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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week the Federal Trade Commission announced its approval of a “new rule provision under the CAN-SPAM Act,” and it was a long time coming—fully 3 years after the Commission first issued the May 2005 discretionary Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that lead up to it.

I’m not going to spend time here going through all the rules and “rulings”—they’re relatively straightforward and you can read about them here. Instead, I want to call attention to what I view as the most important victories our industry gained here:

● The FTC preserved the 10 business day opt-out period. In 2005 they had proposed reducing it to only 3 business days.

● The FTC made it easier for marketers to assign a single “Sender” when it comes to “multiple advertiser” campaigns. The perceived “grey area-ness” of law on this issue had been a big concern for many firms.

Concerted industry advocacy—which is so core to the mission of the eec and DMA and their members—played a central role in last week’s final outcome. We are also fortunate that the FTC was so open to hearing our views and so interested in learning about the inner-workings of the industry.

More than a hundred of us submitted formal comments to the FTC, and many even met with agency staff to voice our perspectives and concerns about the NPRM in person. And in the official Federal Register notice detailing the new rule provision, the impact of our collaborative efforts is apparent throughout. See for example, on page 81, where the Commission notes:

…the time period for processing opt-out requests required by legitimate commercial emailers varies, and often exceeds three business days depending upon a number of factors, including the size of the business, the existence of third-party marketing agreements, and the maintenance of multiple email databases.

Approximately 100 commenters addressed the issue of whether the period for opt-out compliance should be reduced. The vast majority—over 85%—opposed reducing the time frame to less than 10 business days.

The FTC may have issued the last of its CAN-SPAM rules but the members of the eec have a lot more advocating to do. We need to get more ISPs up-and-running with authentication, accreditation and reputation protocols. We need more “unsub” buttons and feedback loops.

My co-chair Robb Walters of Costco Wholesale and I would love to hear your thoughts. What else do we need, and what do you think it will take for us to get there? Comment here or email us, and stay tuned for information about our next Advocacy Roundtable meeting.

—eec Advocacy Roundtable co-chair Jordan Cohen of Goodmail Systems

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Ask me what I do for a living. Go ahead. Ask. I love to tell people about email marketing, and so do most of our eec members. So after a lot of discussion and effort, we're proud to announce the launch of the eec Speakers Bureau. The concept is a simple one, but with tremendous power behind it. While most of us in the eec live and breathe (and dream and sweat) email marketing, that's not necessarily the case with all marketers everywhere. Many companies either don't do email marketing or worse, do it badly.

The new Speakers Bureau will match eec members with speaking opportunities at events that without our support would have little or no programming about email marketing. The goal of the Bureau is to spread fundamental best practices by proactively reaching out to communities where our message of responsible, permission-based email marketing can do the most good.

But we need your help to make this a big success. We want to expand the roster of available speakers to be able to provide assistance to conference organizers large and small. Please join the Speakers Bureau and register to be considered for speaking requests in your community.

Additionally, let us know of any conferences or events that would be an ideal platform to deliver marketers information about email marketing best practices. We'll match up the organization's needs with a speaker. We would also appreciate it if you let us know about articles, whitepapers and other free resources related to the topics covered by the Bureau that can be distributed to support and extend our presentations.

Many thanks to everyone on the Communications Roundtable who worked long and hard to get us to this point. We look forward to making the Speakers Bureau beneficial for eec members and the organizations we reach out to, providing lots of information about email marketing at its basic and its best.

—eec Communications Roundtable co-chair Kay Cavender of Silverpop

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

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

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

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

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

STRATEGIES TO RE-ENGAGE INACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During a recent eec Clients-Only Roundtable meeting we got the discussion going with a very simple question: “What keeps you up at night?” We hope the vendor and agency side is listening because what we said—and heard—speaks volumes for unmet needs. Here are our top three issues:

Value Proposition of Email
With marketing dollars being stretched across more investments than ever, virtually all of us have a crying need to re-justify spend on email programs and infrastructure. For some companies, email is still ramping and its value is still not fully established against more traditional media. For others, the need is to reframe email as a great ROI investment against the newer and sexier Web 2.0 capabilities that are diverting attention and budgets from email. And finally some companies need to update or expand aging systems or databases just to keep the lights on.

Since this is the same No. 1 pain point we talked about a year ago, it’s disconcerting that we are still struggling to find a good answer to this key question: Why invest in email marketing over other tools in the marketing mix?

Every one of our agency and ESP partners have a vested interest in helping us get this value proposition right. It’s clear that they all work hard to create evidence to support an investment in their point solution. But that’s simply not enough anymore. The question mark is higher up “in the stack,” as we technology marketers like to say.

Upgrades to Aging or Outgrown Systems
A couple of us are looking to expand beyond our first generation ESP partnerships to support growing use, while other companies need upgrades to their aging or inadequate systems. This forces email marketers to put on their IT hats: writing RFPs, assessing vendors, justifying internal IT projects and all the rest. It’s messy, time consuming and distracting work and in some cases we don’t have the skills we need to get it done. Vendors and suppliers who can make this easier get an inside track to the business. But look back at Item 1 above—if you can’t demonstrate that your solution supports a clear value proposition for email marketing, you might still lose out.

Email Governance
Even smaller companies are complex organizations with unclear boundaries regarding who “owns” various audiences, and especially the data about them: “the house list.” Drawing up business rules for appropriate use of the audiences in our house lists is becoming increasingly complicated and urgent. Fear and greed are driving the big challenge here: Don’t chase off valuable and hard-to-acquire prospects on the one hand (opt outs), but make sure they don’t simply loiter in our database either. This is as much art as science: balancing business needs with the desire to nurture and woo customer and prospects. Here we’ve seen some good work from our outside partners helping to develop and refine contact strategies, but we still need in-house leadership to create protocols and policies that stick. Otherwise we risk falling into frequent debates which can stop campaigns in their tracks.

How would we measure success? A new top three list a year from now!

—eec Clients-Only Roundtable chair Brian Ellefritz of Cisco Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The eec’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable has developed an interactive Excel calculator to help retailers measure the ROI of their acquisition and retention email mailings, including deployment costs, list growth calculations, and more. View a sample of the calculator or download the full interactive calculator from the Whitepaper Room. The calculator is $49 for non-members, discounted for silver and gold members, and free to platinum members. Not a member? Learn more about membership.

What is the status of the FTC’s CAN-SPAM rulemaking and is the agency going to reduce the opt-out timeframe?

It’s already been more than two-and-a-half years since the FTC issued its discretionary CAN-SPAM Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in which the agency proposed, among other things, to reduce marketers’ allowable opt-out processing timeframe from 10 to three business days.

At last summer’s DMA Email Policy Summit, FTC Spam Coordinator Sana Chriss told attendees that “a team is in place,” and the FTC was working on finalizing its rules. However, at the same time Chriss noted that, because the rulemaking is discretionary, it’s up to the agency as to if and when final CAN-SPAM rules are issued at all, and if so what they’d ultimately say.

So will the opt-out timeframe be reduced? Nothing can be said for certain, but it is encouraging that Chriss acknowledged at that meeting that the vast majority of the 151 organizations who submitted comments to the agency in response to its NPRM described operational challenges that would make it overly burdensome to comply with a 3-day opt-out. You can review those comments for yourself here.

Another positive development has been the agency’s December 2007 report to Congress on the current state of the spam problem. In its “Next Steps” section, the document made no reference to reducing the opt-out timeframe, instead looking to technological developments like email authentication, collaborative government-industry initiatives and consumer education programs as more promising anti-spam measures.

So what should marketers do?

● Stay “in-the-know.” Keep in mind that the opt-out period still could be reduced, and closely follow developments on the Hill as relates to any changes to CAN-SPAM. One way to make sure you’re not out in the cold when it comes to knowing what to comply with and how to do so is by participating in the eec’s Advocacy Roundtable! Members can sign up today by shooting an email to Ali Swerdlow at ali@emailexperience.org. Not an eec member yet? Ali can help you with that too!

● Make opting-out fast and simple. Some very reputable marketers have some very legitimate reasons for needing a full 10 business days to process opt-outs, and it’s essential that we preserve the status quo in that regard. That said, for the sake of maintaining positive customer relationships and improving deliverability, we always recommend processing opt-outs as fast as possible. Making the process shorter for your company will also put you on solid footing in the event that the FTC does eventually decide to reduce the opt-out timeframe.

We’d like to hear your thoughts on this subject. How would a reduced opt-out timeframe impact your company and/or clients? Also, has the lack of decisive clarity on additional outstanding CAN-SPAM issues such as “forward to a friend” and “multiple sender” campaigns been an impediment to your marketing efforts? Let us know by commenting below.

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

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