• Canada's Electronic Commerce Protection Act
  Matt Vernhout's explains how this new legislation impacts email marketers mailing into Canada
  (tags: legislation canada spam)
• Alert: Gmail defaulting to images off for whitelisted senders
  There’s growing evidence that Gmail has defaulted back to images off for senders that have been whitelisted.
  (tags: gmail rendering image_blocking)
• Message to Readers: About Penton, Direct Magazine E-mail Practices
  Ken Magill gives some insight into how a publisher views their email marketing program.An interesting read.
  (tags: cases)

• How often should I send my email newsletter?
  (tags: frequency)

• Why “System” Transactional Emails are a Bad Idea
  (tags: transactional_emails)
• Free Tool Lets You Check Whether Your Reverse DNS (rDNS) is Set Up Properly
  (tags: tools)
• Playing the E-mail 'Match Game?' Be Careful: E-mail Append Poses Serious Risks
  Marketers who ask about append are often looking for a quick fix. However, append is more likely to drive long-term deliverability problems rather than long-term growth and ROI.
  (tags: append list_growth list_building deliverability complaints)
• E-Mail Marketing: At An Inflection Point
  (tags: strategy)
• Social Marketing Designs
  Social Marketing is the hot topic. But how are different companies incorporating it into their designs? Here are a few different examples of what people are doing.
  (tags: gallery social)
• Hilarious and Educational Video by Seth Godin
  (tags: fun)
• Email From Address - How to Pick One
  how do you pick the best “from address” for your email campaigns? There is no hard and fast rule here, but there are some things to think about...
  (tags: from_address)
• MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Awards Gallery
  Get Inspired by These Exceptional Campaigns
  (tags: gallery inspiration)
• Targeted opt-out email: busting some myths
  (tags: permission list_rental tactics)
• UK Subscriber Study: Email Must Say Something Worthwhile
  It’s not surprising that a recent study of UK email subscribers finds that most email marketing is pretty terrible – it’s irrelevant, untargeted and poorly timed. What the study really points out is that consumers notice.
  (tags: study)
• Reputation as measured by the ISPs
  In this post, Laura Atkins look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs. Definitely worth a read!
  (tags: deliverability spamtraps bounce_management complaints fbl)

In this post, Loren McDonald makes the point that even though transactional messages are a golden opportunity to engage with customers (to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers, to anticipate and answer questions or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services), many marketers don't take advantage of this easy and obvious benefit.

He offers some best practices for your transactional emails:

1. Move responsibility for transactional emails into the marketing department.
2. Set up your transactional message stream on a separate IP address.
3. Redesign the inbox presence.
4. Position the transactional message content front and center in the message body. Use HTML design elements to create an attractive and organized message.
5. Add personality that supports your brand or company image, expresses your thanks for that they're customers and invites them to engage further.
6. Use the transactional message to initiate or expand the customer relationship.

Read more here.

• The Value of Email Marketing to the Marketing Mix
  (tags: strategy)
• Half of Americans Don’t Use Twitter, MySpace, Facebook
  Though recent high-profile media coverage suggests that a large percentage of the US population participates in online social networking and microblogging, more than half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites - MySpace and Facebook - according to (pdf) a recent Harris Poll from Harris Interactive.
  (tags: study)
• Every day Italians receive 420 million e-mail
  ...in one year there has been an increase of 20% of the volume of e-mail... about 4 million users check their e-mail from mobile devices... The mail service most used in Italy is Hotmail (40.7%), followed by Libero (35.7%), Alice-Tin.it-Virgilio, Yahoo! and Gmail (between 20 and 24% each).
  (tags: study)

Today Seth Godin came up with a couple of interesting predictions in his post, 'Sixty to zero':

Prediction: 90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. How do you change what you're doing today to be ready for that?

Prediction: The effort required to outsource a task involving the manipulation of data of any kind will continue to decrease until it will be faster and cheaper to outsource just about anything than it will be to use in-house talent. What will you do today to ensure your prosperity when that happens?

Along the same lines, Simms Jenkins recently interviewed Stan Rapp and he says 'Rapp gets that your online messaging today consists of Twitter and Facebook as well as the email inbox. He fully embraces the simple and powerful differentiating aspect of email marketing -- that it is delivered to the people that ask for these offers, updates, and newsletters. This unprecedented by-request-only aspect is what separates email from its peers. In Rapp's view, it is the most powerful yet underutilized force in marketing today.  '

The interview then goes goes onto say:

Jenkins: You said "the inbox is the beating heart of the internet, and email is the tightest link ever forged between buyer and seller." This resonated with me, as someone that runs an email-focused agency. Can you expand on this?

Rapp: No. 1, the tightest one-to-one link you can have is a relationship in which the consumer invites you to talk to them. The beating heart of the internet is the inbox. Its pulse pounds away as each of us clicks open and sends out our hourly emails.

So, the question is: are you doing everything you can to utilise this powerful channel?

• For Sale: 99% Deliverability and the Brooklyn Bridge
  Does an Email Service Provider tell you they have "great deliverability"? Here's what that really means.
  (tags: deliverability)
• 3 steps to reinvigorating tired email messages
  Chris Marriott outlines an approach that marketers can use to evaluate and refresh the contents of their emails.
  (tags: tactics optimization analysis)
• What you can learn from unsubscribes
  An unsubscribe deserves high praise, because of three clear benefits: proper analysis of unsubscribe patterns identifies problems with your email program, an unsubscribe helps you retain the subscriber (really) and an unsubscribe is an opportunity to impress.
  (tags: unsubscribe analysis)
• The Unsubscribe Link Location: Top, Bottom Or Both?
  Everyone seems to agree that your unsubscribe link should be prominent and always included in your email administrative footer. Whether to place it at or near the top of your emails generates more "it depends" answers than disagreements among industry experts.
  (tags: unsubscribe tactics list_management)
• Make It Pop!: From the Inbox to the Store: Using Email to Bring People into Retail Locations
  "We’ve been seeing a wide range of approaches to retail store messaging in email. Here are some noteworthy tactics to try"
  (tags: retail tactics)
• Email Marketing and Google Analytics: Add Power, Save Time
  How you track emails can spell the difference between having an email marketing channel that can be easily condensed into broad reports (i.e. monthly sales numbers) with campaigns that can easily be tracked separately (i.e. comparing this week’s email to last week’s) vs. a disorganized system that takes time to organize or condense into meaningful metrics.
  (tags: tracking analysis Google_Analytics)
• 5 Ways NOT to be a Social Spammer.
  Nobody wants to be a spammer. Yet a growing number of social networkers are increasingly spamming their “friends” or “followers” with shameless unsolicited plugs for their blog, book, business or whatever.
  (tags: spam social_media social_networking)
• There Are No Hard and Fast Rules in Eyetracking
  Best practice and brand guidelines are a great place to start with your email design but eye tracking can give you a true understanding of how your readers read and interact with your email.
  (tags: eyetracking testing optimization design)
• Email Optimization: How Simple Changes Increase Open Rates, Clickthrough, Response, and Average Order Size
  (tags: tactics)
• The Resilience Of Email Marketing In Tough Times - Forrester Report
  "email is resilient in this recession as the channel still inspired 41% of consumers to make at least one online purchase. Additionally, consumer attitudes demonstrate that they are now more likely to respond to ads with coupons and sign up for email promotions than they were when the economy was strong"
  (tags: study)

David Silverman on the Harvard Business Blog has put down some key points when revising copy for your next email in his post: 'How to Revise an Email So That People Will Read It'

1. Delete redundancies. Say it once. That's enough. If you're repetitive, the reader will stop reading and start skimming. (Like you probably just did.)

2. Use numbers and specifics instead of adverbs and adjectives. "The project is currently way behind schedule on major tasks," is not as clear as "The project is 3 weeks late delivering hamburger buns to Des Moines." (If you don't have numbers, still get rid of the adverbs and adjectives.)

3. Add missing context. Does your reader know that hamburger buns in Iowa are required for the company to collect $37 million? If you're not sure, remind them.

4. Focus on the strongest argument. Should those hamburger buns get shipped because the delay is embarrassing for the company, because it's costing children their lunch, or because it's costing the company tens of millions of dollars? Maybe all three, but one of those reasons (and it depends on your reader) will be enough to get buns on the road.

5. Delete off-topic material. The best emails say one thing and say it clearly. One-subject emails also make it easier for the recipient to file the message once they've taken action, something anyone who uses Outlook to manage tasks appreciates.

6. Seek out equivocation and remove it. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" works for Dickens, not status reports.

7. Kill your favorites. Is something in your text particularly pithy, amusing, or clever? Chances are, it's not. If it sticks out, it's probably a tap-dancing gorilla in boxer shorts — hilarious when you thought of it, embarrassing when it gets in your manager's inbox.

8. Delete anything written in the heat of emotion. Will this sentence show them who's been right about the hamburger buns since the beginning? Yes? Cut it.

9. Shorten. Remember the reader struggling to digest your message on the run — a BlackBerry or an iPhone gets about 40 words per screen. What looks short on your desktop monitor is an epic epistle on their mobile device.

10. Give it a day. With time, what seemed so urgent may no longer need to be said. And one less email is something everyone will thank you for.

Read the full post

There's a great post over at Blue Sky Factory addressing the fact that unlike the controversial behavioral targeting feature which Google has implemented, as email marketers we are in a wonderful position to use behavioral tracking - as we have permission from our subscribers.

As Nikki says :'Email marketing is one of the best online marketing mediums to offer permission-based behavioral tracking for online users.   Bottom line: it offers marketers a way of establishing relationships, cross-pollinating social media networks and RSS feeds, and it builds your client base organically. Email marketing enables marketers to deliver campaigns specific to the interests and behaviors of their recipients, while giving measurable results to easily track your ROI.'

Read the full post

• The new key to digital marketing relevance
  great presentation on digital direct marketing from Knotice's CEO
  (tags: relevance personalization)

James Myers over on the Ogilvy blog says the only marketing rule that matters is “BE INTERESTING”.

to be interesting you have to all of the following.
(1) segment your market - create personas if we want to get digital about it.
(2) understand your customers requirements
(3) give them the personal treatment
(4) be relevant
(5) get to the point quickly
(6) ignore your (product) agenda until you know what the consumer wants

Read his post here.

• Goodmail debuts video in e-mail
  Goodmail Systems has released a new technology that will let marketers send video in e-mail called CertifiedVideo.
  (tags: industry)
• Reportlet: Best Practices for Apology Emails
  This 13-page reportlet discusses when an apology is needed, how to limit the scope of apologies, apology email formats, and 7 tips for creating a good apology email.
  (tags: study)
• Spam Accounts for 94% of All Email According to Recent Study
  (tags: stats)
• Don't Overcomplicate It
  Optimizing an existing program is never a simple effort, but we need to look beyond industry trends for inspiration.
  (tags: optimization)
• Adding Facebook Sharing to your Email Marketing
  For your content to be shared on Facebook, you need to use the “Share” url they have created. By using this, it will create a preview of the content, which can then be posted to a profile or sent as a direct message.
  (tags: share)

Just a quick note to say that I will be spending the next two weeks in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for a consulting gig. If you live in the neighbourhood and would like to meet up, let me know!