Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Synchronicity Marketing: The Four Essential R’s of Email Marketing
These terms serve as guideposts to ensure your campaign s not only optimized for delivery, but also maximum response.

Silverpop: Unlocking the Secret World of White Listing
Insight for Enterprise Email Marketers

Premiere Global Services: 8 Thursdays 5.0
Cutting edge tips and tricks to help you and your email program reach its maximum potential.

LSoft: Stop Guessing and Start Knowing
Using A/B-Split Testing to Increase Your Email Campaign Effectiveness

ExactTarget: Email Marketing Design and Rendering
The New Essentials

Listrak: Email Frequency
How Relevancy Tactics Changed the Rules

Constant Contact: The What, Why, and How of Email Authentication
What it is, why it’s important, and what you need to do to authenticate your email.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Listrak: Improving Relevancy of Email Campaigns
Simplify Data Capture with Dynamic Profiling

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Michael Della Penna’s debut Email Experience Blog post on The Customer Experience inspired me step through the looking glass and reflect on the positive experiences I’ve had as an email subscriber. My deep thoughts: the Sephora Beauty Insider email program has beauty and brains! How do they capture my clicks? By treating me like a VIP. It’s easy as 1-2-3…

(1) Roll out the red carpet. Want me to join your made-over email program? Send me a gold-lettered invitation. I feel special when Sephora welcomes me—“the beauty elite”—“behind beauty’s velvet rope.”
-->See the email invitation

(2) Give me some swag. If I take the time to give an exclusive interview, I want something exclusive, too. Sephora makes it worth my breath with the promise of super swag—exclusive freebies and insider-only offers, personalized tips and product picks, plus a birthday gift.
-->Check out the preferences page

(3) Send me roses. If I say red roses, don’t send white carnations! Sephora delivers roses: messages that clearly leverage the data I provide. I say I like the Bare Escentuals brand; they offer free Bare Escentuals lip polish. I say I have combination skin; they promote a revival treatment.
-->View an exclusive offer email
-->View a personalized offer email

Only, I don’t know why on earth I would ever have gotten an email about acne products. I swear—I’ve never had a pimple in my life! Ha.

As ever,
Lisa Harmon
of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

Subscriber fatigue is real, and wrecking havoc with your response rates! This is the primary conclusion from our fourth annual Return Path Holiday Email Survey. Respondents told us that relevance is in their eyes, not the eyes of the marketer. More than half (56.4%) of respondents say they receive high volumes of “junk” from marketers—defined as “email from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me.” “Junk” is second only to “spam” (“email I never asked to receive”) which 65.7% of respondents say they receive in high volumes. One-third say that marketers email them more frequently than promised. Most of this email is simply deleted unread, but subscribers do not hesitate to complain about unwanted messages (reporting the email as spam).

Value—like beauty—is always subjective. Surely all marketer’s email programs will have bad hair days, but there is chance for deeper beauty yet. There are some proven strategies to improve the value of email programs:

● Many respondents say they determine the value of each email message by using the subject line (58.6%). Spending more time to create compelling subject lines and test them effectively could make a difference for many marketers.

● The subject line and from line, as well as a consistent schedule of mailing may help boost response. Most respondents simply delete messages they don’t recognize (52.3%) or that they feel come too frequently (29.1%). Knowing and trusting the sender is key to that “open or delete” decision.

● It was encouraging to see that slightly less than a third (30%) of subscribers say they only open messages from brands they know. This is likely from the increased education about phishing and spoofing and spam tactics. However, another 14.4$ said that regardless of brand, they only open if they requested the particular message type. With most subscribers claiming they get more email than they expected at sign up, marketers must be cautious when sharing internal files or adding new message streams to existing subscriptions.

Marketers have benefited from consumers’ love of email. But even email tolerant subscribers don’t consistently read email unless it offers real value—and most consumers have figured out how to block or ignore future emails they don’t want.

