BeRelevant: Email Marketing Best Practices Blog

Full-Day Workshop: What's Working Now in Email Marketing

Join Jeanne Jennings and myself for a full-day email marketing workshop organized by ClickZ on Monday, February 1, 2010 in Miami, FL.

Jeanne and I will guide you through real-life examples of how a wide variety of businesses are implementing small changes which are increasing both the effectiveness and profitability of their campaigns. More details here.

SAVE $100 off the registration fee when you enter: CL100

links for 2009-12-18

• The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement | ShareThis
  Despite reports of its demise, e-mail is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel. In research performed by ShareThis, they found that 46 percent of shares came via e-mail, 33 percent from Facebook, 14 percent from other channels such as Digg, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc., and just 6 percent from Twitter.
  (tags: study sharing)
• 24 ways: Rock Solid HTML Emails
  When it comes to coding html for email, the key is to focus on three things. First, you should keep it simple. The more complex your email design, the more likely is it to choke on one of the popular clients with poor standards support.

  Second, you need to take your coding skills back a good decade. That often means nesting tables, bringing CSS inline and following the coding guidelines I’ll outline below.

  Finally, you need to test your designs regularly. Just because a template looks nice in Hotmail now, doesn’t mean it will next week.

  
  
  (tags: coding html)
  
  
• 
  
  Seven Questions for Co-Registration Service Providers
  
  
  "Despite claims to the contrary, co-registration isn't a quick fix or shortcut for list growth. It requires significant planning and maintenance to keep the program running well. However, if your partners and vendors are well chosen and monitored, it can be a solid way to grow your list beyond what you can achieve through more traditional means." says Derek Harding in this ClickZ article.
  
  
  (tags: co-registration list_growth)
  
  

links for 2009-12-17

• Email Industry Experts Speak Out: Pivotal Veracity
  "ISPs are now moving toward customer-level adaptive learning filters and placing explicit and learned customer-level behavior over all other levels of filtering (with the exception of outright Port25 blocks).

  This is an incredibly important shift with huge implications for mailers. It means, for example, that it does not matter if you have 0 complaints and 0 unknown user rates – if customer X has negatively engaged with your mail (e.g. historically ignored your mail, moved your mail to the spam folder, etc), it will be placed in the spam folder for that customer.

  Conversely, if your spam complaint rates and unknown user rates when computed at the IP or Domain level are such that you’re designated as spam, your mail will still be placed in the inbox for those customers who have positively engaged with your email (e.g., opened, clicked, replied, moved you to inbox, personal folders, reported you as not spam, added you their address book, etc)."

  
  
  (tags: deliverability engagement authentication)
  
  
• 
  
  4 Tips to Get Ready for Domain Reputation
  
  
  A number of top ISPs are putting in place, or have already established, domain-based reputation systems. It is a major shift in how email messages are delivered - one for which email marketers clearly need to prepare.
  
  
  (tags: deliverability reputation)
  
  

links for 2009-12-10

• Feedback Loops De-Mystified - AOL Postmaster Blog
  Annalivia Ford explains how the AOL Feedback loop works
  (tags: fbl deliverability aol)
• The coming changes
  ISPs and filtering companies are seeing increasing percentages of spam coming out of ESP netspace. Current processes for policing customers are extremely reactive and there are many ESPs that are allowing their customers to send measurable percentages of spam. This situation is untenable for the filtering companies or the ISPs and they’re sending out warnings that the ESPs need to stop letting so much spam leave their networks.
  (tags: deliverability industry spam)

links for 2009-12-09

• Let's Play the E-mail Blame Game!
  Amid reports that e-mail deliverability issues are up, experts from two leading e-mail service providers confirm that, yes, there has been a predictable surge in deliverability problems, but the marketers who are experiencing them are those who, for the most part, have failed to follow best practices.
  (tags: deliverability)
• Email: In Transition, Not Fading Away
  While the explosion of mobile applications and social media outlets is clearly creating shifts in email and channel usage, bad marketing practices will likely have the biggest negative impact on our beloved channel.
  (tags: industry trends)

links for 2009-12-07

• Debunking common email deliverability myths
  Did you sign up with your last email service provider after a whirlwind romance, only to find yourself disillusioned just a few months into the relationship?

