Be Relevant! Email Marketing Blog

links for 2009-02-28

• Beware of the white label data proposition.
  If you are considering alternative ways to generate income for your business, then don’t discount monetising your database, but approach it like all good business decisions by gathering all the facts , exploring the options and considering more than one option. Don’t be drawn into promises of large amounts of money (with no guarantee) in return for damaging your client database.
  (tags: list_management list_rental)
• E-mail: Evaluating Dedicated vs. Shared IP Addresses
  Deciding whether to go with a dedicated or shared IP address involves risk and financial analysis. Each has pros and cons. If your budget allows for a dedicated IP address for your e-mail marketing efforts, I highly recommend it, even for low volume senders. If not, just be sure that you monitor your deliverability on a regular basis so you aren't blacklisted due to one of your IP address neighbors' bad practices.
  (tags: deliverability)
• Building Online Communities by the Numbers
  Online communities are growing in this expense-conscious business environment because they provide companies with a cost-effective means to provide presales support, enhance customer loyalty, support the post-purchase process, and gather customer insights. These forums work for a wide variety of product, retail, and small media sites. Here's a set of guidelines to help your company build an active and effective online community.
  (tags: community)
• What Sells Online? Unsexy Newsletters - BusinessWeek
  (tags: Trends)
• Beyond the Click: The Indirect Value of Email
  (tags: study)
• One Campaign You Must Not Ignore
  (tags: lead_nurturing)

50 Signs You're a Spammer

Joe Manna listed 50 unique characteristics of spammers on his blog recently. Read it to determine if you’re on the dark side (or not). My personal favorites are marked in bold :-)

1. You begin your emails with, “Dear Friend,” “Dear Customer.”
2. You bought, purchased, rented or “joint ventured” your list with others.
3. You refer to your customers and prospects collectively as a “list.”
4. You live your marketing career one batch email at a time.
5. Your email consists of a size 38 Impact font.
6. Your emails have nothing to do with recipient’s interests.
7. You have an email marketing campaign send daily email to your prospects.
8. When times get tough, you just hit your lists harder.
9. You don’t bother checking your “From” address for human replies.
10. You only see Digg and StumbleUpon as sources of thousands of hits.
11. Your email is sent to yourself, blind-carbon copying recipients.
12. Your email lacks the necessary unsubscribe link.
13. You padded your unsubscribe link with more than four lines to bury the link below the fold.
14. Your email contains more CAPS  than a Pepsi bottling plant.
15. Your subject lines begin with “Re:” or “Fwd:” even though you didn’t reply or forward.
16. You predicate your call to action with “If you’re interested…” or “If you’d like…”
17. Your email makes assumptions that your readers want to buy more when they just bought something.
18. The graphics in your e-mail are the email.
19. You worry about how many opt-outs and bounces you might earn, rather than the value you provide your subscribers.
20. Your email recipients have no idea who you are or why the received your message.
21. You can honestly say you live your life one spam complaint at a time.
22. You changed email service providers four times in the past two years.
23. You know your ESPs abuse desk personnel on a first name basis.
24. Your ESP’s abuse desk personnel know you on a first name basis.
25. When asked about spam, you instantly deny it, citing CAN-SPAM Act technicalities.
26. Your email contact database is older than your shoes.
27. Your contact database is segmented into “blast,”  “email” and “do not email.”
28. You sent an email and suddenly wonder why you landed on the blacklist of several ISPs.
29. You insist it’s the fault of the ESP that your deliverability is in the dump.
30. You recently purchased a list of leads and telepathically know they want your email.
31. Your opt-in Web Form lacks any sort of expectation of email.
32. You send several thousand pieces of email on a daily basis, yet don’t consider yourself an Internet marketer.
33. You send several hundred pieces of email and feel exempt from anti-spam laws.
34. You just exported your Outlook address book and imported that into your email provider.
35. Your small business had 1500 customers for the previous year, yet you sent mail to 40,000 “prospects.”
36. You’re in search of an email list cleaner, email blaster or mass mailer.
37. You’ve got the latest information diet pills, mortgage offers, debt consolidation and are the expert in making money quick with no obligation.
38. People opt into your marketing  expecting a free iPod and they get bombarded with offers.
39. When you go to trade shows, you collect email addresses, not network with industry peers.
40. To you, search engine optimization means more traffic, not better results for visitors.
41. Your email marketing consists of sending offers to your entire list of contacts.
42. In an effort to get your email delivered, you include the text of “F.r.e.e” or “no.ris.k” in your messages.
43. You blame your recipients for reporting your message as spam to their ISP.
44. It’s a good day for you when the spam complaints are below 3%.
45. You’re a member of an organization and believe you can “blast” your message to all members.
46. You decide the value of your email marketing, not your recipients.
47. You have an abnormally large database for the actual interest in your products.
48. You seem to have invented a new form of opt-in, known as a “soft opt in.”
49. You aren’t sure if your contacts are opted in or what they opted in for.
50. Your lead generation model consists of a fishbowl at conferences.

