Be Relevant! Email Marketing Blog

Moving to Lifecycle Based Email Marketing - Take this Survey

Stephanie Miller asked me to post this on my blog:

Our friends over at the Email Marketing Council of the Online Marketing Summit, led by active industry advocate Stephanie Miller of Return Path, are hosting a survey that should reveal some interesting data for us all. 

Check out this 10-minute survey about moving from
batch and blast to a lifecycle based email marketing approach.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=etxIrcvrdQ2CQ5bkdaVMFw_3d_3d

Take the survey now - as it closes next week. I’ll be sure to highlight some of the results as they are published. Questions? Ping Stephanie (stephanie.miller (at) returnpath.net).

links for 2008-09-25

• Email Insider » Blog Archive » Once Again: Email List Growth Doesn’t Equal Revenue Growth
  To improve your existing reports, measure response by subscriber profile segments. Then, measure and benchmark to these engagement metrics:
  (tags: list_growth)
• Effective Welcome Email Example: SlideShare
  Slideshare's welcome email does a lot of great things that we can all learn from and apply to our email marketing campaigns.
  (tags: cases welcome_emails)

links for 2008-09-24

• Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008
  Interesting report about blogging - this blog is featured on the Day 2 page :-)
  (tags: blogosphere blogging blogs)
• 6 Easy Ways to Improve Your HTML Emails
  here are 15 things you can do to create great-looking HTML emails
  (tags: design coding)
• Fundamental Design Rules for Email Marketing Success
  Though there isn't one email-marketing design bible, there are fundamental design rules that should be applied. This article reviews some of the high-level design principles as well as more in-depth rules affecting some of the most common issues and questions we are most often asked.
  (tags: design coding)

links for 2008-09-23

• Really Simple E-mail Segmentation: Getting Clicks to Convert
  "The most important thing to do when you're optimizing a landing page is to put yourself in visitors' shoes. Think about what got them to the landing page in the first place and what information they will need to move forward with a conversion. Remember, they don't know your company or products as well as you do; factor that into your evaluation."
  (tags: segmentation)
• Why your emails are getting blocked
  Are you neglecting your email list hygiene, feedback loops or deliverability tools? A new study reiterates the best practices you should already be using.
  (tags: deliverability list_management fbl)
• What Does the CAN-SPAM Act Mean to Marketers?
  "Meeting the CAN-SPAM requirements is the responsibility of the sender and not the ESP. Reputable ESPs will assist senders in meeting the requirements, but the sender must stay vigilant in verifying that all aspects of the act are met."
  (tags: legislation canspam)
• Costco email marketing strategy
  Like their stores, Costco’s email marketing campaigns are also designed to encourage customers to buy all sorts of products.
  (tags: cases)

links for 2008-09-21

• 3 Quick Apps for Resizing Images on the Fly
  Here are three great programs for Mac and Windows to resize images on the fly.
  (tags: design tools)

links for 2008-09-19

• IN: The Email Reputation Conference
  November 6, 2008: this is a one day conference organized by Return Path and focuses solely on REPUTATION being the key to the inbox. The agenda looks very interesting!
  (tags: events)
• Taking E-mail Personalization to the Next Level
  It’s okay to start small with personalization, and you should. First decide what impact you want programs to have, then build back from there. Ultimately, you want each customer to feel like you really know and care about her as an individual, and this can be accomplished—more easily than you may think—by personalizing e-mail content based on what’s of interest and greatest relevance to her.
  (tags: personalization)

