Do you track your opt-in data?
"Surprisingly, I'm finding that many marketing managers aren't tracking this. This is sad, because sometimes this data is the last line of defense against you getting sanctioned over allegations of sending spam. When an ISP, ESP, or recipient asks for proof that a recipient opted-in to your email, they're asking for those exact details."

Four odd email ideas that (maybe) make sense
Mark Brownlow shares four email marketing concepts that seem wrong but might be right.

Three more odd email ideas that (maybe) make sense
And the list continues: poor open rates are a good thing, good responses don't indicate success, and delivering value is a bad idea.

You Need to Have a Privacy Policy 
When I reach out to ISP’s to resolve delivery issues, one of the items they almost always require is that email marketers have a clear and detailed privacy policy.

Let Your Subscribers Tell if the Email is Relevant 
Don't know if your subscribers find your emails relevant? Just ask them!

Link Tracking - Profiles Drive Greater E-mail Relevance
Stefan Pollard "The following two tactics will help you collect data at different points in the customer or subscriber relationship. There are more, of course, but these two work for me time and time again."

Next Tuesday (April 27th), I've invited John Caldwell to give a presentation about selecting the email service provider that's right for YOU. 

Whether you’re thinking about changing vendors or just looking for tips on getting your email house in order, be sure to attend this event!

I found these slides on Slideshare when I was doing some research for a client on abandoned shopping cart emails and thought some of you might find them interesting too:

PS. Don't forget to sign up for next week's webinar "Selecting the email service provider that's right for YOU"

Show value to solve relevance challenges
"All e-mail experts tell e-mail marketers to make their programs more relevant to increase deliverability and ROI and decrease spam complaints, unsubscribes, and inactivity. Nobody can argue with that. The problem comes when you try to figure out what "relevance" really means."

Shopping cart abandonment emails: issues and resources
"Lost" sales through abandoned shopping carts or order forms can be recovered by sending the customer one or more emails reminding them to complete the transaction. The devil is in the detail of course."

Optimizing Your Double Opt-In E-mail
Jeanne Jennings dissects Essential Apparel's double opt-in process and explains how they should optimize it to reduce the number of unconfirmed opt-ins.

Getting ready for Outlook 2010
Bottom line: "Do what you've always done: Keep your email simple, use tables for layout, inline your CSS and follow the other email design guidelines we've been pushing since Outlook 2007 was released. Unfortunately, they're going to come in handy for a lot longer than we wished."

The B2B Marketers Guide To A Brilliant Video Strategy
If you’ve been contemplating adding video to your content arsenal, here are a few simple items that you should consider before pitching The Next Big Thing to your boss.

The Follow-Through: How to Send Stunning Order Confirmation Messages
When gorgeously executed, order and shipping confirmation messages can seal the deal with your customers, making them even more pleased with their recent purchases and perhaps even securing their lifelong loyalty. Take advantage of this great post-purchase opportunity to strengthen their relationship with your brand and encourage repeat shopping by following the tried-and-true techniques in this article.

How to make sure your leads ignore your nurturing e-mails
 

Watch live streaming video from mpeis at livestream.com

Wake up and send more email
Chad Horenfeldt make the point that there are opportunities to send more relevant and timely email communications to certain segments of your database and takes a closer look at sources of fear when it comes to pulling the email trigger.

Mailbox Providers Suggest Collaboration with Senders
Stephanie Miller reports from the Email Insider Summit: "I was delighted to hear both Yahoo! and Hotmail strike a very cooperative and collaborative tone for working with marketers and other senders today, as the two major global mailbox providers discussed plans to expand their inbox products and spam filtering."

Calculating Customer Lifetime Value
In this post David Hughes covers why Life Time Value is important and how to optimally leverage value based segmentation & Lifetime Value.  He also shares a sample analysis and a spreadsheet with a sample model that you can use to jump start your own LTV journey!

How to use email marketing to boost your sales
This post describes an effective process on how to convert email subscribers into buyers.

4 Things an Ethical Internet Marketer Can Learn from Spammers
Daniel Scocco started ooking more closely at spammer's tactics, and found some valuable lessons any marketer should know.