How to Halve Your Email Costs: 10 Tips for Signing with a new Service Provider

I’m just about to sign a new contract with an email service provider. The difference between the highest quote we were given and the final price we’ve agreed is staggering (we’re paying well under half).

This is for the same level of service, the same monthly volume and really similar (if anything, slightly better) functionality. This is not a one-off – the same thing happened last time, and I’ve now been through this several times with web analytics providers, list brokers, online ad suppliers, etc.

Based on all of that, here’s a quick guide to getting what you need from an email service provider, without paying more than you have to. Here we go, 10 tips:

1. Decide What You Want First

The standard way to decide on a platform is to speak to a bunch of providers & let them tell you why you should use them. Then compare what they all offer and go with the best you can afford.

The cheaper, better way to do it will take about an hour of your time up front: Write down a checklist of exactly what you need before you speak to any service providers.

Put your requirements down in Excel. Speak to a few companies & note down how they match up to your list. Fill in costs for each, and you have an easy comparison of your essential needs vs the costs. It’s a subtle difference: “This is what it costs to get what we need” vs “This is what it costs to get what they offer”.

2. Costs: Know what you're buying & how the pricing works.

The basic costs of Email Service Providers are:

• Initial Setup & Training.
• CPM rate. This is your "cost-per-thousand emails sent". 'M' stands for 'Mille', which is Latin for 'Thousand'. Usually you'll make a minimum commitment (eg "I'm going to send 1.5 million emails a month") and they'll give you a rate for that.
• Monthly service charges & support costs.
• Standard services. EG, hourly rate for extra development on your behalf.
• Strategic services. (consulting)
• Hidden extras. Ask to see *all* potential costs. Get it in writing if possible.

Get all of these costs before you think about negotiating rates down. If you push down on CPM before they've told you monthly service costs, they may bump those up to compensate.

3. More on Costs: Ask early & always negotiate down

Ask about costs early on (never say “we’ve got a budget of $100k for year 1). You’ll probably be given 2 costs: A ‘rate card’ (the costs they publish to the world) and ‘your price’ (the cost they’re willing to offer you).

In my experience, these 'your price' quotes can still be negotiated down much further. The prices they’re most likely to budge are CPM and Initial Setup costs. You can often negotiate down further right up to the day you sign.

4. Get your Volume Commitment Right

The more emails you'll commit to send each month, the lower your ESP will go on price. EG, commit to 2-million emails a month and they may offer you $1.50CPM. Commit to 10-million and they may offer you $0.75CPM.

It's important to get this right: If you commit to 2-million and you only send 100,000, they'll charge you for 2-million anyway. If you commit to 2-million and you send 20-million, you probably could have gotten a better rate in the beginning.

The easy way to figure it out is to look at: How big are your email lists? How often do you send email? How much do you want to grow/shrink your lists? How much do you want to increase/decrease frequency?

5. Ditch the Consultancy Services

An in-house consultant will naturally be biased by the limitations of their own tool & their own company. For example, they're never going to say "hey, you're coming up to the end of your contract. I think you've outgrown the functionality our tool offers. You should take your business elsewhere".

My personal opinion is you’re always better off saving the money & using an independent consultant (Tamara, for example).

