BeRelevant: Email Marketing Best Practices Blog

links for 2009-10-27

• My Name Is Loren. BTW, I'm A 'He'
  how can you avoid or minimize potentially embarrassing and costly mistakes by assuming the wrong things about your customers and subscribers? Loren McDonald offers a few tips.
  (tags: database_marketing)
• 7 fixes for terrible subject lines
  Think fast: How much time did you spend on the subject line of your last email campaign message? This critical element too often is the last thing you consider before hitting "send." Yet, it's the first thing your recipients see in the inbox.
  (tags: subject_lines)
• Onboarding 101: Your guide to instant engagement
  Generally, the initial emails or mobile messages that a consumer receives enjoy the highest response rates, since he or she has the most interest in the brand at the beginning. Marketers must use them wisely to ensure successful ongoing communications.
  (tags: welcome_emails onboarding)
• Video email: new technique + take a poll
  Looks like our video email toolbox might have another addition.
  (tags: video)
• Future of deliverability: 1. The role of user interaction
  Four deliverability experts kindly shared their understanding with Mark Brownlow for a series of posts covering the biggest trends in deliverability and what they mean for marketers. This first part looks at the role of user interaction (engagement).
  (tags: deliverability)

links for 2009-10-21

• Conference Recap: ExactTarget Connections '09
  a must-read recap with great takeaways from one of the best email marketing conferences I've attended so far.
  (tags: events)

links for 2009-10-19

• Who needs Subject Lines...?
  This promotion almost completely makes a subject line strategy completely moot in driving open metrics for the Southwest Click 'n Save email program entirely, and in its place? Good 'ol fashioned bribery. It's genius! I mean, really, why didn't I think of that?
  (tags: subject_lines)
• Clinic notes: Ecommerce holiday playbook wrap-up
  Just as shoppers often wait until the last minute to finish their holiday shopping, often online retailers find themselves behind on their holiday optimization.

  Procrastinators need to implement ideas that don’t involve long lead times for design, development or approvals. In the Ecommerce Holiday Playbook for Procrastinators web clinic, we shared tips and tactics that online retailers can implement in as little as five minutes to make the most out of the “most wonderful (selling) time of the year.”

  
  
  (tags: holidays)
  
  
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  How to Effectively Convert Customers to Subscribers: Duke Energy case study
  
  
  
  (tags: cases)
  
  
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  How to get the click (even when you can't)
  
  
  
  (tags: tactics)
  
  
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  Test Results: How Long Should Your From Line Be?
  
  
  Typically length is a concern that comes up when discussing subject lines – how many characters you can fit in a subject before your subscribers’ email programs cut it off.

  But the same thing applies to your “from” line; if it’s too long, subscribers won’t be able to read all of it while viewing their list of emails.

  
  
  (tags: study from_address)
  
  
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  Announcing the Spamhaus CSS
  
  
  Today on the Spamhaus Blog an Announcement appeared discussing a new classification to the SBL - Spamhaus CSS (Composite Snow-Shoe). This is a new classification that will be making it easier to identify and combat an old yet rapidly growing problem - the Snowshoe Spammer.
  
  
  (tags: deliverability spamhaus)
  
  
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  Why a Good Unsubscribe Experience Is Important
  
  
  An easy, clear, and accessible process will encourage them to click the unsubscribe link instead of the spam-complaint button.
  
  
  (tags: unsubscribe)
  
  
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  Q3'09 Spam & Virus Trends from Postini
  
  
  
  (tags: postini study)
  
  
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  Experian buys United MailSolutions GmbH
  
  
  
  (tags: industry)
  
  
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  Why Facebook and Twitter Won't Kill E-Mail
  
  
  
  (tags: industry twitter facebook)
  
  
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  Bol.com tested how to sell the latest Dan Brown and shares the results
  
  
  Bol.com created different header images with different calls to action and wondered which header would maximize the response rate of the campaign. Would this be an ordinary promotional offer (free shipping) or would future readers be triggered by a feeling of exclusivity (be the first one to read the book)?
  