  If you picked that firm because it promised to make all your deliverability problems go away, you probably fell for the ESP equivalent of "I'll call you tomorrow." Here are five common promises that ESPs make, but find hard to keep

  
  
  (tags: deliverability)
  
  
• 
  
  What email users say: Part 2 (spam, value and branding)
  
  
  Nobody should want to send spam, and not just for ethical reasons: if you send spam, expect a hit to your brand and image. And expect people to report you as such, which leads to blacklisting and other problems.

  It's all about individual perceptions here, so let go of your own opinions. Everyone has their own definition and what matters is what recipients think: they're the ones with the finger on the (delete) button.

  So what criteria do users apply to define spam?

  
  
  (tags: spam)
  
  
• 
  
  My Best Practices: Coding
  
  
  Here are some coding tips for html emails. Enjoy!
  
  
  (tags: coding html)
  
  
• 
  
  Marketing Spend For Email and Social Media Top Plans for 2010
  
  
  According to the November "2010 Marketing Trends Survey" of business leaders by StrongMail, 89% of respondents plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in email marketing and social media budgets in the New Year.
  
  
  (tags: study)
  
  

links for 2009-12-06

• Are You Leveraging Your Metrics For Maximum Benefit?
  Loren McDonald explains how to use email metrics to find out how your emails are performing.
  (tags: analysis metrics)
• Our Emails Are So Pretty, Our Messaging So Consistent … I Wonder Why Everybody Ignores Them?
  Many associations spend a lot of money and time developing what they call “consistent branding.” They have a look, they choose a stylebook, and everything they send out — print, email, online — follows the guidelines to a tee.

  Unfortunately, it’s completely irrelevant. It may sound good in a meeting, it may make a nice checkbox in a strategic plan, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing. The point of sending something out is not to make you look good — the point is to get someone else to do something.

  
  
  (tags: design)
  
  

Interesting Way to Respond to a Bounce-back

Last week I received the below email in my inbox from a mystery sender called "do-not-reply". Hmmm... then I looked at the subject line that said:

Tamara, Regarding Your Subscription to Management for the Rest of Us

Okay, that gave me a clue as to who this email was coming from. This is what was inside:

Dear Tamara,

You subscribed to the above e-zine at the following Web site...

mftrou.com

We host that e-zine, handling all its mailings to you. We recently
received a bounce-back from your address, which means that
something was wrong at that address. It may be just a technical
glitch, so we are contacting you to ensure that all is well.
If you receive THIS e-mail, all is indeed well. :-)

However, if this e-mail bounces back to us, we will watch this
account closely. If the next e-mail bounces back to us, too, we
will delete your address as being inactive. In that case, you will
not receive any more issues of the e-zine...

Management for the Rest of Us

In either event, you have nothing to do. Today's message is to let
you know about this. Just to repeat... if you are reading this,
your account is likely fine and we should not receive another
bounce-back.

Please simply delete this message. Sorry for the bother --
we don't send many queries like this. However, a quick check keeps
our database current with bona-fide opt-in e-mail addresses and
reduces the number of e-mails we send out to inactive addresses,
helping to keep the load on the Internet down. It also ensures
that subscribers like you get their requested e-zine! :-)

All the best,

SiteSell E-zine Quality Team

As the email address that this was sent to is a valid email address that sends an out-of-office message to everyone that sends an email to it - I'm pretty sure this is a message that was triggered because of a soft-bounce. 

I thought this was a very interesting approach and I wanted to share it with you because I'm not sure what the upside is of sending out a message like this... 

Would love to hear your thoughts!