• Spear Phishing Attacks Snag E-mail Marketers — Krebs on Security
  Criminals have been conducting complex, targeted e-mail attacks against employees at more than 100 e-mail service providers (ESPs) over the past several months in a bid to hijack computers at companies that market directly to customers of some of the world’s largest corporations, anti-spam experts warn.

  The attacks are a textbook example of how organized thieves can abuse trust relationships between companies to access important resources that are then recycled in future attacks. According to multiple sources, the so-called “spear phishing” attacks in this fraud campaign arrived as virus-laden e-mails addressing ESP employees by name, and many cases included the name of the ESP in the body of the message.

  
  
  (tags: spam)
  
  

Understanding the emotional and logical mental processes of your readers is the best way to take your email sign ups to the next level.

Make them feel part of an exclusive group. Use direct and compelling language. And overcome as many objections as you can.

If you can do these three things, you will grow a steady list of subscribers that can be a source of online income for years and years to come.

Read this article on Copyblogger to find out exactly how to do this.

• The Retail Email Blog: Reportlet: SWYN, FTAF and Community Links
  As we approach the holiday season, it’s worrisome that major retailers aren’t doing more to empower their subscribers to extend the reach of their email campaigns. SWYN and FTAF provide free marketing that’s currently going unused, meaning money is being left on the table. The report details which social networks retailers are linking to, looks at how popular sharing interfaces like ShareThis are, examines the wording used in FTAF links, and reveals the prevalence of promoting SMS subscriptions and mobile apps in emails.
  (tags: social_sharing swyn ftaf study)

• Security Alert: Phishing Attack Aimed at ESPs
  Over the course of the past five weeks, spam campaigns have been aimed at the staff members of over 100 ESPs and gambling sites. These targets have received emails typically with content that mentions the staffer by name, and purports to be from a couple, presumably friends or co-workers. The phish message has been sent numerous times, over several different systems, including using the facility of some ESPs, using online greeting card sites, and by way of a botnet. Sources confirm the list of addresses is very small (less than 3,000 addresses) and aimed 100% at staff responsible for email operations.
• Early Preview of Facebook Messages
  Paul Farnell was fortunate enough to get early access to the new Facebook Messages. He spent some time looking at its support for HTML email and wanted to report back on his early findings. In short: it's looking quite promising.
  (tags: facebook)

Attributing success

Assuming the audience is relatively unchanged, peaks and troughs in email responses are typically attributed to the offer/content and the subject line.

And, naturally, we take that into account when planning future content/offers and writing future subject lines.

But, of course, a proper analysis should consider all the factors that might impact results. And there are a lot more than we generally think.

So when you come to assess your results, cast a wider net when looking for an explanation. For example, review delivery issues, copywriting approaches, timing, the previous emails, your other marketing, spam and the competition.

Read this very interesting article by Mark Brownlow here: www.smartinsights.com

• Presentations European Email Marketing Conference 2010
  (tags: events)
• Reminder Emails: Groupon Gets It Right
  (tags: cases)
• Giving the Right Deal or Giving Away the Store?
  Free Shipping. It is always something we all look for as consumers, but is free shipping really free to retailer? Are there ways you can use it to benefit your holiday sales this season?
  (tags: holidays free_shipping)
• What's to Like: Facebook Messages and What it Means for E-mail Marketers
  (tags: facebook)

Today, I was invited by the nice folks at theemailguide.com to talk about marketing to the international community on their weekly eMail radio show. You can listen to it here: 

Laura Atkins discusses the Facebook Postmaster page:

There’s still quite a bit of concern and worry about how the Facebook messaging platform is going to affect marketing. One thing that may help is the Facebook postmaster page. There’s all sorts of good information on those pages

Read more here: blog.wordtothewise.com

• UK businesses face spam backlash from customers
  Two thirds of adults are annoyed at receiving spam from recognised brands and would back a campaign to change email legislation
  (tags: study)
• Majority Of Adults Suffer From Spam Stress
  60% of UK adults blame brands – saying they are tricking them into receiving unwanted emails.
  (tags: study)

Last Friday I gave a keynote presentation at the Email Marketing Forum in Brussels. Here are the slides:

• Which doctype should I use in HTML email?
  there are subtle differences in how email clients render HTML emails with a variety of doctype declarations... Or no doctype at all.
  (tags: coding)
• The trouble with anchor links in email newsletters
  the folks over at Campaign Monitor discovered a rather startling fact - anchor links aren't working as reliably as they originally thought in a number of popular email clients. This could be a rather major design issue if your email newsletters and templates contain a table of contents (TOC), or 'Back to top' -style links.
  (tags: coding)
• Marketing with transactional emails
  Administrative messages are the unloved stepchild of email marketing. The order confirmation, shipping notices, welcome emails etc. are often setup using default designs and text written by a software engineer…and never looked at again. Which is a lost opportunity when you consider just how much attention these emails get.
  (tags: transactional_emails)
• 8 Amazing Email Marketing Infographics
  (tags: infograph stats)
• Social media most effective channel to integrate with email
  marketers rate social media as the online marketing channel with the greatest positive effect when integrated with email
  (tags: social_media stats)

• What do Email Professionals Make?
  How much can you make as an Email Professional, and what is the best title to have? And which part of the country have the highest salaries? Bill McCloskey recently polled The Inbox Insiders to see what everyone was making. Where can you make the most money? Read on to get all the stats...
  (tags: industry stats)
• 10 Ways for E-mail Marketers to Survive Facebook Messages
  wise advise from Unica's Len Schnyder: “It will be another domain and its importance will grow over time similarly to how Gmail grew over time. People are creatures of habit; I don't expect to see a huge migration to Facebook's email client, no tectonic shifts or anything like that. Quite the opposite, I think it'll be gradual and happen over time.”
  (tags: facebook social_media industry trends)

• Facebook's New Email Offering
  Facebook describes this as next generation messaging. Zuckerberg said "It will be seamless, informational, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short."
  (tags: facebook social_media trends industry)

• No, social media doesn't mean email marketing's dead
  -According to the Econsultancy report, How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers, email marketing is still the channel of choice for receiving correspondence and offers from companies. According to the research, 61% of consumers prefer receiving offers via email, so although customers are more receptive to social media sites, abandoning email marketing altogether is a risky strategy-
  (tags: study)
• Reviving The Dead
  -there are effective tactics for re-engaging inactive subscribers. Here are a few of the things Morgan Stewart recommends to clients looking at their dormant subscribers-
  (tags: re-engagement)
• 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Unsubscribe Process
  -The bad news: Almost a third of the email addresses on your mailing list are going to turn over this year. (Read: Email List Churn and How to Overcome It) The good news: Some of those who unsubscribe don't really want to cut off all communication - but if all you offer them is a simple unsubscribe form, they'll take it and be gone-
  (tags: unsubscribe)
• Two Approaches to Get Started With Segmentation
  Stephanie Miller discusses two ways to get your arms around your segmentation opportunity, both with the goal of "right message, right person, right time."
  (tags: segmentation)
• European E-mail Marketing Consumer Report 2010
  =ContactLab presents the results of the latest research on the use of e-mail among Internet users. The study, in its second European edition, describes and compares e-mail and newsletters habits and behaviour in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, highlighting similarities and differences between the different markets-
  (tags: study europe)
• Are You Pulling the Trigger?
  -Karen Talavera discusses two must-have triggered-email campaigns no email marketing program should be without: the welcome email & the re-marketing email-
  (tags: triggered_emails welcome_emails)
• 'Best Practices' Are Dead
  -All the other best practices that we talk about -- from welcome and win-back emails to design best practices -- are really just "recommended practices." They are practices that have a high chance of producing the best results, but are not necessary and not necessarily the best path in every instance-
  (tags: testing strategy)

• Marketing Return on Investment (ROI) Calculator
  The folks over at Toddle released a cool calculator that you can use to see how effective your last campaign was and to give you an idea of how much you can afford to spend in future. Check it out!
  (tags: tools)