  
  (tags: testing)
  
  
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  Holiday Email Planning and Ideas
  
  
  Many marketers struggle with what kind of campaign they want to run and how they can create something special. Here are some ideas to get you started. The holiday season is a busy time for customers, marketers, Santa, just about everyone. So, be relevant, be concise, and be different so that your message stands out.
  
  
  (tags: holidays)
  
  
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  Mobile Email Marketing: Myths & Realities
  
  
  Here are the top 5 myths—and realities—of mobile email marketing.
  
  
  (tags: mobile)
  
  
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  Case Study: Boosting your Reach With an E-mail Series
  
  
  In marketing, there's a saying that people need to see your message three to five times before it sinks in. There are also some things you want to express that are somewhat complicated, so being able to feed the key benefits to readers in small bites helps with comprehension. In these instances and others, a series of e-mail messages can often be more effective than a single missive. Here's an example of an e-mail series that increased unique metrics by 100 percent or more, broadening the reach of the message.
  
  
  (tags: cases series)
  
  
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  Relevant Marketing with Mobile Alerts
  
  
  Among respondents who would opt in to location-based alerts on their mobile phones, more than one-half were interested in messages from restaurants, followed by movie and event tickets, weather, and clearance sales.
  
  
  (tags: mobile)
  
  

How To Score With Your Email Campaign

Great post by Anton, over on his Email Ethics blog:

Let's think about it, sending an email and having the receiver to transform is a little bit like going out in a club to score.
Let me just call my email John.

John wants to score. He is in his apartment downtown and is dressing up. If he wants to score he probably has to dress as well as possible to be the more attractive possible. This is the creative.

Once ready he heads to the club, this is the broadcast.

If he arrives there without any incident (delivery) he gets in the line outside the club and wait for his turn.

Then he gets to go through the bouncer (the spam filter) who will let him go in if:

1 - he matches the dress code (Tidy HTML)
2 - he never went in a fight in the club or got thrown out (Reputation)
3 - He isn't drunk and talking crap (content scan)

When he gets in (inbox) he spots a good looking girl he likes if he already knows her, she's a client, else, she's a prospect.

He gets close to her and then throw his pick up line (subject line). There are several types of pick up lines:
1 - If you lie about yourself, it's a scam
2 - If you are too mysterious, you might loose her attention
3 - If yo are too long you might be boring.

In a few words, your subject line needs to be as good as your pick up lines: short, punchy and interesting.

If the girl gets in the discussion with John, then he got a click, but there's a lot more to do to score.

He has to try to keep the discussion live and interesting and to gather as much information about the girl so he knows what she likes, what she wants,... that's web analytics.

The interesting thing here is that even if he doesn't score right away with that girl, the more information he will get here, the more likely he is to score on a later night when they get to meet again.

As I see it, email marketing is like trying to score with hundreds, thousands of persons in one go.

2009 Holiday Marketer: Experian’s Benchmark & Trend Report

What do we expect to see this holiday season in respect to the email marketing industry’s performance? The 2009 holiday marketer: Benchmark and trend report has some interesting points well worth your consideration, especially for all of you email marketers out there looking to gain an edge on the competition this winter.

Taking a look at the data from the report, there are a number of relevant tidbits that merit a quick shout-out:

• Email’s “eco-friendly” reputation may not hold as much sway with environmentally-conscious customers as you thought, so don’t cancel the print catalogs just yet.
  “Surprising to many, Behavioral Greens, which are the group of consumers that are most green aware according to Experian Simmons, account for nearly half of all catalog purchases.”
• Shorter really is sweeter when it comes to email subject lines during the holidays.
  “All industries with the exception of consumer products and services experienced the highest open rates when using subject lines of 25 characters or less last year.”

• Email and search still drive the most traffic to retail sites, but keep an eye on additional traffic from social networks.
  “Last December, search engines and email were the top referral sources for retailers, but social networking referred nearly five percent of traffic, a rate higher than portal front pages.”
• The economy will continue to be a factor in online marketing strategies this holiday season.
  “In 2008, searches for the term ‘layaway’ jumped as consumer awareness increased. Layaway programs effectively drove early purchases with the peak for search-term variations that included ‘layaway’ taking place last year during the five weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.”