6. Ditch the Training Too

Most ESPs insist you have some sort of training at the very beginning. My advice is to take the absolute minimum to get you going at first. There are 3 reasons for this:

1. You just won’t know how much training you need until you’ve used the application for a few weeks.
2. If you get all the training on day 1, you’ll have forgotten any advanced stuff by the time you’re comfortable enough to use it.
3. If you do need extra training later on, you can always get it for the same price (or cheaper) than on day 1.

7. Ask for a longer contract

This sounds like a bad idea: The longer you're tied in, the bigger the risk. If things go wrong 3 months into a 3-year contract, you’re stuck! But, the longer your contract, the more commission your sales rep will get. Because of that, they’ll often offer you a cheaper deal to sign for longer.

There is a win-win: A longer, cheaper contract with break clauses. EG, sign up for 24 months, but agree that at each 3-month point you can give 3 months notice to cancel the contract.

8. Ask "if we sign by the end of the month..."

Your sales rep will have monthly targets. They'll get commission and bonuses if they hit their target, and even more if they over-achieve it. You can often commit to sign up by the end of the month in return for a better deal.

It's also worth remembering that it's really tough for them to go back on a deal. If they're willing to charge you $X to sign before Monday & you don't sign, 9 times out of 10 the deal will still be there on Wednesday.

9. Ask "who do you usually pitch against?"

Ask the question "Who do you usually come up against in pitches?". This achieves 2 things:

1. You can then speak to their closest competitors & find out if they’re better/cheaper/both.
2. Companies will often offer special pricing when pitching against their closest rivals.

Sales people are also naturally competitive. If they pitch against ACME corp 7 times and lose, they're more willing to be flexible with price if they can win the 8th.

10. Speak To Other Clients

If a company's system isn't suited to you, their sales people may not tell you. Their clients will give you a far less biased picture. Ask the company to provide references. Ask around your network to see if anyone else is using them. Ask the Email Marketers Club.

If another client says "we're doing the same volume as you and paying half the price," your ESP should either be able to give you a better cost or a really good reason why they can't.

11. Be nice!

Here’s my bonus tip: Be nice! Life’s much more pleasant & it can benefit your budget too. The person on the other end of the phone is far more likely to help you out if they like you. If you make their life really difficult, on the other hand, there is no emotional reason for them to do anything for you.

Any other tips? Experiences? Disagree? Work for an email service provider? Let us know in the comments!

Purchasing email lists is NEVER a good idea. Ever.

A comment from a list provider on a previous post inspired me to write this post because I want to warn you all.

Companies that advertise that they sell email lists "for as low as 60$" should never be trusted. Where did they obtain these email addresses? Did they scrape them off a bunch of websites or did they use other shady tactics like that? By purchasing a list and sending a campaign to that list, you'll be labeled as a spammer instantly. So stay away from them. Don't. Ever. Purchase. Lists. Period.

Please note that I am not saying that renting email lists is a bad idea. List rental can work. But you should always ask the list rental company how they got the email addresses, how they obtained the subscriber's permission (ask them to show you examples) and how often the list is emailed. The last thing you want is that your company/brand is labeled as a spammer for sending emails to people that didn't ask for them.

Also, make sure that it's the list rental company that sends out the emails. If they give you the list so you can send the emails from your system, run away as fast as you can. Seriously. If they are serious about their business they would never just give you the list. So if they do, I'm guessing they do it because they know they will get loads of spam complaints and bounces and they don't want to risk their own sender reputation.

Ask them to do a trial on a random subset of their list to see if you'll actually get a return for your money. List rental is not cheap and there are not a lot of good email lists out there to rent.

Last but not least, if you really think that renting an email list rather than building your own email list is a good practice, think again. The only reason why I would ever recommend someone to go out and rent email lists is when they want to get started with email marketing and they need to build their base from scratch. In that case, list rental could help you get started if you use it only to promote your own list.

Renting email lists should never be a long-term tactic. It's just not cost-effective enough.

I'm sure there are people out there that disagree with me. They are probably in the list rental business themselves :-) But, if you are not in the list rental business: feel free to share your experiences (good or bad) in the comments!

Links for 2009-02-25

Here's an overview of some interesting articles I read recently. Check them out!

