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."

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
 

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!

Check out Bronto's 3-part blog post series on optimizing your sign-up process:

• Part 1: Stand Out & Entice
• Part 2: Finessing the Form
• Part 3: Landing Page & Welcome Message Musts

Steve Atkins answers the question: Which is better UTF-8 or ISO-? over on the Word to the Wise blog.

Mark Brownlow talks about the interesting stuff you can learn by looking at your stats.

Looking for a job in deliverability or compliance? Check out the job posts on Al's blog

StreamSend has a nice overview of the CAN-SPAM requirements on their blog. Just keep in mind: complying with the law is just the bare minimum of what you need to do - so make sure you're compliant. However, complying with what ISPs ask you to do is what really matters.

Eric Farson discusses the new Spamhaus’ Domain Block List. 

I am running a quick survey to find out what your education needs are with regards to email marketing and I would like to invite all of you to participate. It'll take you no more than 5 minutes of your time!

Click here to participate.

Thanks for participating!

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!

Here's an overview of some interesting articles I read recently. Check them out!

• Body Background Images & Outlook 2007
• Nested tables in HTML email: how much is too much?
• Bump CTR: use the last email in the next email?
• Do your customers need a dedicated IP address for sending email?
• Whitelists, Blacklists, and Greylists: What Matters for Email Marketing: part 1 | part 2
• ISP Postmaster Pages: part 1 | part 2
• Landing Page Optimization: 6 Ways To Attract Higher Conversions
• How email works: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

In the last year or so a couple of really good books have been published about email marketing. Here's an overview:

Email Marketing: An Hour a Day
By Jeanniey Mullen, David Daniels

Jeanniey Mullen and Dave Daniels have written an easy to read, accessible and rewarding guide to email marketing that will appeal to both the novice and the trained professional. This book spells out how to develop and execute your email marketing campaigns more effectively than any other book on the market today. It draws from the authors' deep experience as practitioners and analysts, as well as their experience as vendors and customers.

The Truth About Email Marketing
By Simms Jenkins

This book is very easy to read without too much unexplained industry jargon to make your eyes glaze over. It's informative and chalk full of useful data. However, it's not a tome full of pages of fluff - just the facts and extracted data to get a good intro to the business or a primer for a veteran.

E-Mail Marketing For Dummies
By John Arnold

John Arnold's manual for email marketing is an amazing resource for anyone looking to start or accentuate their email marketing. The information is presented in a way that is easy to follow with enough technical explanation to help everyone from the complete novice to the expert.

Total E-mail Marketing: Maximizing your results from integrated e-marketing
By Dave Chaffey

This in-depth book covers all aspects of e-marketing and e-mail. Very comprehensive and informative and will help any interested in learning more about the processes from segmentation to implementation.

>> More email marketing books

Andrew Kordek came up with a list of common misconceptions, truths and some general statements that he hopes some folks will read and take notice. These are my favorites:

• Sending email only for revenue is short term thinking.
• The size of your email list doesn’t matter if you don’t take care of your list.
• It takes a lot longer than 2 days to put together a piece of creative for an email
• A navy blue background vs. a dark blue background will certainly not move the needle in terms of conversions
• Just because you are adding another program or value add for the customer, doesn’t mean that the customer wants to get that email.
• Don’t have people send email who don’t know what the hell they are doing. Leave it to a professional.
• Adding another picture, or banner or another link to your email wont necessarily help your email. In fact it might make it worse.
• Email testing is a waste of time, unless you use the data. In other words, don’t test cuz you think its cool or the thing to do. Test. Analyze. Adapt.
• Email experts or strategists who talk about best practices and strategy who have never been on the client side to execute these best practices and strategy should try it sometime. Oh…and tie it to a revenue number as well. Walk the talk folks.
• 3-7 seconds guys. You have 3-7 seconds to grab the attention of the reader. Are you sure you want to add that extra banner or picture or offer in there?
• Just because its legal, doesn’t mean its the right thing to do.
• Respect your subscriber. Period.