Have a closer look at these findings and many more by downloading the report in full from the Experian Marketing Services’ website.

Source: Email Responsibly

links for 2009-10-16

• Measuring What Matters in Email Marketing, Part 2
  There are many approaches to using email-campaign metrics to measure and improve marketing performance. The following are the top five approaches Karen Talavera recommends, along with appropriate measures and usable insights for each.
  (tags: analysis metrics)
• Growing Subscription Revenue With Triggered Emails and Online Renewals: How Three Companies Did It
  The following case studies illustrate how three organizations applied best-practices for deploying triggered emails to drive renewals—and what tips and tricks you can use to do the same.
  (tags: triggered_emails renewals)
• Takeaways from ExactTarget Connections 2009
  Chad White shares some useful insights from the conference

links for 2009-10-14

• Gmail Users Get Real-Time Updates in Their Email Messages
  ecently, some Gmail users spotted a new feature in which small favicons were appearing next to certain email messages in the inbox view. The icons, which only appeared next to commercially sent emails such as those delivered by Netflix, seemed to be a way to highlight certain messages when doing a quick scan of a crowded inbox.
• Why Email Still Rules (a Response to Today's WSJ)
  "If anything, email is re-inventing itself as the killer app in the emerging 3.0 world of multi-platform digital communications. There are at least three mega-trends occurring that indicate email is experiencing a Renaissance; not an apocalypse:"
  (tags: industry)

links for 2009-10-13

• Three years on and still going strong
  "It seems no new marketing channel can call itself credible until it gets the "email killer" tag."
  (tags: industry)

Updates from Connections 2009

Until Thursday I am attending Exact Target’s user conference “Connections 2009”. You can follow the tweets from the conference here or here:

links for 2009-10-06

• Approaches to Building an E-mail List, Part 2 - ClickZ
  very good article on list building
  (tags: list_growth)
• 13 Ways to Categorize Gifts in Holiday Emails | Get Elastic
  Helping shoppers find the right present for everyone on their list is the priority of your holiday email campaign. Sure you need to cover the basics, like gifts by recipient and price. But a little creativity can help you stand out in a sea of uniformity.
  (tags: holidays)
• Sender Reputation in a Large Webmail Service
  interesting document written by someone at Google
  (tags: reputation)
• STUDY: Social Media Leads to More Time Spent on Email
  (tags: study)
• Webinar: Inbound & Email Marketing: So Happy Together
  Join Blue Sky Factory CEO Greg Cangialosi and special guest Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, on Tuesday, October 13 as they discuss the inbound marketing landscape and how email marketing complements this method of attracting customers.
  (tags: strategy acquisition)
• Here are the slides from our very first webinar on holiday email campaigns - The Email Marketer's Club
  (tags: holidays)
• Open Rates Rise Again: Epsilon
  Average open rates—or the percentage of people who view e-mail with graphics turned on—were 22.2% in the second quarter of 2009, up slightly from 22.1% in the first quarter, according to Epsilon.
  (tags: study)

Running an International Email Marketing Program

Yesterday I spoke at a B2B email marketing event organized by the UK DMA – it was the best email event I attended in a long while. Great speakers and great content, so well done DMA! :-)

Here are the slides from my presentation. When I get approval from the other presenters, I’ll post their slides here as well.

Running An International Email Program

View more presentations from Tamara Gielen.

Tweeting from the DMA’s B2B Email Marketing Event

You can read all the insights and takeaways from the UK DMA’s B2B email marketing event here:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23dmaemc

links for 2009-09-26

• The "Bulletproof" Button
  a great technique that enables email marketers to use image-based buttons but still convey the CTA if images are blocked.
  (tags: coding design)
• Subject lines: Amazon's lessons on discounts and frontloading
  The less targeted the email, the more Amazon has to compensate with a bigger discount to encourage attention. So you'll find the big discounts featured in subject lines with broader product group promotions
  (tags: subject_lines cases)
• Transactional Email Overhaul: 5 Strategies to Revive an Older Program
  See how a marketer is re-invigorating a transactional email program that had been on autopilot for too long. Includes strategies for targeting improvements by focusing on metrics, creative, segmentation and testing.
  (tags: cases transactional_emails)

