Be Relevant! Email Marketing Blog

Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Online Marketing In Europe

CAN-SPAM versus opt-in or even double opt-in. In the US, you can send a regular e-mail newsletter to people who have visited your tradeshow booth, without their consent. You figure, "if I can do it in the US, I can do it in Europe, right?" Wrong!

Europe has a completely different set of regulations regarding privacy and online communication. In addition to this legislation, there are significant local variations in the value online marketing has within the overall marketing mix in each European country.

On 6 December, MaCS is hosting a webinar called "Learn from the local experts: Avoiding the pitfalls of online marketing in Europe".

What you'll learn:

• How to make sure your European communications don't break the rules.
• How online marketing in Europe is different from the US both regionally and in relation to specific European countries.
• How to successfully adapt your online marketing campaign for the European market.

Tuesday December 6, 2005 - 9.30 AM PST | 18.30 CET | 17.30 GMT

More information & registration

Email Marketing Stats by Industry

Because they found there is a real thirst for timely, industry specific email marketing statistics, Bronto has just released its first quarterly industry statistics report.

Read the report here and sign up to receive the quarterly industry statistics report via email..

Tune Up Your Email Marketing Strategy

Bronto is offering a document on their website to help you tune up your email marketing strategy.

This document provides an outline of how to approach your email marketing strategy and asks questions to guide you through the process of putting together a plan. Sections included will review:

• Setting Goals
• Organizing Lists
• Content Planning
• Collecting Data
• Evaluating ROI

Worksheets are included at the end to jot down your thoughts as you think of new ideas.

Download it here.

Spam Filters demystified

Adestra created a white paper called "Spam filters demystified"  -- it's supposed to give marketers a thorough briefing on how they work and what to do to get round them. You can read extracts of this white paper on their website.

I requested my copy of the white paper already :) If you're interested, you can request a copy here.

Who Should Write Your Newsletter?

ChiefMarketer is featuring an article about who should write your newsletters.

No, it's not someone from the marketing department. And don't let anyone from design or technology touch your newsletters either :)

Find out who they think is the best writer for your newsletter.

DMA's Email Authentication Virtual Seminar

On December 5th the DMA is hosting a virtual seminar in which you'll learn how and why to comply with DMA’s most recent member requirement: Email Authentication.

Attend this Virtual Seminar to understand how Email Authentication actually works; evaluate the range of inexpensive and easy-to-implement solutions; and review the steps your company needs to take in order to comply.

In addition, you will learn:

• What is the value proposition of E-mail Authentication?  How do authentication solutions defend against phishing and other forms of e-mail fraud/forgery?
• What are the key considerations for marketers?  How can authentication be leveraged as part of an overall deliverability strategy?
• What are the challenges and lessons learned from early adopters?
• Where are we today?  How many companies have deployed authentication solutions?  What lies ahead?

To register or for more information, visit
http://www.the-dma.org/councilevents/crenovweb/

Moving To Another URL

I've decided to move my blog from Blogger to Typepad, mainly (but not only) because it offers the functionality to archive my posts in categories.

This is the url: http://emailmarketing.typepad.com/bestpractices/. Bookmark it and visit it regularly for new updates.

I'm moving my Blogger posts over one by one. I hope to have finished doing that in the next couple of days.

If you are subscribed to my mailinglist or my RSS feed, don't worry: you won't notice anything - I've switched everything over to the new url. In case you do find anything unusual, please let me know!

Any comments and/or suggestions on the new design and functionality are welcome of course!

Six Tips to Make HTML Email Look Right

Wendy Roth, training manager for Lyris Technologies, offers a couple of tips to make your email messages look right in the different email clients:

1. Use inline styles or HTML tags
2. Keep background colors light and text dark
3. Validate your HTML
4. Put scripts, forms or flash on your website, not in your email
5. Put critical information in text, not images
6. Put (almost) everything in an image

Read the full article to learn more.

Source: iMediaConnection.com

Personalize Your Emails For The Specific Needs Of Your Customers

iMedia Connection is featuring a series of articles on "Marketing and the 2005 Holiday Season". One of the articles is wrtten by Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey: The Secret to Holiday Email Marketing.  According to Nussey the secret to holiday email marketing is to give preferences, for which you shall receive conversions.

"A solid, robust preference center program can help drive sales and expand brand value. Preferences aren't only important during the holidays, but it's particularly during this joyous-yet-stressful season that caring for your customers translates to increased enthusiasm for and loyalty to your brand.