• Reportlet: Animated Gif Usage Surging
  -This free 9-page report discusses the three major limitations of animated gifs, deliverability concerns, and outlines a number of animated gif tactics used by major retailers-
  (tags: design)
• Groupon and Friends: Active E-mail Address Machines
  -group-buying platforms like Groupon, LivingSocial, and Woot have been accruing thousands upon thousands of active e-mail addresses every day. Indeed, while Groupon specifically has been hailed as an e-commerce triumph, what it's doing on the e-mail front - still one of digital marketing's more lucrative channels - likely has some underappreciated zip-
  (tags: cases list_growth)

• Ten Numbers Every Email Marketer Should Commit to Memory
  -here are the ten numbers that every email marketer would have committed to memory-
  (tags: analysis)
• Email Marketer Sues Microsoft, Yahoo, Return Path, Cisco Ironport
  An e-commerce services firm is suing Microsoft, Yahoo, Return Path and Cisco Ironport Systems, claiming theat mass email campaigns it sends on behalf of clients have been wrongly blocked from reaching recipients.
  (tags: deliverability)

• email the online activity with the highest overall penetration
  -The TNS “Digital Life” survey of internet users around the world found in September 2010 that on average, surfers spent 4.6 hours a week on social sites, compared with 4.4 hours on email, the most common internet activity-
  (tags: stats)
• How to Keep Your Email Marketing List from Hating Your Guts
• Mature and Improve Your E-mail Campaign in 2011
  -Among other discouraging reports, Forrester found that the average -score for B2B campaigns actually dropped since its last review in 2006. So, in this column, let's review tips to mature and improve your e-mail campaigns before Forrester's next review-
  (tags: tactics)

I attended (and spoke) at the European Email Marketing Conference in London today and yesterday. I am back at my hotel in Amsterdam now and spent some time digging for the best takeaways from the conference:

• StephanieSAM: Once you can find the people who have a propensity to buy, you can target content to them that is relevant.
• StephanieSAM: Orbitz does a subject line test with every broadcast mailing. Computes results in real time, rolls out the winnner.
• wvanderscheer: Good advice of Ted Wham: in order to optimize your e-mailmarketing: hire geeks or work with a great ESP.
• StephanieSAM: Sometimes the hardest part of being an #emailmarketer is getting data out of your own company.
• iamgfc "listen before even thinking about speaking through email"
• iamgfc "don't get forced down the path to best practice. Best practice is different for all brands" 
• iamgfc "email has to be part of the customer customer journey. Moments of truth are opportunities to have meaningful conversations"
• iamgfc "there are so many opportunities to collect email addresses - till rolls, SMS, pos, social, competitions, dm and more"
• iamgfc "you have four seconds to capture attention with an email"
• iamgfc: @gwdbis3 I agree, I actually said I was being generous at 4 seconds
• iamgfc "you can learn from 'digital body language' just by watching what people do"
• iamgfc: Dutch travel company reduced email unsubscribes by 35% just by offering the ability to unplug from emails for a 'limited period'
• miapapanicolaou: Don't forget - data gets old. I'm not the same person I was 2 years ago. Consider that when segmenting data for email campaigns
• EJvdBurg: Silverpop: social sharing increases the reach of an emailcampaign by 24%
• StephanieSAM: Knowing your customers starts with the boring stuff (aka: data gathering)
• EJvdBurg: Fedma: 56% of companies perform their complete email marketing activity in house
• iamgfc: 66 percent of european marketers expect to increase email spend #FEDMA
• EJvdBurg: Fedma: 72% of companies expect volumes to increase next 12 months
• iamgfc: Over 80 percent of european marketers see email as strategically important #fedma
• EJvdBurg: Fedma: 33-50% of companies do not measure conversion to sale of their email campaigns! 
• StephanieSAM: FEDMA study: Less than 10%+ of EMEA marketers have a completely data driven #emailmarketing program. Big opportunity!
• wvanderscheer: Talking about opportunities:76,2% of emailmarketeers don't use win-back campaigns as part of their communication!
• wvanderscheer: The new submit button is a segmentation button, e.g. fill in e-mail address and click on your gender to submit

Read all the tweets from the conference here.

• E-Mail: This Isn't Hard
  For a decade, e-mail marketers have measured everything wrong, and are now reaping the rewards of poor measurement techniques with ever-declining open/click/conversion rates. By measuring via "lift", you truly account for the impact of e-mail marketing.
  (tags: analysis)