links for 2009-09-24

• Two Free E-mail Deliverability Tools
  Jeanne Jennings shares two free resources that can help you identify and address potential deliverability issues related to your sender reputation. The first is Sender Score, a free e-mail reputation service from Return Path. The second is EDS Alerts from Email Data Source, which allows you to monitor e-mail sent from a specified IP address or domain name, among other criteria. Either resource alone is valuable; when used together, they can provide the information you need to safeguard your e-mail reputation and deliverability.
  (tags: deliverability)
• Ireland: 2009 Email Marketing Insight
  This report gives insight into the levels of personalisation Irish survey respondents use in their email, what metrics they track, average open and click-through rates, budgets for email and the challenges they are facing in email marketing.
  (tags: study)
• Domain Reputation and Recipient Engagement
  There are two major changes that have already begun in beta behind the scenes at some ISPs that you, as a savvy marketer, should be aware of. Akin to your postal mail today being tracked by the return address (your actual street address), email has historically been tied back to the sending IP it originated from when handing the message off to the receiver. However, imagine your postal mail being tracked by your last name instead; regardless of where you actually reside. And then, by how many people who receive your postal mail actually open the envelope and do anything with it. That's what's happening with email -- your sending domain, IP agnostic, will be used in tracking the type of mail you send augmented by recipient engagement.
  (tags: deliverability reputation)
• Pivotal Veracity on Domain Reputation and ISP Insights
  In their ISP Insights for 2009 and 2010 whitepaper, they quiz top ISPs on their current and future plans with regard to spam filtering, domain reputation, authentication and more. Very insightful stuff.
  (tags: deliverability reputation authentication)

How Are ISPs Changing Their Spam Filters?

The folks at Pivotal Veracity have written a report about how ISPs are changing their spam filters and how legitimate email marketers are impacted by this. You can download it here.

Key take-aways:

• Domain-based Reputation is here!
  A number of top ISPs including Yahoo & AOL are moving to augment IP-based reputation systems with portable Domain-based reputation systems for those mailers using DK/DKIM authentication.  This is a hugely important development and one that will be welcomed by legitimate mailers.  This means, ISPs will “attach” (compute) your Spam Complaint Rate, Unknown User Rate, and Spam Trap Rates to your Domain (this will be the domain you are authenticating which for most mailers will be the friendly from domain)  in addition to your IP.   Switching IP addresses? With domain-based reputation ..you get to keep (for good or bad) your reputation.
• Authenticate with DK/DKIM
  With the exception of Hotmail which is still sticking to its proprietary “Sender ID” authentication model, the authentication method of choice by all the other leading ISPs is DK/DKIM.  If you are not already ..authenticate !  You need to authenticate in order to take advantage of domain-based reputation and other ISP services such as Yahoo’s feedback loop. 

Goodmail in my inbox – on unsolicited mail

Alex Schultz, a good friend and ex-colleague of mine posted the following message on his blog:

I am confused. I thought goodmail was meant to fix spam or help it and yet here I have two goodmail certified mails from a company who I did'n’t subscribe to and have no idea who they are.

These are the first two goodmail certified mails I have ever seen.

Here’s a screenshot of his inbox:

Interesting….

links for 2009-09-23

• Three Evil Words or How To Spot a Bad List Rental Service
  If readers take one lesson away from this newsletter in 2009, let it be that no reputable firm sells e-mail names for perpetual use. A reputable list owner or manager will sell access to subscribers on a one-time basis and mail the list on the marketer’s behalf, but they won’t sell the names.
  (tags: list_rental)
• Half of E-mail Marketers Segment by Clicks: Forrester
  The good news is 51% of e-mail marketers in a recent survey by Forrester Research said they use click-through data as a segmentation attribute. The bad news is 51% of e-mail marketers in a recent survey by Forrester Research said they use click-through data as a segmentation attribute.
  (tags: segmentation)

Tactics for Reactivating Non-Responders

Successful reactivation begins with creating relevant segments. Specifically, marketers should separate the never-responders from former responders and light responders. This segmentation approach allows the marketer to understand which tactics work best for each group. After all, these segments differ behaviorally.