12 Social Media Secrets From World’s Top Superstars
"here are hot social media tips direct from 12 of the top industry masters. You’re going to want to model their priceless advice"

There's more to come, but I'll save them for tomorrow :-) Happy reading!

More stats: more than seven in 10 e-mail users told Windows Live they would rather talk to their friends and family through e-mail than through social networks.

Source: eMarketer

It's interesting to see in the below chart that both B2C and B2B marketers (or at least 50% of them) agree that identifying the best time to send emails is an email marketing tactic that works well for them.

What is also interesting to see is that including links to social networking sites works better for B2C marketers than for B2B marketers. I find this hard to believe actually. Maybe it's because B2B marketers haven't found the best way to do this yet? Or they haven't started to focus on it? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Source: eMarketer

In about 30 mins I will be presenting a webinar called "Powering Email with Social Media: Grow Your List & Generate Leads". You can view it here:

This webinar is part of an online email marketing summit organized by Brighttalk. Check out the other presentations here.

In this 1-minute video, Stephanie Miller talks about why good emails get blocked as bad:

As you know, tomorrow I'm hosting a webinar for the members of the Email Marketer's Club in which Stephanie will talk about these things in much more detail, so make sure you reserve your seat here.

In this 5-minute video, Stephanie Miller shares what she's learned at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit last January. Some great take-aways here, so make sure you watch the video:

As you might know, Stephanie Miller will be a speaker at a webinar that I'm hosting next Tuesday. In this webinar she'll talk about why your campaigns are not reaching the inbox and what you can do to solve that. Don't worry, it won't be a pitch to become a Return Path customer, I'll make sure of that! ;-) More info here.

When it comes to list building, the one thing you need to understand is that there are no shortcuts to building a huge AND responsive list.

1. Visibility

When people go to your website, is it easy for them to sign up to your list? Are you displaying the sign-up option prominently on the page? 

One way to give your list some visibility to people that visit your website, is by triggering a lightbox (or hover box) that pops up after someone's been on your website for a x seconds. Look at what the average time on site is for someone and trigger the lightbox around that time.

2. The incentive

The incentive that you offer for someone to sign up to your list is key - it has to be the right incentive for the right kind of audience. The more the incentive appeals to people outside your target audience, the less responsive the list will be.

Let's say you run a contest or a sweepstakes to build your list and everyone that signs up has a chance to win an iPad. You'll get a lot of people signing up to your list because they want a chance to win the iPad, not because they're interested in your stuff.

3. Build trust

What are the benefits of signing up to your list? How do I know you're not going to spam me or sell my address to someone else? Why are you requesting me to give you my email address if all I want is to see that video?

4. Testing

Spend enough time testing different incentives to find the one that converts best for you BEFORE you start spending big money to drive even more traffic to your opt-in pages.

I know all this sounds very straight-forward but you'd be surprised how many people forget the testing part.

Once you've optimized your sign-up page as well as you can and you tested everything that you can test, then you're ready to pull out the big guns and drive lots of traffic to your sign-up page.

Partnering with people or companies that target the same audience with different products or services could be a very good way to build your list. 

Other ways to drive traffic to your sign-up page could be:

• search engine marketing
• optimizing the page for organic traffic
• including a link to your sign-up page in your regular email signature 
• including a link to your sign-up page in your forum signature
• talking about your incentive on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, forums...
• publishing your newsletter to Twitter & Facebook and including a subscribe link in your newsletters

I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff here but the key is really to drive traffic to your sign-up page through proven ways of driving traffic to webpages.

Single vs double opt-in

When you use double opt-in, you may loose anywhere between 10 and 40% of the people that sign up but don't confirm. I usually recommend using double opt-in for sources that are not highly targeted or when the incentive is something that appeals to a much wider audience (eg list rental, co-registration, contests & sweepstakes) and use single opt-in for sources or incentives that are highly targeted.

Now it's your turn

I would love to hear which list building tactics you've tried and how well they worked for you!

On March 31st, 2010 I spoke at the B2B Marketing Forum in Amsterdam. My presentation was titled "Building a successful B2B email marketing strategy". I spent some time over the Easter weekend to record the presentation, so that I could share it with you here.