links for 2008-09-18

• Reviewing Spam Laws in APAC
  Singapore, Hong Kong, China spam laws
  (tags: legislation apac)
• Alt attributes and image suppression in emails
  make no assumptions with alt attributes. With all the variations out there, you have no realistic alternative but to test your design in one of the inexpensive tools available to find the image and image attributes combination that works best across all clients and webmail services.
  (tags: alt_tags coding)
• How to Get More Opens and Clicks
  three effective techniques for writing subject lines that can increase your open rates, as well as my "quick five" call-to-action checklist that will help your readers take that important next step.
  (tags: subject_lines calltoaction opens clicks)
• Make E-Mail Pull Its Holiday Weight
  How can you maximize your e-mail efforts to capitalize on the fourth-quarter buying activity? A few basic tips:
  (tags: holidays)
• Three Ways to Improve Your Lead-Nurturing Strategy
  "Email is an important part of any nurturing strategy. While you can integrate graphic-rich emails into the strategy, it is worthwhile to also include periodic text emails that appear as personalized communication to your prospect. "
  (tags: lead_nurturing)

links for 2008-09-17

• Inspire Me!: Email’s Ten ‘Demandments’
  Know your email subscribers' "demandments" and direct your messages toward meeting and exceeding them.
  (tags: strategy)

links for 2008-09-16

• E-Mail Marketing: Fixed And Variable Costs, And Why They Matter
  When it costs a significant fee to do something, you work very carefully to make sure that you've done everything right (aka "best practices"), so that you get a suitable return on investment. When something is close to free (aka e-mail marketing, on a variable cost basis), the discipline is different --- not bad, but different.
  (tags: industry)
• Challenge-Response: a Panacea or Abuse?
  Challenge response systems have been around long enough now that pretty much everybody has an opinion on them. The end users who use challenge response systems seem to love them. But legitimate email senders often never respond to challenges, and so the end users are actually missing out on a lot of wanted email.
  (tags: deliverability challenge_response)
• New Email Rule: Nonresponders May Still Love Getting Your Email
  Don't fire nonresponders before asking first. Until you know why, you can't fix things.
  (tags: non_responders)

links for 2008-09-15

• Webinar: The ROI of Email Deliverability and Centralization
  Sep 24: This webinar explores how leading online retailer The Parent Company is achieving a 253% risk-adjusted ROI by centralizing email across ten retail and content brands, including eToys, BabyUniverse and ePregnancy. This interactive webinar will present the findings from the newly released Forrester Consulting study "The Total Economic Impact™ of the StrongMail Platform." -- Hear The Parent Company SVP and CIO Chris Cummings discuss goals and objectives for his email programs while Forrester Research email analyst Julie Katz analyzes the findings alongside additional research on email trends.
  (tags: events)
• Best Practices for Curing List Fatigue, Part 1
  "in the first part of this two-part series, we examine some of the root causes of list fatigue. "
  (tags: list_fatigue list_management)
• Understand the power of email numbers
  If you're measuring email effectiveness based on online sales, you're only getting part of the picture. To understand the campaign impact, here are the metrics to consider.
  (tags: metrics)
• Why Aren’t You Using Double Opt-In?
  Loren McDonald offers some pretty compelling arguments for why you shouldn't go for anything less than double opt-in.
  (tags: list_growth)
• Maximising ROI without overmailing - how to determine the right send frequency for your email campaigns
  Relevance and timing have a huge impact on how an individual regards any given messaging frequency; getting this right (a topic in its own right) requires a deep understanding of customer profiles and the use of event triggers and lifecycle marketing techniques in your email programmes.
  (tags: frequency)
• Deliverability.com: Some Yahoo findings - Let's compare approaches
  The author describes how a new company overcame recent delivery issues with Yahoo Mail.
  (tags: yahoo deliverability)
• Why do I get spam?
  There are basically five reasons why we get spam.
  (tags: spam)
• Email Cannibalization
  With e-mail, your cannibalization costs are based on customer frustration --- how many contacts until you no longer get enough revenue to offset the folks who opt-out of your campaigns? You can answer this by executing simple contact strategy tests.
  (tags: testing strategy analysis)
• Focusing on Referrals, Abandons Helps Diapers Grow List, Bolster Sales
  Take a look at one eretailer (Diapers.com) who tripled new customer referrals with three simple tweaks to their email strategy. The strategy also used well-timed emails to turn abandoned shopping carts into 129% more conversions.
  (tags: cases)
• List Segmentation Effects on Open Rate, Click Rate, Bounces, Abuse Complaints
  For the most part, segmenting your email marketing lists can help improve your open and click rates, and will reduce the number of bounces from each campaign you send. However...
  (tags: study)
• Image blocking and email marketing
  Mark Brownlow: "Every now and then, I put up an article with detailed, but clear and jargon-free, explanations of some basic email marketing concepts. For those who don't live and breathe this stuff (which is most people). The latest appeared today and covers the issue of image blocking. What is it? Why does it matter? What can you do about it?"
  (tags: image_blocking)
• BrontoFire: Live - Holiday Campaigns
  In this video, Julie Waite and DJ Waldow dissect several holiday messages from last year. They evaluate from Crutchfield, eBags, HP Shopping, and Nascar - all who entice consumers with unique methods.
  (tags: holidays)

