressive list growth program, factor in these costs as well. And then make a business decision based on long term customer value and satisfaction,” Stephanie says.

“We run into this balancing dilemma when we suggest a list hygiene or list cleansing audit,” says ExactTarget's Nate Romance who is also co-chair of the Roundtable. Most clients see value in doing a re-engage and send a win back campaign to the portion of the file which is non-active, Nate says. “However, many will opt for reduced frequency as opposed to suppression of those subscribers who have not responded in a long time. That allows them to keep a big number for list size.”

Nate says that when he starts to discuss these issues with marketers, some see the value in keeping “dead” or “nearly dead” records on the file because with a baseline of zero, any interaction will be a rise in response. However, usually it takes more than just continued hammering at the inbox door, he says. “Sometimes sending the best of the best offer that month rather than weekly will increase response rates,” he recommends. The rest of the group agreed, however, that dialing back frequency has not ever significantly improved response rates. “The risk to your sender reputation is real when you keep non responsive records on the file,” adds Stephanie of Return Path. “I never think that risk is worth the small chance that a couple people will respond at some future point.”

Nancy from Fishbowl adds that a similar practice is common when marketers try to build a list quickly – they sacrifice quality for quantity. “I see a lot of what I call ‘deceptive list building,’” she says. This is when a marketer does a sweeps or promotion with vague email permission just to build the file quickly. “That lack of express consent can be a problem for deliverability and response rates and has a real cost for determining the value of such a venture.”

Such practices often are not well measured, and so it’s hard to determine the impact – good or bad. “When someone gets more aggressive they might do campaigns that are intended to build the list quickly and then they don’t track by source so that we can’t always associate the promotions with complaints and response (or lack of),” Nate from ExactTarget says. “I always recommend that we tag these folks or track source so that in six months we can check the quality of the list and the real success of the campaign.”

“It’s so interesting that we marketers are good at thinking about LTV of a subscriber when we pay for them – as in a media buy or PPC search campaign,” Stephanie adds. “But when we acquire email subscribers through these “organic’ measures, we don’t always track by lifetime value, we track by the initial sign up.”

Nancy agrees. “The value of someone when they are new to the file may be different than the same person six months down the road. We often see that there comes a point, especially for smaller files, that the file stabilizes at a certain number because of loss. New subscribers come in at a steady pace, but subscribers are also lost due to list aging and fatigue,” she says.

That is a very good argument for making sure that list growth is an ongoing commitment, and not a onetime promotion.

What are you doing to consistently grow your email file with active subscribers? Do some of these points resonate? Please comment below, or join the eec List Growth & Engagement Roundtable to participate in future discussions like this.

- Stephanie Miller
Vice Chair, eec
VP, Global Market Development, Return Path

3 Questions for Ken Magill, Journalist & Email Marketing Columnist

Thursday, August 26, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

As he launches his own newsletter for the email marketing industry, Ken Magill gives the eec his thoughts on the state of the state – with or without his commentary.

Q1. Why does the email industry need another newsletter?

I actually don’t see it as “another” newsletter. I see it as re launching something I’ve been putting out for several years, except this time I own it. I’ve been covering e-mail and other forms of online marketing for going on 14 years now and, as a result, can offer perspective and insight that others can’t.

As long-time readers know, I’m not afraid to offend, am not afraid of backlash—in fact, I really like backlash—and will write about subjects others hesitate to touch. I don’t do it just to stir up trouble, though stirring up trouble is fun.

This industry is still fledgling and has a lot of growing up to do. The fact that the first question out of so many marketers’ mouths about email is “Where can I buy lists?” is proof positive of that. Controversy keeps people’s interest and robust debate is the straightest path toward industry maturity.

Q2. What has changed in the email world during your "quiet period"?

The discourse has been a lot more civil:)

Q3. What's the coolest thing you see happening in email in the next year?

I think making predictions is generally a prime opportunity to make an ass of oneself, so I generally don’t make them. When I have, I’ve generally been wrong. In 1994, I predicted the new VW Beetle would flop, for instance.

That said, I think it’s safe to say marketers will increasingly embrace engagement email—or messages sent based on previous interactions—as vendors prod them in that direction and they begin to see the undeniable results. That will be very cool.

Pull the Trigger for Targeted Messages and Higher ROI

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 by Marco Marini

When do fewer emails mean higher ROI? When your emails are hyper-targeted and truly one-to-one. That doesn’t mean you need a huge team of people contacting customers one at a time, like the telemarketers of old. It only requires you to tap into existing technology and know-how to make it happen.

I like to say “happy birthdays mean happy profits” because birthday emails are a perfect example of this concept. When someone subscribes to get your emails, you get their birth date along with the other data you gathered about them upon signup. That date goes into your system and on or near the customer’s birthday, depending on how you have it configured; an email is automatically triggered offering a birthday bonus of some kind, like a free ice cream cone if you work for a chain of sweet shops, or a free movie rental if you’re marketing your video stores.

These emails get a remarkably high response rate because they are so targeted…and therefore, welcome.

You’re not limited to birthday emails, however, nor are triggered emails only appropriate for B2C marketing. Triggered emails come in three types—recurring, transactional and threshold—and can be used in a variety of circumstances:

A recurring email can be a birthday email like we’ve described above, or could happen a certain period after a purchase, to remind a customer that it’s time to renew
A transactional email can be one email, like a follow up to a purchase or download, soliciting feedback, or even a drip campaign following a purchase, giving tips on how to use the product (and also up-selling)
As a threshold email can occur when a customer’s behavior has gotten to a certain point, say if they’ve purchased three songs from one album, you offer a discount on the album

In the past, marketers resisted moving from batch-and-blast to this kind of targeted, triggered approach because the cost seemed prohibitive. Between building the API and the software to handle the emails the technological cost made any chance of an ROI a slim one. Today, however, all top-tier ESPs and many secondary ones offer triggered messaging capabilities. That means you can make your email marketing program even more relevant without increasing your staff or IT costs.

Before we dive into the benefits and how-to’s of triggered emails, let’s review the terminology:

Triggered means triggered by an event: A trigger based message is one sent out in response to a certain action within an email or on a website
Targeted means segmented, with dynamic content, so different recipients get different email content and even colors and graphics
Drip marketing is a series of messages triggered by an event, such as a purchase or whitepaper download (also known as lifecycle messaging)

You’ll also need to define the event or events that trigger the website. The event might be a click on a website, time spent on a page with no shopping cart activity, a coupon download, or a link clicked in an email. Or, to return to our earlier example, it might be date driven like a birthday or anniversary.

One-to-one triggered emails have a much higher ROI so even though you’re sending out fewer emails, you’re making more money off the targeted ones. But what do you need to do to be set up for that kind of triggered email?

1. An ESP or in-house solution that enables triggered messaging

2. An API to automate the flow of data from your CRM or in-house database to your ESP or internal ESP

3. A content library, so your system can take from it to place the appropriate message in each email

Also consider that these types of emails typically use a transactional delivery engine vs. a marketing delivery engine, i.e. point-to-point transmission vs. one-to-many broadcast.

The one caveat happens when you start to collect the data upon which to define your rules. Do not ask for too much. You can ask for up to four pieces of information upon sign up, but any more than that, and your abandonment rate will soar. Instead, be very clear what information you want to start out with and only ask for that (based on what you can really use). Then over time you can ask for more information, and append that information to that subscriber later.

The idea of this kind of targeted email marketing might be daunting, but it’s really not difficult given today’s technology and pre-existing services. As a result, your triggered email messaging can be as sophisticated as you want to make it, to get the most ROI from your highest value customers. For example, your system can score a customer based on behavior, such as purchasing a higher-priced item, and offer an exclusive and limited price on another item as a reward.

Marketers have to start automating their email campaigns based on customer behaviors, such as shopping cart abandonment. Companies who’ve done this have experienced higher click through rates and conversion rates, without increasing staff costs. Alternatively, automating email programs around customer behaviors with hyper-targeted messages will result in a higher email marketing ROI.

And it leads to a higher engagement index, which means more of your subscribers are engaging with your email, which in turn will give you a better standing in the eyes of the ISPs…which in turn will improve your email deliverability and get you into more inboxes…and so on and so on and so on.

Sounds pretty happy to me!

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

30 Email Marketing Do's & Don'ts From 3 Experts

Thursday, August 19, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

This week, the eec was a proud partner for ClickZ's Connected Marketing Week. During yesterday's eec workshop, Optimizing Your Email Campaigns, 3 email experts led by eec founder, Jeanniey Mullen, gave us their top 5 do's and top 5's don'ts of email marketing.