• Body Background Images & Outlook 2007
• Nested tables in HTML email: how much is too much?
• Bump CTR: use the last email in the next email?
• Do your customers need a dedicated IP address for sending email?
• Whitelists, Blacklists, and Greylists: What Matters for Email Marketing: part 1 | part 2
• ISP Postmaster Pages: part 1 | part 2
• Landing Page Optimization: 6 Ways To Attract Higher Conversions
• How email works: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

How To Use Pay-Per-Click to Drive Email Signups & Create New Customers

Here’s a simple 4-step technique to grow your opt-in lists, find new customers, and make the most of your pay-per-click budget.

Pay Per Click – The Standard Technique

The most common use for pay-per-click advertising (search advertising) is direct sales. Here’s a vastly simplified picture of a standard PPC campaign:

1. Figure out your target keywords
2. Bid on a bunch of terms
3. Send traffic to your site
4. Measure the results
5. Rinse & repeat

This works really well if you get it right, but it has a fairly large, obvious weakness: The visitors you get from pay-per-click are usually first-time site visitors & it’s much, much harder to turn a new visitor into a customer than it is to sell to someone who’s already warmed to your brand.

As an email marketer you know this. That’s a big part of your job: Get permission to talk to your prospects regularly and you have a much greater chance of turning them into customers.

How to Use Email to Improve Pay-Per-Click Results

Here’s a simple technique you can use to join up PPC & email and get great results. We’ll take a B2C example to illustrate, but this will work equally well (if not better) in most B2B scenarios.

Step 1: Target searchers early in the ‘research’ phase

To do this we’d bid on phrases like “how to buy a tv”, “tv reviews”, “best tv”, and thousands of other much less expensive variations!

Step 2: Create something to help these people with their research

We’ll put together an ebook, “Everything You Need To Know About Buying a TV in 2009”. We’ll put this in PDF format.

Step 3: Turn the visitor into a subscriber

To convert the visitor into a subscriber we'll create a 2-step landing page on our site.

Page 1 would be a short sales pitch for your free “Everything You Need To Know...” ebook. The page will also contain an opt-in form, asking for “name”, “email address” and perhaps another key bit of information: “Budget”, “Location”, “Type of TV you’re interested In” for example. All of this along with a checkbox “I am happy to receive emails from ...”. In other words, the visitor is opting in to our emails in exchange for downloading our free ebook.

Page 2 would be a ‘thank you’ page containing a link to our free PDF ebook. Maybe we’ll include a list of best selling TVs, or a call to action back to our homepage to avoid this page being a ‘dead end’, engage the visitor a little more, and perhaps pick up some sales.

Step 4: Turn the subscriber into a customer

We know our new subscriber is in the research phase for buying a TV. Ideally we can then send them an automated series of emails to grow them from an ‘early researcher’ to a ‘customer’. Alternatively, if we don’t have the tools to support that, we can simply move them onto our regular email campaigns.

Either way, the ability to speak to this prospect regularly gives us a much better chance of gaining them as a customer than we would if we just pushed them straight from a search for “TV Reviews” to a page of “Top Selling” TVs on our website.

This is a simple B2C example, but the tactic has unlimited applications and can work far better in the B2B space, using how-to guides, whitepapers and reports in exchange for permission to speak to your web visitors through email.

A Billion Dollar Email Opportunity: Where Are All The Newspapers?

19 years after the world’s first website popped up, newspapers have fully caught up on the web. They have teams of SEOs. Big pay-per-click budgets. Spend millions on analytics.

But - here’s the big question: Decades after the first email dropped into an inbox, where are all the great newspaper email programs?

Newspapers & Email: The Opportunity

With their investments in analytics, newspapers already have a vast wealth of behavioural data about their audiences online. Connecting that audience with relevant content by email is a win:win:win – it benefits the newspaper, the reader, and the advertiser.

Perhaps the newspapers feel like they’re in the business of producing ‘a product’. Translating a whole newspaper into a website is straightforward, whereas translating a whole newspaper into an email is virtually impossible.

Instead, like a good email marketing program, newspaper email could be personalised & relevant.

Here’re 10 quick starter ideas newspapers could pursue through email.