Look back at your own Q4 email program. What did you do to engage with subscribers, and create a more compelling experience that breaks through the clutter? The only way to improve revenue from this channel is to create great email experiences over and over again. That means "great" from the subscriber perspective—relevant, timely and at the proper frequency.

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

When asked in a JupiterResearch Consumer survey, just 17% of the online population cited adware as a strong concern that had impacted their use of the Internet in the last 12 months. Moreover, 15% of the online population stated that they had paid for anti-adware software, indicating that this portion of the population that is rightly concerned with ad-tracking and malicious attempts to monitor their behavior are already self-regulating this situation.

Such a do-not-track list is impractical for a number of reasons. JupiterResearch continues to find that consumers regularly clear their cache and delete cookies in order to protect their surfing behavior. Beyond that engrained behavior, the notion of computer sharing at home, work and school makes the notion of a do-not-track list a logistical nightmare. This reality coupled with the comparison to the do-not-call list that the document cites is not accurate. The Do Not Call list works particularly because of the friction involved with setting up a phone number. While difficult, a malicious advertiser could circumvent such friction by setting up a new IP address and thus such a do-not-track list is merit-less just as the failed proposal for a do-not-email list was. Malicious email senders can hide behind a new and changing array of IP addresses and the same is true for those bad actors in the online ad space.

Furthermore, such a system would undermine a significant and growing portion of the online economy that is behavioral targeting. Many technology companies—and increasingly, legitimate publishers—are using behavioral tracking to increase advertising revenue versus one ad for all.

Lastly, such a notion of a an IP-based do-not-track list would fly in the face of the FCC mandate requiring digital transmission of TV signals (coming to a set-top box in the near future). The advertiser/publisher benefit of that FCC mandate is to potentially target the IP address of a set-top box in order to deliver more meaningful and relevant ads and content. The FTC proposal is in conflict with the promise of the FCC plan and would simply raise costs and stifle the innovation of relevance.

—David Daniels of JupiterResearch

Reading Wired magazine this past weekend (insert your favorite Tricia-wants-to-be-a-nerd comment here), I ran across a new term—“Bacn” (http://bacn2.com). Coined in August at PodCamp Pittsburgh, it means permission email you opt-in for, never read, then delete. The recipient wanted the email at the time of opt-in but just can’t find the time or will to read. The email marketing world is chock full of bacn. Most email marketers would agree that bacn is the result of non-relevant email.

So I ask, in making bacn, which half of the relevance equation is broken—content or timeliness?

—Tricia Robinson-Pridemore of StrongMail

Halloween is my best holiday. On Oct. 31, it's absolutely OK to do two of my favorite things: dress up and eat candy. I monitored my inbox today (in costume – I was a nun) to see which retailers were celebrating with me. The results were frightening! Out of the 42 commercial emails I received, only 3 directly referenced Halloween—that’s scarcely more than 7%. Bluefly, J. Crew and Lands' End each offered up a treat: a percentage discount, a free shipping offer and a dollar discount, respectively. (They also used eerily-similar subject lines, following a “Boo!” + “Offer” paradigm. We do have our SLs down to a science.)

From: Bluefly
Subject Line: BOO! Extra 10% Off-Today Only
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007

From: J. Crew
Subject Line: Boo! Free shipping's ending…
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007

From: Lands' End
Subject Line: Boo! A $10 Gift For You.
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007

We all talk so much about relevancy, and while many of us find technological obstacles between our email programs and that fabled state of totally targeted, segmented, dynamic-data-driven email nirvana, there is absolutely nothing stopping any of us from sharing something as simple as a batch-and-blast Halloween greeting with our subscribers. I certainly received a deluge of Halloween-focused messaging in the weeks leading up to the event—costumes, treats, décor and more, right?!

As we move into our next phase of holiday preparation—Thanksgiving—let’s consider ending our T-day-focused communication stream with an exclamation—Happy Thanksgiving! You know you’re gonna send out a Black Friday sale message anyway, so why not offer it as a gift in thanks? Check back post-turkey; I’ll report on whether the well-wishing ratio is any more bountiful.

