Tagged.com has been ordered to pay the state of New York and Texas $750,000 in damages for intruding on member’s contact list in order to send out millions of promotional emails to potential users. The website is a social networking platform, and is one of the most visited sites on the web.
You might be saying to yourself, ’sounds like a pretty creative idea. It would be if Tagged.com sent the emails out as themselves. Instead, the site misled their recipients by making the emails appear to be from friends on Tagged.com. Hence, the scandal.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General, reached a settlement with Tagged.com to pay $500,000 in penalties, and to change their guidelines involving information use of their members.

What Tagged.com was doing was actually genius, while being sinister as well. The website would send out emails to people making it seem that they came from the user who had just posted photos on the site. This of course led to clicks, and provided a reason for more people to sign up for the social networking site.

Cuomo stated specifically, the reason for his prosecution, “Unsuspecting users had no idea that Tagged had hijacked the email addresses of their colleagues, families and friends for the purpose of blasting them with spam,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “This agreement holds the company accountable for its invasion of privacy and puts the proper safeguards in place to keep it from happening again.”

If you’re an email advertiser, this story has you understandably angry. In a day and age where so much content in emails is met with cynicism, it’s hard to run a clean and decent campaign. Spam will always be around, but we like to think that many of the industry leading companies are above the pettiness that bots and spammers resort to.

Tagged.com didn’t just penalize themselves, but set back email advertising as a whole.

The report found a positive connection among consumer usage of email, instant messaging, social networks and text messaging, dispelling myths that the explosion of social media and texting will overtake email usage.

“The total number of social media users is rapidly increasing, but often these users jump in quickly, only to curtail their use of social media over time,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy.

“Email on the other hand, is woven into all online interaction, making it an essential tool that consumers continue to use more and more.”

The increase in consumer email usage is not only tied to its close relationship with social media. Smartphones are driving increased usage of email as well, even among the college demographic.

“Nearly 40 percent of students use smartphones and two-thirds of those use email,” said Mike Hanley, director of the Institute for Mobile Media Research in the study.

“The increased use of mobile email is significant because it reverses the five-year trend of declining email use among college students.”

ExactTarget identified two key tactics marketers should use to drive continued success with email:

· To break through consumers’ inbox clutter, marketers should deliver timely, relevant and personalized emails to consumers.

· Due to consumers’ being increasingly open to promotional messages via text, marketers should develop mobile messaging strategies.

ExactTarget published a whitepaper today, and according to a statement, “the research found a positive correlation among consumer usage of email, instant messaging, social networks and text messaging, dispelling myths that the explosion of social media and texting will overtake traditional email usage.”

Indeed, this would seem to indicate that Google Wave might help email.  It’ll represent another way of holding conversations, after all, and then folks who aren’t chained to it will turn to things like email and IM every so often to continue chatting or carry out some specific task.

So there’s one point against the latest rumor concerning email’s death.  Next, we have to consider people’s first impressions of Google Wave.  Nicholas Carlson recently summed them up with the phrase “‘Impressive’ But ‘Useless.’”  He provided a little picture of a surfer wiping out, too.

Google Wave isn’t quite set to replace email as the dominant form of electronic communication, then.  Email marketers can go about their business as usual.

The first thing you have to do in building an effective email follow-up program is to determine your desired outcome of each email (you can’t build an effective email if you don’t know what you want to achieve from it.)

Depending on your desired outcome a response could be any number of things. Overall though, emails have three primary roles.

1. Build Relationships: All email programs should build a stronger relationship with your customer and seek to enhance your brand in their eyes.
2. Get Responses: Example- respond to surveys, questions, feedback, etc…
3. Persuade Action: Example- clicking a link in the email.

No matter your intention, an email should aim for the following actions at a minimum and in the following order:

1. Get attention (interest)
2. Get the open
3. Get the action (response, click, etc…)

In other words, the job of an email is to first get the attention of the recipient, second to persuade them to open the email, then finally get them to act upon something in the email by clicking (typically back to your site.)

It goes without saying you can’t get the open if you don’t get their attention and you can’t get the click if you don’t get them to open it.

Now, having said that, how to you maximize the opportunity for achieving the three desired actions above (interest, open, action?)

To do this you need to understand that there are 4 basic components which all emails are made up of.

The 4 Components Present in Effective Emails

1. From Name
2. Subject Line
3. Email Content (body)
4. Call to Action

Of course every email should have an opt out option etc… but that is for another article and I will not go into detail on it here.

To achieve the first two actions (i.e. interest, open) you must develop an effective subject line. Make it short, sweet, and intriguing. Let’s say you are running a limited time fall promotion for some product you sell.

The Subject Line

A good subject line might be:

Get 50% Off. 5 Days Only. Details Inside …

A less powerful subject line might be:

Fall Into Savings for a Limited Time!