Former responders once found the email interesting, but no longer do. Never-respondents never did; perhaps they only supplied an email to take advantage of a specific offer. As a result, these different segments may respond to different reactivation approaches.

Consider at least two different approaches for reactivation. We've seen significant differences in the success of offers, especially when comparing results between never-responders and former responders.

Some offers include:

• One-time discount or gift with purchase. Retailers have the option of bribing the living dead back to life. Those who employ this tactic should do so with the understanding that they may be training their customers to wait for better offers, but some revenue beats no revenue. Also, this option allows marketers to test the value of different kinds of incentives (10 percent off vs. free shipping, etc.).
  
• Survey. Give customers the ability to sound off about what they like and dislike about the email and to recommend content they may like. This approach works best if the marketer can use survey responses as preferences. For instance, if the customer merely wants less email, the marketer must have the ability to reduce frequency for this approach to work best.
• Reduced frequency. If a marketer has stuck to a single cadence for his or her emails, then the living dead may respond to a change in frequency. Even unengaged consumers notice when a regular email disappears from their inboxes and then reappears.
• Interest check. Very often, the simple approach of asking subscribers if they still want to receive the email works well. This approach may involve sending a simple postcard-style email with the single call to action of "click here to continue receiving these emails." A more subtle approach in this vein may involve changing only the subject line to remind users what they receive. For one retail bank client, we changed the subject line of a newsletter from the branded name for the newsletter to "your June newsletter from [bank name]."

After testing, the most successful tactics will emerge. Of course, the definition of success depends on the marketer. While a retailer may judge success on purchases, other marketers may consider any click or open a success. In general, we prefer the broader definition of any click or open because it shows signs of life, if not a return to constant engagement. Resurrecting the living dead has to start somewhere.

One last thought centers on expectations. Marketers should not expect to reactivate every member of the living dead. Far from it. The most successful reactivation campaigns might reactivate 50 percent of the file, but those efforts involve high-value incentives for a highly targeted group. More realistically, marketers can expect to reactivate 5 percent of the living dead with modest efforts and up to 10 percent with more aggressive efforts.

Source: iMedia Connection

links for 2009-09-19

• Inspire Interaction with Promo Emails: 4 Tactics to Boost Clicks, Encourage Social Sharing
  MarketingSherpa interviewed a marketer from Chick-fil-A to learn how they made their promotional email program more interactive, and have built stronger relationships with subscribers. New content and features are generating an average 15% CTR, and 75% of subscribers said an email inspired them to visit a store. Plus, email drove the growth of a Facebook fan club from 25,000 to 1 million in less than a year.
  (tags: cases promotions)

links for 2009-09-18

• Grow Your List Through Testing with Google Website Optimizer
  (tags: testing list_growth landing_pages)
• Best Practices for Collecting Opt-Ins Offline
  Your company is exhibiting at a conference. Or perhaps one of the senior management team is presenting at an industry seminar. Maybe you’re running ads in trade publications or other vehicles. You can use these channels as prime opportunities for collecting opt-in email data to grow your lists with new subscribers.
  (tags: list_growth)
• "Free Shipping" Email Marketing Questions Answered: To Free or Not to Free? | Email Responsibly
  Free shipping is a vital topic of consideration for most businesses, as it often involves the business itself incurring the associated, and often expensive distribution cost. To help you decide if free shipping offers are right for your organization, Experian CheetahMail has produced a new white paper exploring the issues related to free shipping.
  (tags: holidays)
• Subject Line Testing in Email: Just Do It!
  An important key to email marketing success is testing. One of the most important components of a campaign to test is the subject line. The subject line is the teaser copy that entices the recipient to open your Email.
  (tags: subject_lines)
• eRoi’s awesome newsletter
  "The other day I got an email from eRoi that knocked my socks off. From the moment I opened it, I was engaged", says Andrew Kordek. And I have to agree with him. Their design is pretty awesome!
  (tags: cases)