Below you'll find the complete list from:

Sundeep Kapur, VP, Strategic Marketing, NCR eCommerce
Debbie Kane, Director, Web & Partnership Marketing, Active Interest Media
Aaron Smith, Director, Professional Services, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company

Ask yourself, "why should my consumer sign up for my email?"
Use intrigue versus incentive.
Build up 'reverse preferences' (track what people do & don't do).
Run subject line tests.
Use social media to increase open rates.
Test.
Analyze.
Use web and email designers.
Use clear calls to action.
Keep important content/messages above the fold.
Do respect image blocking and the preview pane.
Do render tests.
Do create an iron-clad email production process with tasks, individuals, and even days of the week associated with each milestone.
Do run a test with every send – and (this is key) – share your results with your stakeholders for short-term visibility; archive them for long-term learnings.
Do ask yourself these three questions:
       (1) What is this email about?
       (2) Why do my subscribers care?
       (3) What do they do about it?

Don't

Don’t assume something works.
Don’t convert print promotions directly to email campaigns.
Don’t overcomplicate your email creative.
Don’t over-mail your list.
Don’t under-mail your list.
Don’t make subscribing – or unsubscribing – too complicated.
Don’t try to say too much with a single email.
Don’t silo email – remember your other channels, both offline and digital.
Don’t forget about the landing page!
Don’t assume what worked yesterday will work today, or tomorrow. Keep testing and evolving!
Don't ignore your reports & front line.
Don't badger the lifeless (don't over-mail your non-responders).
Don't say everything in the subject line.
What should I do next? (no call to action)
Don't forget to be timely.

Remember - the don'ts will lead to do's!

Powerful Purchase Data That Can Reel In Revenue

Wednesday, August 4, 2010 by Kristen Gregory

Plenty of databases house valuable information that could help marketers do a better job with their email programs. Here are some data points to consider bringing into your email platform to take your marketing up a notch:

1. Last Purchase Date - I believe this is perhaps the most powerful data field of all as it has tons of revenue-generating and relationship-building marketing potential. Ideas for messages based off this date (and all can be automated) include:

product review requests.
“getting started” guides or how-to tips for using the product purchased.
product care messages (tips to maintain or clean the product).
coupon for next purchase.
product refill requests (after estimated use time as passed).
non-purchaser series – sending “We miss you” emails with increasingly valuable offers to push folks back into purchasing after a certain amount of time has passed.
non-purchaser series for those who have NEVER purchased (i.e. the last purchase date field is empty).

2. # of Purchases Made By Contact - This can help you identify single-buyers and try various tactics to push a second purchase. You can also identify your most frequent purchasers and create VIP offers just for them.

3. Lifetime Value/Total Purchase Amount - This data can also help you recognize and segment out your top spenders and create a strategy specifically for them. Make these customers feel special. Welcome or invite them into an elite group where they can get access to products before others, receive exclusive offers, have a voice in product development (perhaps they get to vote on product features/colors!) and so on.

Sephora has a V.I.B [Very Important Beauty Insider] program where customers who spend more than $350 in the calendar year get royal treatment (10% welcome coupon, access to products pre-launch, special holiday gift cards, exclusive offers and more). You can set up a similar program and target folks who are near or on their way toward that VIP amount, reminding them of the benefits. (Sephora isn’t currently doing this as far as I can tell.) Doing so could spur more purchases through YOUR business versus a competitor in hopes of reaching that elite level. To run this kind of program, you’d want to track the total purchase value over a calendar year.

4. Average Sale Value (or at minimum, last purchase value) - Knowing what customers spend on average can help you be smart about the offers you present. If someone spends $110 on average every time they purchase from you, you can feel confident they may take advantage of a deal offering a free gift or free shipping for purchases over $100 or you can try to push them a bit further than normal with a special offer at a purchase of $150 or more.

5. Dominant Product Category - If someone tends to focus their purchases in one of your categories - say outdoor & gardening out of all your home décor options or only clothing in your bike shop - you should consider targeting that customer with messages featuring that area of displayed interest.

The revenue you can create by implementing this kind of savvy marketing will likely be well worth the effort/investment necessary to bring this data into your email platform.

Have you already set up some messaging based on these data fields? What results are you seeing?

- Kristen Gregory
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto Software
@kristengreg

Why the Email Industry Needs New Tracking Metrics

Monday, July 26, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

Email marketing has made significant improvements over the years. As a whole, the industry has improved email marketing strategy, message design, targeting and delivery. But one area that hasn't improved is tracking metrics. ESP's are still using the same metrics that have been in place for years. It's time for that to change.

For the past 2 years, the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable has been developing a new set of email marketing measurement standards called the Support Adoption of Metrics for Email (SAME) project. The new standards are a dramatic improvement over original metric definitions. They provide more insight into the true results of a campaign and paint a more accurate picture of your campaign performance.

The reasons why the email marketing industry needs the new metric standards are numerous. They include:

The ability for all marketers to benchmark their results against the metrics from any delivery platform
The ability for the industry to aggregate results knowing that all source data was acquired using the same definitions
The ability to compare data across multiple systems and databases
The ability to better integrate metrics with other platforms, such as CRM system

Because of the benefits of the new metrics, many ESPs are adopting the new standards or are planning to do so. At Email Transmit, we've made an update to our tracking area to provide our clients with access to the new metrics. Our interface now defaults to the new eec metrics and we've allowed clients to continue to view traditional metrics as well.

While implementing the new metrics we've also provided their definitions so marketers can fully understand how the results are calculated. Client feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, as clients are able to get more usable data from their campaign results.

Are you ready for the next step in email metrics? Start by signing the petition, then read the definitions and commit to incorporating the new metrics or contact your ESP and ask them to support the project. Hopefully in the near future we'll all be able to abide by a common set of metrics and have usable industry-wide benchmarks based on the same definitions.

- Adam Q. Holden-Bache
CEO/Managing Director
Mass Transmit, developer of Email Transmit
Connect with Adam on Twitter and LinkedIn

Will ESPs Evolve Into Marketing Automation Solutions?

Wednesday, July 7, 2010 by Marco Marini

A recent article in DM News entitled, “E-mail service providers break the mold” got me thinking about how ESPs have been evolving, adding features sets and functionality, that are beginning to close the gap between the ESP platform and the marketing automation platform.

The evolution of the ESP is to be expected given the changing marketing landscape and shifting customer expectations. The further we move away from batch-and-blast and move toward one-to-one marketing, the more we have to take into account that one-to-one is not as simple as a really targeted and timely message. It means the platform by which it’s delivered too, for example via mobile or a social networking site.

In addition, most top tier ESPs offer drip and triggered email streams and have built-in web analytics or integration with a web analytics platform, two capabilities that begin to bridge the gap with marketing automation software. I predict lead scoring will be next. ESPs are recognizing that they must do and offer more in order to compete with marketing automation solutions like Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot. Marketing automation is like a big tool, a dashboard that gives marketers access to all kinds of information about what prospects are doing when, and where they are in the sales cycle. To evolve into that kind of tool, ESPs will have to offer lead scoring.

Even with their evolution and growth, email is still the core competency of ESPs. Email is—and always will be—the thread that ties everything together. You need an email address to log in to LinkedIn. You get an email when someone contacts you via Facebook. It’s the email that leads to the landing page that provides the web analytics. As the DM News article points out, ESPs are adding other services like database and mobile marketing. Next ESPs will need really need strong lead scoring capabilities, which might mean developing or buying a robust lead scoring solution and being able to tie that back to CRM systems.

Marketing automation excels at lead nurturing before passing those leads along to sales, so those leads are of a higher quality and more likely to result in customers. Compared to the core competency of an ESP(email as thread), marketing automation does a better job of pushing people through the sales pipeline, with more intelligence, more automation and—as a result—more relevance. Marketing automation isn’t only for customer acquisition, however. Used properly, it’s just as good for customer retention.

In short, marketing automation is sales and marketing focused, while your typical ESP is more marketing focused. But down the road maybe an ESP will buy a lead-scoring company. If that's the case, how would it be different from a marketing automation tool?

There is still one major difference, however, and that’s ease of implementation. With an ESP, you can start with email and add on more functionalities as needed. You choose the right ESP for your program, use it properly and you’re good. This ease of implementation lowers the barrier compared to a marketing automation platform.

If you choose a marketing automation tool, you’re gaining lead scoring and marketing sophistication. You’re also signing up for a lot of work upfront in order to use it properly. You have automation rules to set up, processes to define, and more…much more. A recent comment from a colleague drove this point home. She was tardy in replying to an email, and when she did reply, she explained her company is moving to a marketing automation software that had her “frazzled.” As she put it, “It’s a fantastic move, but as with anything the implementation is slowing me down a bit.” At the same time, she recognized the benefit of the solution, stating that the result will be streamlined processes and more qualified leads for the sales team.

In my opinion, due to the complexity and sophistication, a marketing automation solution is overkill for many (or even most) companies. You need to progress to the point where you really need that kind of functionality, so you’re likely better off starting with an ESP anyway.

Can ESPs evolve to the point where they offer the sophistication of a marketing automation solution without losing the simplicity of their implementation? Or will ESPs eventually be some version of a marketing automation software, with all its complexity and benefits?

We even see the need for bridging the gap at our own company. Although we resell almost a dozen ESPs, we also partner with Marketo and Pardot to offer their marketing automation solutions to our clients. No matter what happens with the gap, whether it shrinks or disappears altogether, I believe this trend is a good thing overall. The increased competition will only continue to raise the bar for everyone and it’s our clients and their customers who will ultimately benefit.

- Marco Marini

CEO

ClickMail Marketing

Sending from the Receivers’ Perspective

Thursday, July 1, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

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.

We all need a bit of perspective. We all need to be better at sitting in the other guy’s shoes. Chelsea vs. Manchester? Perspective. Colts vs. Patriots? Perspective. Red Sox vs. Yankees? Perspective. As Seinfeld said, “athletes change teams so often, at the end of the day, you’re just cheering for the uniforms.”

As marketers we also need perspective. We’re supposed to be good at reading and analyzing reams of data to assess what makes our customers tick, then use this to provide more relevant offers and in turn generate higher response rates. Why is it then that we marketers also tend to be a bit thick-headed when it comes to understanding email deliverability from the receivers’ (ISPs) perspective? Many marketers are a bit stuck in their own shoes and fail to realize that ISPs don’t exist to serve them. Their loyalties are to their users. This seems so basic, yet many deliverability challenges can be avoided by marketers if they realized this one truth: The inbox is supposed to be usable, helpful, and optimized for the subscriber – not for you (the marketer).

We (ExactTarget) felt so strongly that we needed to help bring this perspective to light, so we worked with several of the top experts in this industry to create a whitepaper entitled: “Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious about Permission & Deliverability.” We challenged each contributor to imagine they had the chance to corner the CEO and give him a piece of their mind on what the company needed to do differently to achieve better results via email. Contributors from Yahoo, Earthlink, McAfee weighed in from “where they sit” as part of the receiver community, and I think the advice they provided is spot-on accurate and a must read for any marketer needing to optimize their deliverability.

George Bilbrey of Return Path also contributed another insightful letter as part of the document that highlights another often cited area where perspective is needed – the culpability of the ESP vs. the marketer when deliverability problems arise. George says, “It’s worth noting that most inbox placement problems can only be solved by the marketer—not the Email Service Provider (ESP) sending the message. What ESPs can provide is a well-configured infrastructure, which is certainly important.”

Answering the Call for Email Measurement Standards

Friday, June 25, 2010 by eec Blog Contributor

I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable of the Email Experience Council (eec) for the last few months. One of the goals of the Roundtable is to promote a new set of email marketing measurement standards called the Support Adoption of Metrics for Email (SAME). The new standards are a dramatic improvement over original metric definitions. They provide more insight into the true results of a campaign and paint a more accurate picture of your campaign performance.

It’s important that all Email Service Providers (ESPs) adopt these new standards so that we have a common set of definitions industry-wide. Right now its not possible to compare campaign results from one system to another as they don’t follow the same calculations in their metrics. And forget aggregating any industry-wide metrics, even something as simple as an open rate, because that metric is calculated differently by various ESPs.

Earlier this week the Roundtable announced that Email Transmit was one of the first two ESPs to adopt the new metrics standards. Read the press release and the DMNews article, "Inbox Insider: E-mail measurement should be standardized". They also mentioned 11 more ESPs have committed to doing so in the next six months.

We’re clearly at the beginning of a significant improvement in our industry. With the work of the Roundtable members we hope to get other ESPs to adopt the new standards and for other email platforms to use the metrics in their reporting definitions too.

If you’re interested in supporting the S.A.M.E. Project, start by signing the petition, then read the definitions. Make sure your ESP or email delivery platform has plans to implement the new metrics into their system. Hopefully in the near future we’ll all be able to abide by a common set of metrics and have usable industry-wide benchmarks based on the same definitions.

- Adam Holden-Bache
Email Transmit