The first subject line clearly states the offer and then ends with a subtle call to action (details inside) followed by an ellipsis (or hellip)—An ellipsis is a three-dot symbol used to show an incomplete statement. Ellipses are used in on-screen menus to convey that there is more to come. (…)

The From Line

The from line should be the name of your business or website to be most effective. Why? It is your business or website that they are transacting with and using it in the “from” line will help trigger brand awareness which will answer at least one major question they will ask when they receive the email—”who sent me this email?”

The answer to that question combined with the subject line easily tells them what the offer is and who it is from. They need to know this so trust is built and any hesitation to open the email based on security is removed from the equation.

Ok, you have now accomplished the first objective and let’s say the open the email. What next?

Well you now need to make sure at least two basic things are present to get the next action (which is the click in our example.)

The Content
Your email body (the text, images etc…) needs to reinforce the offer and provide details on it. Don’t go into your whole life story and write a book here. Keep it simple, state the benefits to the customer, stick to the facts, and then provide a call to action (or two).

Remember, people are overwhelmed by emails and they aren’t going to spend a ton of time reading so get to the point and make it compelling. Give them a reason to take action and then most importantly, ask for the action! It does you no good to develop a super email, get it opened, and forget to give them ways to perform the final action.

Many people just need a good prompt to get it done and this is what is referred to as the “call to action”.

The Call to Action

Calls to action ask the reader to do something. They are things like “Shop Now!”, “Learn More”, “Click for Details”, “Go Shopping”, “Add to Cart”, etc…

Provide your reader with a number of ways to get back to your site including hyperlinks to your domain, to the product(s) you are promoting, and a few good “calls to action” like listed here.

The call to action should also reflect what your intention is for them. If you want them to “Start Shopping” then tell them that. If you want them to “Complete the Survey” then tell them that. Don’t assume they will do it just because you present it to them—ask them to do it.

Those are the basic components of what makeup all emails and how you can use them to develop an effective email that get the three desired actions completed—Get Interest, Get Opened, Get the Action.

I’ll be going into more details you should consider for developing effective email follow-up campaigns in upcoming articles. This is a good place to start.

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After all, email marketing has been around for a while and has proven itself again and again as an essential tool for the small business or entrepreneur. So why do we cast our old friend away just because a new, sexier tool appears? Where is our loyalty?

“But what about spam?” I hear you ask, “And spam filters, which prevent so many of my messages from reaching their intended audience…even for opt-in lists?”

True, spam and the sometimes effective antidote, the spam filter, have reduced the effectiveness and deliverability rates of emails. However, do you honestly believe that all of your 500 (or 5,000) followers on Twitter see all your tweets? Especially if they are following a couple thousand people?

“Who needs emails now that we have RSS?” you ask. 

Ah, yes, RSS. The very cool tool of professional bloggers and new media evangelists. A spam-resistant tool that keeps our inboxes clean. Dirty little secret: if I find a blog essential I subscribe to the email version. That way I know I’m going to see it. Even though my Firefox start page is filled with RSS feeds from some of the most important Web marketing blogs out there, I just don’t notice them very often.

“Email is for old people, like you. People my age use social media sites to stay in touch.”

First of all, you’re not too old for me to put you over my knee, so watch your tone.

Yes, I love sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. However, all social media sites leverage emails in some way. You generally have to visit those sites to interact with them, which is why LinkedIn sends you group updates and network invitations via email, Facebook forwards all emails and wall posts and photos you’ve been tagged in to your email, and Twitter emails you direct messages.

Yes, you can shut these off, but these sites are wise enough to realize that people have their emails open almost all day, and it’s a way to make sure they can get in front of them.

If you’re looking to grow your business online, then you need to include email marketing in your marketing campaigns. We’ve found that your email subscriber base is often the highest converting group when it comes to promoting new products and services, and especially events.

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On Oct 30th, 2008 I write a blog post on relevancy and emails. To state my point I showed an example of an email that John Song received from Nordstrom. John, who had never purchased any women products from Nordstrom, was receiving emails promoting women products.

During our conversation John said that he was a big fan of Nordstrom and was ok with receiving and ignoring irrelevant emails but he wished that they would send him relevant products/offers though.

No matter how big a fan a person is of brand, eventually the patience runs out. Guess what happened recently? John got so tired of the irrelevant emails that he finally hit the small “unsubscribe” link on the email he recently received. Done. Gone. Here is what John wrote on his Facebook status (came via his Twitter update).

Companies work very hard to get people to come to their sites and then to subscribe to their emails. But it appears that not many of them work hard enough to keep these subscribers. Someone (subscriber) who took time to fill a form on the site to subscribe to the email is ready to open his wallet. It is the job of a business to help that person open that wallet and spend that hard earned cash. But it can only happen if the business sells the customer what a customer wants and not what the business needs or wants to sell. Unfortunately, most of the emails consumer get today contain the products that business wants to sell and not necessarily what a customer wants to buy. Below are 7 ways that you can use to create relevancy in your emails and standout from the crowd.