links for 2008-09-09

• Video email update: can you embed them?
  There are three alternatives when it comes to putting videos in email: the embedded code, image and embedded file approaches.
  (tags: video)
• Email marketing to grow by 24% in 2008 (UK)
  E-consultancy's latest Email Marketing Platforms Buyers' Guide reveals that the UK market for email platforms and services continue to grow, reaching £274m by the end of the year; an increase of 24% on 2007.
  (tags: study)
• Newsletter Benchmark stats for: Member Associations, Internal Communications
  Denise Cox recently aggregated three months worth of stats for all Member Association and all Internal Communication newsletters published through their system - and offers the top level metrics in this blog post.
  (tags: study)
• Conference: A practical guide to email marketing
  I am speaking at the UK DMA's Email Marketing Conference on November 4th in London, along with Jeanniey Mullen, Stephanie Miller and Dylan Boyd. Hope to see some of you there!
  (tags: events)
• Newsletters, Blogging and SEO: How They Work Together for You
  When you use email in partnership with blogging and search, you'll build newsletter circulation as well as blog traffic, and both together will help boost your organic search engine rankings without stealing even an extra penny from your search-marketing budget. You can't lose!
  (tags: strategy blogging seo newsletters)
• Spammers are sending far fewer image-based messages
  In other findings, Russia continues to be the origin of most spam, according to IBM. Russia is responsible for 11% of the world's spam, followed by Turkey with 8%, then the United States with 7.1%.
  (tags: spam study)

links for 2008-09-06

• MAC mail has a feature that allows you to "false bounce" an email.
  Something we need to factor into bounce processing! Thanks to Christopher Byrne for the tip!
  (tags: bounce_management list_management)
• In Defense of Blacklists
  When Spamhaus blacklists an e-mailer for spamming, it's the equivalent of a cop pulling someone over for questionable actions in the worst neighborhood imaginable. That these cops are self-appointed is troubling. But marketers would do well to understand that without Spamhaus, people's inboxes would be unusable. And for the most part, the reason marketers get blacklisted is because they were displaying behavior similar to that of some of the most despicable people the human race has to offer.
  (tags: blacklists deliverability spam)
• Tips on email list building
  Here are a few tips to help you build up your list...
  (tags: list_growth)
• How much do spammers actually make?
  "Let's round it down to $7000 per week, and assume that our spammer takes four weeks of vacation per year. His net profit for the year? $336,000." (I think I'm in the wrong business, LOL!)
  (tags: spam)
• Who are the Email Marketing Experts in your country?
  If you could name maximum 3 people that live in your country, who would you consider to be the email marketing leaders/experts in your country?
  (tags: industry)