Read the rest here

• C-Level Event Invitations: How It's Done
  I's nearly impossible to get top-level executives to even open your e-mail, but if you're short on time and budget and your only option is an e-mail invitation, here are some guidelines to follow.
• 6 Tips on How to Use E-mail for Market Research
  Here's how to make the most of a survey delivered via e-mail
• Takeaways from the Email Evolution Conference 2009
  Chad White summarized the main takeaways from the event
• Litmus offers free testing every weekend in February
  During the next three weekends (starting 14 Feb), all Litmus testing will be completely free for all their users
• All You Never Cared to Know About Deliverability
  Steve Woods uses a border example to explain the technical side of deliverability to a non-technical audience
• Profiles in Email Laws: Austria’s EU Opt-In Regime
• Email Evolution – One Twitterific Conference!
  a summary of the best tweets from the Email Evolution Conference from the "All the news fit to send" blog
• What I learned redesigning the Campaign Monitor newsletter
  David Greiner shares the considerations he made when redesigning their newsletter. The new design is awesome. Check it out!
• Common Misconceptions and Truths of Email Marketing
  Andrew Kordek came up with a list of common misconceptions, truths and some general statements that he hopes some folks will read and take notice.

My good friend Bill McCloskey is offering 60-day-free trial accounts for their new Alerts offering because they’d like to get as many beta testers as possible. You can pre-register here. But hurry, because pre-registration closes in a couple of days!

This alerts service allows you to set up email alerts for emails that come from a particular IP address, come from a particular sender, contain a keyword or phrase, drive traffic to a particular web site and more.

Check it out!

Here's an overview of interesting stuff I read lately:

AOL to Begin Using DKIM
http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/11/aol-to-begin-us.html
http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2008/11/aol-and-dkim/
AOL announced its plans to begin DKIM verification sometime this next year during an ESPC call moderated by Ben Isaacson of CheetahMail with special guest Mike Adkins from AOL.  DKIM is the next generation of DomainKeys, an encryption based authentication method, which is picking up adoption in the receiver community. Currently, AOL uses an IP based reputation algorithm to determine the propensity of outbound mail to be spam. Under the new paradigm, a sender’s domain will be verified against the DKIM signature with inbox success being determined by that domain’s reputation. Mike proposed that by the end of the first half of 2009 an initial version checking the signature will be in place. As part of this, AOL has deployed an address where any sender can check the validity of a DKIM signature against the AOL DKIM implementation. To check a signature, send an email to any address at dkimtest.aol.com. It was also mentioned that SPF will be actively used as another data point providing information about a sender, whereas now SPF is checked but not used in the reputation algorithm. 

Always Have Smooth Landings with the Landing Page Checklist
http://blog.emailexperience.org/2008/11/always_have_smooth_landings_wi.html
The eec Email Design Roundtable have added a Landing Page Checklist to their Email Checklist Series. This checklist offers a collection of ideas that you can easily apply to your program.

AOL Launches Online Sender Support Tools
http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/11/aol-launches-on.html
http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/
AOL is once again leading the industry in making available their knowledge and systems to legitimate senders

Follow deliverability on Twitter
http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/11/follow-delivera.html
Dennis Dayman provides a list of email marketing experts on Twitter

Campaign Frequency: Striking a Balance
http://blog.blueskyfactory.com/best-practice/campaign-frequency/
How often should you send to your list of subscribers? It depends on your audience, your product, your content, and your marketing goals. These elements ultimately determine “your” optimal frequency. John Kirk provides some basic guidelines.

Jordan Ayan posted a link on Twitter last night to a pdf version of his book "The Practical Guide to Email Marketing". Here's an overview of what the book has to offer:

• 7 Email Strategies
• The Opt-in Process: 10 Steps to Success
• Email Segmentation Strategies
• Guidelines for Effective Email Creative
• Email Metrics: Identifying Insights to Success
• Email Testing: A Checklist for Success
• The Strategic Checklist for Email Success
• The Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say in Subject Lines

Check it out.