Preferences allow you to personalize communications for the specific needs of your customers. They are the ultimate way to steer your campaign from appearing only to benefit you, the sender, toward helping the recipient see the importance and relevance of the campaign."

Read the full article and find out which are the elements that make up the perfect preference page.

Source: iMedia Connection

Q3'05 eROI Email Statistics by List Size

eROI did an interesting study on the effect list size had on read and click statistics in Q3. They found that the middle of the week is the low point and Sunday and Friday are noticeabe high points in the week for both stats. Sending volume is thus inversely related to how reads and clicks are going to react, with the exception of Saturday.

This quarter eROI decided to take a different look at day of the week stats, namely by adding list size to the equasion. They broke down lists into:

• <500
• 500-999
• 1,000-4,999
• 5,000-9,999
• 10,000-24,999
• 25,000-49,999
• 50,000-99,999
• 100,000-199,999
• 200,000 and higher

They found many expected themes that reads and clicks decline and bounce rate increases. The reasons for this are simply that of list management, larger lists require more maintenance and make individual accuracy more difficult. Smaller lists are easily managed by marketing managers.

eROI therefore recommends to look at creating smaller segments of customers to treat differently or, even better, utilize dynamic data to address your customers. Consider removing individuals that are not reading your emails or separate them out into a different segment and mail to them less frequently and see how that affects your overall successfulness of your campaigns.

I agree with these recommendations, the more relevant the message is to the recipient, the higher your reads and clicks will be. I wouldn't necessarily mail the individuals that are not reading your emails less frequently but I would certainly try to find out what makes them tick so that I can provide them with more relevant content.

Download the complete .pdf

This data used for this study is global, so it's not US centric. Find past eROI studies for comparisons here: http://eroi.com/roi_resources.htm and subscribe to their Email Strategies Newsletter at http://www.eroi.com/newsletter.htm

Source: A special thanks to Dylan T. Boyd, VP of Sales & Strategy at eROI for bringing this interesting study to my attention!

The Right Offer At The Right Time

iMedia Connection is featuring an interesting article by Accucast CEO Michael Pridemore called "Fine Tuning Your Email Strategy". In this article Michael Pridemore suggests optimizing email marketing strategies by focusing on three things: frequency, timing and audience. This is not new of course, but he does offer some very good tips and examples.

It comes down to this:

• Audience: analyze your email reports to determine which are your most responsive customers and base your marketing message on how customers have responded in the past
• Timing: this depends of course on your target audience. If you're targeting a B2B audience you better not send emails at night or in the weekends because that's not when they read their emails. However, if you're targeting a B2C audience, sending emails in the evening or during weekends might be a good idea, because that's when your target audience is reading emails.
• Frequency: To determine what is the best frequency for your target audience, you need to test and keep a close ey on open & unsubscribe rates. There are 2 things to keep in mind: only send relevant messages & it's better to send too little than too many.

Read the article here.

Better Than Email Marketing? RSS Demystified [web seminar]

On November 17th, MarketingProfs.com is hosting a web seminar called "Better Than Email Marketing? RSS Demystified".

During this virtual seminar you will learn all you need to know to get started with RSS marketing, whether you're only interested in a quick under-an-hour and no cost implementation or long-term strategic integration of RSS in to your marketing mix.

For a modest investment, RSS can fire up your marketing mix, from direct marketing, PR, e-commerce, internal communications and online publishing to SEO, traffic generation and customer relationship management. In this crash course, you will find out exactly how your organization can profit from implementing this new technology.

You will learn:

• The 7 steps to RSS marketing success: a step-by-step system, designed to provide you with a roadmap to achieving RSS marketing results
• How to make the business case for RSS
• How to integrate RSS in your marketing mix
• Advanced RSS marketing tactics, such as autoresponder RSS feeds and RSS customization and personalization
• The details you need to use RSS for increased traffic
• How to best promote your RSS feeds, generate subscriptions via RSS and collect user data
• The truth about RSS metrics and what you really can measure
• A quick primer on podcasting and videocasting, the two "technologies" bringing your closer to your customers online than ever.

Speaker: Rok Hrastnik
Date & Time: November 17th @ 12pm (noon) EST (6pm CET)

Register here.

Having participated in quite a number of web seminars hosted by MarketingProfs, I can definitely recommend them. The content and the speakers are usually very high quality and they are NOT trying to sell you anything. Attendance costs 99 USD per web seminar, but Premium+ members (like myself) can (amongst other things) attend about 20 web seminars per year for free. Want to know more about the benefits of becoming a member of MarketingProfs?