10 Simple Email Ideas for Newspapers

1. There’s a big breaking story today & I want to stay up to date. I want to give you my email address & have you send me hourly updates & breaking changes until the story dies.
2. Every week, I read the whole of your ‘money’ section . Why can’t I sign up to get money articles by email?
3. I’m a big fan of one of your journalists. I read his blog a couple of times a year when I remember to check it. If you emailed his articles to me I’d read them every time.
4. You’ve got minute-by-minute coverage of every football game on your site. Why can’t I get 15-minute email updates on my Blackberry when I’m travelling? Why can’t I get an email alert whenever there’s news about my team?
5. I need to keep tabs on my competitors in the finance pages. Google is sending me alerts, but I only want the ‘finance’ stuff and only about those 3 companies – why can’t you email it to me?
6. I’m really interested in any news articles mentioning my local town. Often I don’t spot them. Can I sign up so you email me whenever we’re mentioned?
7. I’ve been to your site every day for the last year. You know exactly what kind of stuff I read. Can’t you cross-reference my tastes with your other readers and start sending me stuff they like? You know – like Amazon do with “Customers who bought this also bought...” emails.
8. I left a comment about a political issue. I want to carry on the debate whenever it comes up, but I have to check your political pages every day to see if there’s anything new.
9. I don’t have time to read the news, can’t you just send me a roundup of ‘most read news articles’ every week so that I can stay up to date?
10. Let me register all my interests & my location and send me info every time an event comes up that matches.

All of these are totally relevant for readers, with great potential for advertising revenue. Pick anything along these lines and scale it across a big national newspaper’s million+ readers and you can see the huge opportunity. Newspapers make millions today from CPM display advertising, imagine the increased revenue, audience satisfaction & loyalty a great email program could produce.

Email Marketing Books To Read

In the last year or so a couple of really good books have been published about email marketing. Here's an overview:

Email Marketing: An Hour a Day
By Jeanniey Mullen, David Daniels

Jeanniey Mullen and Dave Daniels have written an easy to read, accessible and rewarding guide to email marketing that will appeal to both the novice and the trained professional. This book spells out how to develop and execute your email marketing campaigns more effectively than any other book on the market today. It draws from the authors' deep experience as practitioners and analysts, as well as their experience as vendors and customers.

The Truth About Email Marketing
By Simms Jenkins

This book is very easy to read without too much unexplained industry jargon to make your eyes glaze over. It's informative and chalk full of useful data. However, it's not a tome full of pages of fluff - just the facts and extracted data to get a good intro to the business or a primer for a veteran.

 

 

 

E-Mail Marketing For Dummies
By John Arnold

John Arnold's manual for email marketing is an amazing resource for anyone looking to start or accentuate their email marketing. The information is presented in a way that is easy to follow with enough technical explanation to help everyone from the complete novice to the expert.

 

 

Total E-mail Marketing: Maximizing your results from integrated e-marketing
By Dave Chaffey

This in-depth book covers all aspects of e-marketing and e-mail. Very comprehensive and informative and will help any interested in learning more about the processes from segmentation to implementation.

 

 

 

>> More email marketing books

14 Ways to Annoy Your Subscribers

Loren McDonald lists these 14 annoyance factors that drive email list churn:

1. Sending irrelevant email messages
2. Sending emails too frequently
3. Expanding permission to other mailings
4. Sending an offer to customers for a product/service they have already purchased
5. Not using any of the data you collected from recipients to create targeted messages
6. Lack of personalization
7. Bad personalization
8. Not using a friendly (recognizable) "From" name, especially in "welcome" messages
9. Using one “From” name/address in the welcome email and then different ones in your regular emails
10. Poor design or confusing navigation
11. Making it hard for readers to manage their subscriptions or contact you from email
12. Using one or two large images to show products or present information.
13. Using images to present action items
14. Emails with typos, the wrong date or product photo, broken links or coding errors.

Common Misconceptions, Truths and Some General Statements About Email Marketing

Andrew Kordek came up with a list of common misconceptions, truths and some general statements that he hopes some folks will read and take notice. These are my favorites:

• Sending email only for revenue is short term thinking.
• The size of your email list doesn’t matter if you don’t take care of your list.
• It takes a lot longer than 2 days to put together a piece of creative for an email
• A navy blue background vs. a dark blue background will certainly not move the needle in terms of conversions
• Just because you are adding another program or value add for the customer, doesn’t mean that the customer wants to get that email.
• Don’t have people send email who don’t know what the hell they are doing. Leave it to a professional.
• Adding another picture, or banner or another link to your email wont necessarily help your email. In fact it might make it worse.
• Email testing is a waste of time, unless you use the data. In other words, don’t test cuz you think its cool or the thing to do. Test. Analyze. Adapt.
• Email experts or strategists who talk about best practices and strategy who have never been on the client side to execute these best practices and strategy should try it sometime. Oh…and tie it to a revenue number as well. Walk the talk folks.
• 3-7 seconds guys. You have 3-7 seconds to grab the attention of the reader. Are you sure you want to add that extra banner or picture or offer in there?
• Just because its legal, doesn’t mean its the right thing to do.
• Respect your subscriber. Period.

Read the rest here

Email Marketing Unconference/Barcamp: Who's in?

Anna Billstrom wrote a blog post on an idea she discussed with me when I was in San Francisco last week. Basically she would like to organize an email marketing unconference. We call it a Barcamp here in Belgium.

Basically the set-up is as follows: low to zero registration fee (if we can find someone to sponsor the location, food etc), cheap (but fun) location, agenda determined by the attendees, attendees are speakers and speakers are attendees...

Read Anna's post and let us know if you'd like to participate: http://www.banane.com/workblog/?p=648

You can either comment on the idea on Anna's blog, or on the Email Marketer's Club's forum.

Let us know if you'd be interested in helping to set this up or if you're interested in sponsoring.

Ideas for locations are welcome! Anything goes - we could even do multiple events in multiple continents.

Who's in?

Worst Unsubscribe Practices

I am still unsubscribing from lots of emails in an email account that I no longer wish to use. While doing so, I've come across a couple of practices that make me want to scream. I'll share them with you so that you can make sure not to do this to your subscribers:

• don't make me log in to unsubscribe from your email. I usually don't remember my login details and asking for a password reminder results in more email in my inbox.
• give me the chance to update my email address. I might still want to receive your newsletter at a different address but am too lazy to look for your newsletter sign-up box on your webpage.
• give me an opportunity to cut down on the amount of emails you send me. Some senders send me more than 1 email per day. That's overkill. I do want to hear from you once in a while, just not every day.
• give me the chance to say which emails I do and which I don't want to receive. I am not interested in everything that you send me. Give me a chance to choose the content I want.
• don't use font size 6 (or 1) for your unsubscribe link. In some emails the footer text is so small that you need a magnifying glass to be able to read it. I wear glasses because I have bad eye sight. Don't remind me of that every time I want to unsubscribe.
• don't make the links blend in with the rest of the text. Use some underlining at least so that I can easily recognize the unsubscribe link.
• don't get too clever with naming your unsubscribe link. The word "Unsubscribe" is what I'm looking for. I recognize that word instantly. Don't make me read the whole footer. I'm unsubscribing, remember?
• don't send me a confirmation of my unsubscribe request. A simple "you've been unsubscribed" on your website will do. Remember: I am trying to reduce, not increase inbox overload by unsubscribing.
• use my email address in the To-line, not my name - that way it's easier for me to see which alias I've used to sign up for your newsletter.
• don't make the "why do you want to unsubscribe from this list" survey question mandatory. I admit, I didn't see anyone doing this, but just in case you'd be tempted to do this: don't!

Have you seen unsubscribe tactics that make you want to scream? Please share!

Participate in the Email Marketer's Club's 2009 Inside Email Marketing Study

I would like to invite all of you to participate in the 2009 Inside Email Marketing Study, sponsored by the Email Marketer’s Club in cooperation with ExactTarget and Ball State University.

The purpose of this study is to provide the international marketing community with a better understanding of how email marketing performance is measured across the globe and how email marketing teams integrate with other marketing channels.

The survey should take you about 10 minutes to complete.

Take the survey now:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/102714/01xlo

50 randomly selected respondents will receive a 25$ iTunes gift card and all respondents can receive a summary of responses by submitting their contact information at the end of the survey.

Thanks for your cooperation!

PS. If you have a blog, we would appreciate it if you could post a link to our survey on your blog.