• Email Unsubscribes - Embrace Those Who Reject You
  here's an interesting thought...
  (tags: unsubscribe)
• Lifetime Value: Metric For E-mail Success
  A far better method to evaluate the success of your e-mail program is by looking at the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your consumers.
  (tags: ltv analysis metrics)
• How Email Segmentation Made My List Stronger AND $31,940 More Profitable
  (tags: cases segmentation)
• Beginner's Guide to Segmentation Analysis
  (tags: segmentation)
• How to Use Email Segmentation to Shorten the Sales Cycle
  (tags: segmentation)

• Boost Email Marketing Response With List Segmenting and Triggered Emails
  Although segmenting will help you target your emails and get you far better outcomes, many people hesitate to start because they are busy and think it will take a lot of time and effort. The reality is that you can start with some basic segmenting, and extend it later on.
  (tags: segmentation)
• The Big Fat Marketing Blog » Ken Magill
  Check out Ken Magill's new blog
  (tags: blogs)
• Really Simple E-mail Segmentation: Engaging Your VIP Customers
  In this column, Jeanne Jennings talks about engaging those who open, click, and convert. By either increasing their average order or increasing the frequency with which they order, you can improve your bottom line. This is where transactional messages and reach, frequency, and monetary (RFM) come into play.
  (tags: segmentation, segmentation, engagement, transactional_emails, rfm)

• Email A/B Testing and … Chemistry?!?
  How to get started with A/B testing
  (tags: testing)
• An Interesting Finding About Forms               
  It turns out that it’s not the number of questions marketers require, but how long it takes the responder to answer them that matters most. Forms that were able to be completed within one to two minutes or less were most likely to be completed, while longer forms were more likely to be abandoned mid-way through.
  (tags: forms)       
• Adding social links to emails: what and where?                
  If you put links to social sites in your email, which sites/tools do you link to? And where do you put them?
  (tags: social_media)
        

You might have noticed that I haven't been blogging much in the last couple of weeks. That's mainly due to a heavy workload at the office and a personal side project that I'm working on and that I'll be telling you more about in the next couple of weeks and months.

Right now I have a couple of overloaded inboxes and an overloaded RSS reader but I am determined to catch up - sooner or later :-) Until then you'll see more of these link summaries containing the best articles I read on email marketing, and occasionally also on social media/networking which, as a blogger and community manager, is becoming more and more a focus areas.

I would like to thank Loren McDonald and Kath Pay for continuing to contribute great content to this blog and I would like to extend the invitation to become a contributing author to this blog to anyone that interested. Let me know if you're interested!

Here is some email marketing wisdom that I selected especially for you during my weekly 2,5 hour train ride to Amsterdam:

E-Mail Marketing History Lessons
"The incredible ROI (define) of e-mail was supposed to turn it into the medium of choice, and essentially replace traditional direct marketing almost entirely. Clearly, that was a shortsighted perspective."

Case study: How ClearBrick built its e-mail list
"The integrated e-email and PPC campaigns maximize the company’s marketing budget by helping the two build off of each other. Howard can select PPC keywords based on which items are best received in the newsletter, and the PPC campaigns help to build the company’s e-mail marketing list. It’s a strategy that he intends to continue."

4 Reasons Not to Add Social Networking to Your Site
Here are four reasons it may not be a good idea to add social networking features to your site.

E-mail Increasingly Blurs Work, Home
While e-mail is increasingly blurring the lines between Americans’ work and home lives, it has also led to more flexibility and most workers don’t believe it has added significantly to their overall workload, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The True Secret of Successful Email Marketing
Deliverability is a very hot topic.Why? Because it is a solvable problem. There are vendors out there with a SOLUTION to that problem. And vendors sponsor trade shows. And so we have a disproportionate amount of conversations about reaching incremental groups of customers, but almost no conversation about what you send to the people you do reach to make your message more compelling.

Email ROI – Spoiled By Our Own Success
No wonder subscribers ignore us. Honestly, most email marketing today is pretty terrible. It’s irrelevant, poorly timed, creatively uninteresting and completely generic. -- When we abuse the trust that subscribers gave us and send boring messages or more email than could possibly be relevant, subscribers tune all our messages out. They may not actually unsubscribe or complain to the ISPs, but they unsubscribe with their delete button. These subscribers are now lost to us.

E-Mail Marketing Gone Wild, Part 2
What is the purpose of your e-mail marketing program? Is it to facilitate low-profit purchases from customers craving discounts and promotions, to communicate a marketing story, to drive the customer to the website, to communicate authority on key items, to clear excess inventory? Kevin Hillstrom advises us to be consistent, and communicate this strategy.

Simple content plan for an email newsletter
A regular newsletter is far easier to produce if you have a content plan. It not only acts as a prompt but also means you can prepare some material ahead of time, knowing what 'slots' you have to fill. Here are a couple of examples.

Stay tuned for more great articles as I continue to catch up on my reading...

      
• Keep the Heat Off That New IP Address            
  "begin slowly, sending a limited number of messages to small subsets of the best addresses on your mailing list. As you begin to build your reputation, you can start building your volume, but always while keeping an eye on your deliverability reports and spam-complaint rates."
  (tags: deliverability throttling fbl)
• BtoB Magazine's 2008 E-Mail Markter Insight Guide               
• CAN-SPAM: Useful or Histrionic?
  Though any ethical member of the email marketing community wants to do his/her part to curtail Spam, I've never seen much empirical evidence as to the earth-shattering benefits derived from this legislation's existence. Blasphemy say you?                
  (tags: canspam legislation)
        

I noticed that Delicious did not post the pages that I bookmarked last week. Here they are:

VistaPrint provides blueprint for how to irritate your customers via email
"There is no reason to email your customers every single day…N-O-N-E. This is probably as major a violation against building trust with an email list as I’ve ever seen or experienced and I’d be hard-pressed to recommend VistaPrint to anyone in the future because of it." -- I had a similar experience with Vistaprint and will never buy from them again because of it.

MarketingSherpa Seeks Nominations for 2009 Email Marketing Awards
Here’s your chance to get some recognition for your email savvy. Enter MarketingSherpa's 2009 Email Marketing Awards competition. The fourth annual competition honors B2B and consumer marketers for email campaigns that really work. Think response rate, overall strategy and campaign goal

12 questions to ask about your email marketing
See if you can answer all of them. You might learn something along the way... Great stuff Mark! Thanks for sharing!

Email Marketing Q&A's
"At the eec, we don’t claim to have any silver bullets, but we do have expert answers to the most frequently asked questions in email marketing"

E-Mail Marketing Gone Wild
Folks, how do we ever expect our customers to take us seriously, when six in ten messages tell the customer NOT to pay full price?

Free HTML Email Template - "Welcome"
Aweber's latest HTML email template is designed to help you quickly and easily create one of the most critical (and often-overlooked) messages: the welcome email.

Restaurant Marketing: 5 List-Building Ideas
Just as with any other business, a restaurant’s email marketing campaign has to start by getting subscribers. So where/how can restaurant owners build their lists?

5 Factors for Measuring Your E-mail Reputation
To solidify your organization's e-mail reputation, Return Path suggests monitoring the following five data points that each ISP looks at...

The shelf life on email permission
Even though they opted in, subscribers are still marking your messages as spam -- and ISPs are noticing. Here are some fresh ideas to keep your email list from stagnating. -- Great article DJ!

Check out all my email marketing bookmarks on delicious.com