Until next week!
Lisa Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are we doing to make things easy for consumers?

—David Atlas

A recent DMA Report, “The Integration of DM and Brand,” makes the case that brand and direct marketing are converging—where direct marketers are building brand value and brand marketers are influencing sales. (The report surveyed 296 marketers, 56% of whom combine direct and mass marketing and 44% just do direct marketing.)

I believe that email is one of the channels where this line is blurred most—in a really good and powerful mix that benefits marketers and subscribers. In fact, it benefits marketers BECAUSE it benefits subscribers! But that is a future blog post.

In the survey, nearly 70% of brand marketers rate personalization as having a positive or strong positive effect on brand and 64% rate targeting as having a positive or strong positive effect.

Clearly, these two methods—personalization and targeting—are keys to creating relevance in email, and the smart marketers who employ them to build satisfying and engaging email experiences for their subscribers enjoy higher response and ROI. Recently, a client added personalization to their email program and found that it boosted customer response by 6%, but dropped prospect response by 5% (and boosted prospect unsubscribe rates by 2%). Wow. That is pretty powerful—and really illustrates that when the subscriber has a relationship with your brand, customization and a personal approach are very powerful. When the prospect didn’t have a relationship with the brand, the intimacy assumed by the marketer bombed.

In fact, Return Path surveys show that brand and the subject line are the two of the most influential reasons why a subscriber decides to open and email. More so, it’s not just that particular email or the fact that the subscriber knows the brand, it’s the fact that the email program itself has value—the brand of the email program (what we at Return Path call “prior value”) matters most. In that 3–5 second decision to open or delete, the brand value of your email program—that you’ve sent me email in the past that was interesting, helpful and relevant—is what drives the open.

Brand matters in email, but it doesn’t trump relevancy.

—Stephanie Miller

I am a huge fan of email marketing and really believe in its strength and ability to deliver a dynamic offer in a quick and to-the-point manner. So I wanted to add a personal case study to show how great a medium email marketing is for companies to produce sales in an immediate nature.

As we hopefully all remembered, this past Sunday was Mother’s Day. It’s a day to say “thank you” not only to the women who put up with our crap and issues for the better part of our initial lives, but also (in my case) to the woman I hope to drop my kids off with for hours at a time so I can play golf or have some alone time with the wife. It’s also a day for me to celebrate my wife, the amazing mother of my two children, so she knows how much I appreciate her (all the time).

But on Wednesday of last week it occurred to me that I had yet to think about buying a single gift for anyone. My mind raced while I was at work—what should I get, when should I get it, where should I get it—and I could feel myself drawing nothing but blanks.

Then suddenly the skies opened and the sun shined down on me as I opened up one of my consumer email accounts. I had at least seven emails waiting for me from companies I had purchased from in the past, all with amazing Mother’s Day offers and ideas for the clueless like myself! This was relevant email times 10! Not only relevant with the offer, but relevant with the timing of that offer—combine those two things together and you truly capitalize on the value of email marketing.

So I opened every single email, clicked on every link I could find, and let the companies walk me through what they were offering. It was like having seven different personal shoppers at my disposal. All the advertisers did a great job of making the Mother’s Day offers front and center to the landing page they took me to. Free two-day shipping was referenced numerous times in numerous places, clearly showing the value and benefit they planned to offer me for making a purchase. Because they took me to a specific page with Mother’s Day offers and specials they did the one thing I think any consumer appreciates—they made the buying experience and searching experience easy.

The moral of this short story is that many of the fundamentals we all read about as it relates to email marketing—relevance, timing, value, clarity, offer—were all spoken to in the messages I received. It really gave me the motivation to take the call to action. So companies are getting it. They’re getting what they need to do and how to use those things to their benefit. This then will grow their sales and continually enable them to build their brand online. I ended up buying four things from two different companies, and the reality is that if I hadn’t received those emails, I wouldn’t have purchased anything from any of them.

Kudos to them!

—Rob Fitzgerald