links for 2008-08-28

• A Good E-mail Marketing Program Costs Money
  "marketing organizations can no longer afford not to invest in efforts to improve the relevance of their e-mail programs"
  (tags: strategy budget)
• Time to learn about email marketing | The Scrappy Email Marketer
  "I spend 30-60 minutes a day on average reading about this industry to really understand it and learn new things about it. Education is an ongoing thing in my opinion. Never rest on what you know and always have an open mind."
  (tags: industry getting_started)
• Five ways to repeat yourself effectively
  "We've all had emails that worked particularly well, drawing an unusually high response. Pity, then, we can't use that same email again and again. Except we can...sort of." Mark Brownlow offers five ideas.
  (tags: tactics)
• How We Improved Our Newsletter Subscription Process
  "Hoping to inspire you to review your own subscription processes, here are the improvements that we made"
  (tags: cases opt-in)
• CSS support for MobileMe
  "Last month Apple replaced .Mac with a new service called MobileMe and while it is certainly slicker visually and nicer to use, in terms of CSS support the results were mixed."
  (tags: mobileme css coding)
• Embedding images revisited - Campaign Monitor Blog
  "The increased initial download size, and hence slower speed, the failure to show for increasingly popular webmail clients and the hassle of attachments still seem to indicate that embedded images are not the way to go in most cases."
  (tags: coding)
• Cracking the FTC Code: What You Can and Can't Do With Transactional E-mail
  "the topic of what is and isn't allowed under CAN-SPAM almost always comes up during any discussion about using transactional e-mail for marketing purposes. While it's always a good idea to verify that you're in compliance with CAN-SPAM laws, the good news is that when done properly, this potentially lucrative and brand-building practice is allowed. The key comes down to knowing the law and acting accordingly."
  (tags: transactional_emails canspam)             
• 2009 Email Benchmark Guide Survey
  A final request: Please take 5 to 10 minutes to answer MarketingSherpa's annual Email Questionnaire
  (tags: survey)

links for 2008-08-27

• The new definition of spam                
  recipients "define spam by the quality of the email itself -- not by the overall reputation of the company emailing them." So what are you to do? Spencer Kollas share some tips. 
  (tags: spam relevancy testing frequency targeting)
• Really Simple E-mail Segmentation: Getting Openers to Click - ClickZ
  "The good news about those who open but don't click is that they're able to see your images. The bad news is you don't know whether they're fully reviewing your e-mail and not finding anything engaging enough to click on, or whether your e-mail was opened in the preview pane a for a second as they scrolled past it, without looking, to get to another message."
  (tags: segmentation)
• Broken Graphics and the 40/40/20 Rule
  "This isn't to say e-mail creative is unimportant, but e-mailers really do need to assess how much energy they're spending on creative relative to crafting the offer and hitting the right target. I'd bet an evening's worth of cigars and vodka martinis that most are spending 80% of their time focused on the part of their effort that affects 20% of their chances of success."
  (tags: rendering design segmentation relevancy offer)
• Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season
  This guide includes benchmarks and advice on when to begin your campaign, how much to increase your email volume, which days to send on, and how to stand out in the inbox during the holidays.
  (tags: study)
• B2C problems for B2B email marketers
  Combined with their portability (the email address isn't zapped when you move jobs), it's no surprise to find business folk using them to get commercial email from informational websites and vendors.
  (tags: b2b rendering deliverability)

links for 2008-08-26

• United Online to update FBL
  (tags: united_online fbl deliverability)
• Return Path + Habeas = good for email marketers?
  "any concentration in a marketplace raises questions. Matt Blumberg, Return Path's CEO and Chairman, was kind enough to take time out to answer them for me." - Mark Brownlow interviews Return Path's CEO, Matt Blumberg
  (tags: industry deliverability safelist senderscore)

links for 2008-08-25

• Embedding images in email - Campaign Monitor Blog
  "based on our results, it is clearly not worth using embedded images in your emails. All you will be doing is forcing people to download encoded images that they will not be able to view."
  (tags: coding)

links for 2008-08-23

• How to Spam
  Spam is any communication that purports to offer a benefit but is unwanted. Of course that means come-ons for cheap prescription pills, penis enlargment and miracle fat-burner supplements, and mortgage refinancing, but it also includes too-frequent updates from companies you’ve done business with, useless “updates” from newsletters you’ve subscribed to, meaningless self-linking on social media, and so on.
  (tags: spam)

links for 2008-08-22

• IBM on advertising in e-newsletters
  IBM Corp. uses its own e-newsletters to build brand awareness and generate leads, but it also relies on placing ads in outside e-newsletters to reach those publications’ audiences. About 10% of its interactive marketing budget is spent on advertising in other companies’ or organizations’ e-newsletters that are directed at individuals at midmarket companies
  (tags: cases)
• A Designer's Guide to HTML Email
  (tags: design coding)
• Email Marketer's Club: Top 50 Members
  Are you in the list? Check it out now!
  (tags: emc)

links for 2008-08-21

• Email Insider » Blog Archive » Engaging The Unengaged
  David Baker thinks sometimes we blur the trends of consumer use of email for personal reasons and professional reasons, with that of email marketing and the business value exchanges that have evolved our use of this digital channel. All the consumer trends indicate we are using it more, and it's more pervasive in our lives than ever. But is it a great marketing and sales channel, though, from a Lifetime Value perspective? Is social media diminishing the value of these communications?
  (tags: engagement strategy)
• The Email Holy Grail: Targeted, Relevant Messages
  Kath Pay offers strategies that will help you reach the new Holy Grail of email marketing: targeted, relevant and timely emails
  (tags: strategy getting_started)
• 29% of Internet Users Have Bought Things From Spam Email??
  "Security company Marshal reports that their latest survey found 29% of respondents willing to admit that they have purchased something from a spam e-mail. While that number seems pretty questionable, PCMag's Appscout points to a related survey from Forrester in 2004 that found 20% of people say they have bought from spammers. In other words, if you believe these studies - it's getting worse, not better."
  (tags: spam study)
• Fortune 500 companies use of email spoofing countermeasures declining
  A recently conducted study by Secure Computing’s TrustedSource reveals that, not only a mere 40% of the Fortune 500 companies use Sender Policy Framework and DomainKeys Identified mail, but also, that the ones who’ve implemented the countermeasures aren’t fully taking advantage of protection mechanisms offered at the first place.
  (tags: dkim spf spoofing authentication)
• Japan's Updated Anti-spam Bill (1 of 3)
  (tags: legislation japan)

links for 2008-08-20

• What content do B2B customers / prospects want?
  "It is interesting to note the difference in what marketers think they should provide and what the recipients want to receive. For example, industry research is actually more valuable to End Users then marketers seem to think."
  (tags: b2b studies)
• Spamza - Why Using Only Single Opt-In is Dangerous for YOU
  Another reason why you should use double or confirmed opt-in.
  (tags: list_management spam)
• Using a Coupon to Entice Cutomers to Take Your Survey
  (tags: cases)
• Four Common Assumptions Masquerading as Best Practices
  Stefan Pollard discusses 4 common assumptions that have been labeled best practices but might be more correctly labeled "conventional wisdom," meaning ideas people accept as worthy without investigating them on their own. "Not every best practice will yield the best results."
  (tags: tactics testing subject_lines navigation image_blocking)
• What to Do When You Mess Up
  Loren McDonald offers these tips: Don't panic. Make it right, quickly. Communicate your follow-up first to those directly affected. Turn the mistake into an opportunity. Learn from your mistake. Sounds simple? Well, it is!
  (tags: tactics)
• E-mail Marketers Slopping it up: Part 47
  "OK, so “Part 47” is an exaggeration, but every time a new study on e-mail marketers’ practices comes out, it without fail illustrates how loosey goosey we are on this particular channel."
  (tags: studies)
• Email Marketing Platforms Buyer's Guide 2008 | E-consultancy.com
  If you are looking for an email service provider, then this guide can help you compile your shortlist. It contains profiles of 23 leading UK suppliers plus information about the size of this market and trends affecting the sector. Includes SWOT analysis, tips and pitfalls and vendor matrix.
  (tags: esp rfp)