Two European Email Marketing Conferences

A while back you could read on this blog that MarketingSherpa is organizing their first Email Marketing Summit on May 12-13 in Munich, Germany.

Last week at the Email Evolution Conference, the DMA/EEC and BBP announced that they are organizing a European Email Marketing Conference in Barcelona, Spain on June 3-5.

This means that there will be 2 major email marketing conferences in Europe this year. w00t! w00t! (that's Geek for Yippie!) :-)

Email Marketing to Europe

As you know, I attended the Email Evolution Conference last week in Arizona where I was invited to sit on a panel with Kath Pay, Skip Fidura and Dela Quist to talk about the do and don'ts of email marketing to Europe.

Topics that we covered included the opt-in legislation in Europe, localization of content, segmentation and testing strategies, the need for templates that work in multiple languages, how do you coordinate things when there are so many different languages, countries and cultures involved, the fragmentation of the ISP market etc.

Here are the main takeaways from this session:

How do you organize an international email program?

There are two ways you can go about it: you can either manage everything centrally or you manage the email program locally. Personally I've dealt with both approaches in the past.

Some Unsubscribe Page Inspiration

As I am trying to reduce the email accounts that I need to check on a daily basis, I am unsubscribing from a ton of emails today and re-subscribing to some with another email address. Unsubscribe pages come in all shapes and forms. These ones are the best I've come across in my quest against inbox overload. Why? Because they make it easy for me to just change my email address or choose which newsletters I want to unsubscribe from.

I like this last one because it plays on my emotions. Almost made me feel guilty for unsubscribing. Almost. :-)

Attending Technology for Marketing & Advertising in London

If you're attending Technology for Marketing & Advertising in London next week, let's meet up! I will there the full day on Tuesday and until lunch time on Wednesday...

Links for 2009-02-17

• C-Level Event Invitations: How It's Done
  I's nearly impossible to get top-level executives to even open your e-mail, but if you're short on time and budget and your only option is an e-mail invitation, here are some guidelines to follow.
• 6 Tips on How to Use E-mail for Market Research
  Here's how to make the most of a survey delivered via e-mail
• Takeaways from the Email Evolution Conference 2009
  Chad White summarized the main takeaways from the event
• Litmus offers free testing every weekend in February
  During the next three weekends (starting 14 Feb), all Litmus testing will be completely free for all their users
• All You Never Cared to Know About Deliverability
  Steve Woods uses a border example to explain the technical side of deliverability to a non-technical audience
• Profiles in Email Laws: Austria’s EU Opt-In Regime
• Email Evolution – One Twitterific Conference!
  a summary of the best tweets from the Email Evolution Conference from the "All the news fit to send" blog
• What I learned redesigning the Campaign Monitor newsletter
  David Greiner shares the considerations he made when redesigning their newsletter. The new design is awesome. Check it out!
• Common Misconceptions and Truths of Email Marketing
  Andrew Kordek came up with a list of common misconceptions, truths and some general statements that he hopes some folks will read and take notice.

European Email Marketing Survey

If you live in Europe, I encourage you to take Return Path's Email Marketing Survey in which they benchmark perceptions among European email marketers.  Your answers will help to develop new products and training that help email marketers improve response and revenues.  The results will be shared with you.

Survey:  http://bit.ly/gby6k

Multivariate Testing in Email Made Easy

Multivariate testing - testing multiple variations for multiple placements such as headlines, images and call-to-actions - used to be complex and tedious to set up and analyze for email marketers.

That's why the founders of 8seconds decided to develop a tool that simplifies the process. They have just released this tool - and it is not only very simple but also very cheap to use.

How does it work?

Well, 8seconds provides you with an interface in which you define how many placements you have in your email and how many creatives you have for each of these placements. It then asks you to enter a link for each creative plus the url for the landing page that is linked to that creative. The tool will compile a small piece of code (and href and img tag) that you need to include in your email and will also ask you to define how much statistical validity you want to aim for.

Once you sent out the email through your usual email service provider, it will serve different variations of your email until statistical validity is reached. From that point forward it will only serve the most optimal variation of the email - all in real time.

Check it out here and try it out for free.

Full disclosure: 8seconds have asked me to help spread the word about this product. Your honest feedback will be highly appreciated and will help 8seconds make their product even better.