Intelligent Email Marketing [event]

On December 7th, Brand Republic is hosting a one day, senior-level conference titled "Intelligence Email Marketing" at The Waldorf in London. On the agenda are topics such as new technologies, deliverability, data management and tracking, etc.

Find out more.

Preview-Pane Survey Findings

In a September survey of The Intevation Report readers, the question was asked whether their email client has preview-pane and/or image-blocking features. They also asked whether and how they use either or both of these functions.

Here is what they found (click links to view graphs of results):

1. More than 9 of 10 email users have access to a preview pane, and 7 of 10 say they frequently or always use it.
2. More than half of those who read email in a business-oriented client such as Outlook or Lotus Notes do not see images in email because their clients block them.
3. However, 3 of 10 readers have manually changed their email settings to allow downloading of images and graphics.
4. Sixty percent of survey respondents read messages in either Outlook 2003 or Lotus Notes, the two clients that block or mangle images by default. Add in the earlier versions of Outlook, which have the preview pane but lack image blocking, and the market share for B2B readers rises to 87%.
5. 75% of email readers who use the preview pane use it in a horizontal format and most often see either 4-5 inches deep of content (44%) or 2 to 3 inches (41%).
6. Vertical-pane users see more content, but there are fewer of them (25% of all preview-pane users). Pane widths used most often by this group are 4-5 inches (46.9%) and 6+ inches (26.5%).
7. Nearly half of email readers look at just the first few lines they see in the preview pane to decide if they want to continue reading the message, but 32.9% will read the whole message, even if they have to scroll through it.
8. The sender's name and/or address remains the most important factor readers look for in the preview pane when deciding whether to read further or open the email (60%), followed by the subject line (54.3%), the headline (53%) and any teaser copy (30.3%).
9. Preview-pane users are less likely to download blocked images and graphics when reading an email in the pane. Half of those who open email messages said they always download blocked images, but only 34% do in the preview pane.
10. Email users are most likely to download blocked images in order to make the email easier to read (80%) or to view images, charts and graphics than to view advertisements (10.1%).
11. Only 31% of email users say they always or frequently add the B2B newsletters they asked to receive to their safe-senders list or address books in order to avoid losing them in bulk or junk folders.

The full article provides tips, recommendations and action steps to make your email more preview pane/disabled image friendly. It's definitely worth reading!

Source: EmailLabs

Turning Visitors to Customers with Email Marketing [webinar]

Attend the latest Webinar in Topica's Educational Series to learn the best strategies to use email marketing to turn more visitors into customers.

V2C: Turning Visitors to Customers with Email Marketing Thursday, November 10th at 10 a.m. PDT

Learn how to use email marketing to grow your prospect base, build relationships with potential customers and turn more visitors into customers.

The agenda includes:

• Customer acquisition with email marketing
• Automated database segmentation
• Behavior based automated email campaigns

Participation is limited to 30 attendees. If you would like to attend, please register here.

E-mail Service Provider Market Guide, 2005

JupiterResearch recently released an Email Marketing Buyers Guide, a detailed evaluation and ranking of 30 vendors. Jupiter evaluated each vendor in the categories of client references, product demo, financial stability, services expertise, application features such as usability and functionality, partnerships, and technology integration. It also compared the needs of b-to-b marketers with those of b-to-c marketers in a bid to help the former make better vendor decisions.

The company then based overall value, suitability and breadth on the distinct needs of six types of marketers -- small business, service-oriented, low-volume promotional, low-volume newsletter, high-volume promotional and high-volume newsletter.

Jupiter Research included the following vendors in the report: Accucast, BlueHornet, Bluesky Factory, BlueStreak, Click Tactics, Cheetahmail, Constant Contact, Digital Impact, DoubleClick, Dynamics Direct, e-Dialog, Email Labs, Epsilon Interactive, Exact Target, Listrak, Lyris, Harte-Hanks Post Future, Postmaster, Quris, Responsys, Rightnow Technologies, Silverpop, SKYLIST, Subscribermail, Talisma, Topica, Twelve Horses, Vertical Response, Yesmail and Zustek.

Here's some insight into the firm's criteria and rankings, provided by Dawn Anfuso, editor of iMedia Connection.

Integrating Promotional Content Into Transactional Email Messages

In this week's issue of BtoB's E-Mail Marketer Insight Heather Palmer Goff, Director of deliverability and ISP relations at Responsys, answers the following question:

What are some key guidelines for integrating promotional content into transactional e-mail messages?

Here's what she answers: