As promised, here's an overview of the most interesting email marketing related articles that were published in the last couple of weeks:

List management:

• MarketingSherpa advises to use text-only if you're emailing BellSouth names. Apparently the ISP modified its filtering system in January. The folks at MarketingSherpa did some testing and discovered that text-only messages were the ONLY types getting through. In fact, not even emails being converted from HTML to text with a multipart MIME detecting system will land in a BellSouth inbox. BellSouth provides Internet service in the following states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.


• In this article, Melinda Krueger answers the question "How do I calculate the cost for acquiring the email addresses of our "customers" to build our database?"

Subject Lines:

• In this article, Gail Goodman discusses approaches and "secrets" behind great subject lines.

Events & Seminars:

• DMA's E-Mail Marketing Council (EMC) will host a couple of virtual seminars in the next coming weeks: "Email Image Suppression Demystified" on March 6th and "Legislative Update for Email Marketers" on April 12th.

Studies & Research:

• The eec recently released their Value of an Email Address report.
• Alterian debuted a free online assessment tool that measures a marketer's e-mail marketing sophistication and recommends tips for improvement. The Email Self-Evaluation is available here. The tool asks marketers to answer 10 survey questions to gauge the level of each marketer's e-mail program. Then, based on the score, it gives marketers a rich media presentation that offers them ideas to help advance their e-mail marketing programs. The results are given in real time and let marketers compare their efforts to others in the industry. The overall results will be published and shared with the public when the study is completed.

Design & Layout:

• Each email reader handles emails differently - what works in Outlook 2007 does not necessarily work in Outlook XP or Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail. Thus, if you cannot identify what each customer is using but you know your customers are using a range of email readers and each email reader treats emails differently, you may be stuck creating emails that conform to the lowest common denominator. In this study, Pivotal Veracity compares each of the major Outlook readers on all critical elements you need to know to ensure your emails retain their brand integrity and effectivenss.
• Found this one through Kelly Rusk's blog: Salima Valji, an emarketer from Microsoft, has posted a great guide for designing emails for Outlook 2007.

Deliverability:

• In this article, Stefan Pollard discusses how to resolve ISP blocks. Bottom line: start a dialogue with the ISP and try to understand what caused the delivery challenge. And then fix it!
• In this article, Derek Harding discusses the challenge of getting your transactional emails delivered to the inbox. Bottom line: you should apply the same principles and techniques as you do to marketing campaigns to ensure transactional messages are delivered every time.
• In this article, David Baker explains the difference between reputation services, authentication and accreditation by making an analogy with license plates on cars. For those that are having difficulties understanding what it's all about.
• In part 2 in a series of articles about email deliverability, Spencer Kollas explains how to maximize email deliverability through applying effective list hygiene techniques. He suggests to scrub your lists regularly, to remove bad domains, distribution accounts, "spam" email addresses, inactive addresses and to use data checkers.

Landing pages:

• In this article, Jeanne Jennings offers seven tips for creating effective landing pages. Most important of all: match your landing page to your call to action and use a look and feel that is consistent with the email.

Strategy:

• In this article, Dylan Boyd compares newsletters versus one-off email campaigns. Basically he's trying to say that if you really want to sell and not educate, focus on the one-off campaign.

Spam:

• A flood of spam coming out of China and South Korea is fueling a 30% jump in spam levels in just the past week, according to a new report.

And last but not least: Mequoda developed 10 guidelines for designing an effective email newsletter that will help them analyze the email newsletters of successful B2B and B2C publishers. Beginning in February 2007, Mequoda will begin publishing one Mequoda Email Newsletter Review each month. Over the next year, these reviews will create a reference library of the best and worst B2B and B2C email newsletters. A perfect "A" Mequoda Email Newsletter Score is 40, or 4 points for each 10 Best Practice Guidelines.