7 ways to create relevancy in the emails

• Browsing History - Use the subscriber’s onsite browsing history to find out what products he looked at but has not bought yet. This list should give you an idea of his interest. Based on this learning determine what products you should offer in your emails.
• Email Click Through - Use his past email click-though behavior to determine what peaks his interest. If a customer has shown interests in certain products/contents/offers in past then they are very likely to be interested in similar products/offers/content. Someone who only clicks on discounted is most likely to open an email that says so and also click on a product that is on discount. Use that information to target.
• Shopping Cart Abandonment - Use the shopping cart abandonment history to determine what products he is interested in. Use the time triggered email to encourage him to come back and finish the process. You can also send offers but be careful (check out Targeting Cart Abandonment by Email.
• Purchase History - Use his past purchase history to determine what he buys. Use not only online data but also offline, phone order and catalog order data. Make recommendations in the email based on past purchases. E.g. if you know that he buys blue shirts then recommend new blue shirts. Depending on what products your sell you might also send complementary items.
• Frequency and Recency - How often does the customer come to your site and when was the last time you saw him. Frequency and recency of visit is a strong indicator of a customer’s likelihood of buying from a site. The longer the customer takes to return to your site the more are the chances that you will loose him as a customer. Timing your email message can bring that customer back into buying mode. Use frequency and recency to determine if you need to send a coupon or some other promotion to bring the customer back to the site before it is too late.
• Help Them Help You – If you do feel you have to send something unrelated to persons interest (e.g. provide him an opportunity to see what else you sell maybe lure him into buying something he might not have considered) then send it along with something relevant to him. E.g. send discount on women apparel along with some discount for men stuff.
• No Email - If you don’t have anything relevant to send to a customer then please don’t send an email. As mentioned before people are bombarded with irrelevant emails every day, you need to stand out of the crowd and make your email count so don’t send any email if you don’t have anything to offer.

Hope these tips help. Email me if you need help finding the right analytics and email solution.

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Okay, so maybe that’s not “big,” but it does stand to set a precedent.

In response to the NY AG’s similar accusations, Tagged founder Greg Tseng explained that Tagged’s registration process is abundantly clear, including several screenshots of the registration process (PDF), such as this:

Which could easily support either of these lawsuits, especially since the California case states

Tagged harvested millions of email addresses from the email address books of consumers. Then, using these consumers’ email account credentials, Tagged sent unsolicited advertisements to the harvested email addresses, making the messages appear as if they were invitations to join Tagged sent by persons known to the recipients.

The complaint says that the site also failed to make it clear that the users were registering for the site or sharing their friends’ email addresses (which doesn’t seem to be supported from Tagged’s screenshots of the process), and that these practices violate the federal Stored Communications Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

To date, no social site has been successfully sued for similar practices. Tagged notes that inviting friends is the lifeblood of social sites’ growth, but often the practice is executed in such a way that looks like abuse.

What do you think? Do these examples look like abuse? Will this be enough to get a ruling in court, or will the case be thrown out like the suit against Reunion.com last year?

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Based on what I’ve been seeing in my email box, there are a lot of you who didn’t “get the memo” on this topic. During this month, I have received no less than ten email newsletters that have the subject:

July 2009 Newsletter

Yes, at least ten newsletters from different companies had that subject line. Not good. And worse than that, who cares? A boring title like that doesn’t entice me to open the mail and find out what you have to tell me.

Make the subject interesting so I want to open the mail and read what you have to say. Convio has a good post about what makes an email subject line successful. In a nutshell:

- Tell the reader what’s inside.
- Don’t use the same subject line for each issue.
- Don’t include your company name or date.

Always remember to look at your client / prospect communications from their perspective. If you do, it will help you spice things up a bit and get you more opens — which is one of the objectives in the first place.

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So ClickZ is reporting on a new study by Epsilon who is a, you guessed it, e-mail marketing provider shows that marketing e-mail open rates have gone up recently.

The “Epsilon Q1 2009 Email Trends and Benchmarks” report found open rates hit 22.1 percent in the first quarter, up 11.2 percent from the rate of 19.9 percent the researchers found in Q1 2008. The study was compiled from 6 billion e-mails sent to more than 200 clients by Epsilon in January, February and March, and it combines data from both the company’s proprietary platforms, DREAM and DREAMmail.

In addition, deliverability is up slightly in Q1 ’09 over Q1 ’08 (94.1 to 93.4 % respectively) and the open rates have gone up in 12 of the 16 measured industries year over year. Doing well is financial services with 31% open rate and doing not so well is retail apparel at 14.3%.

Critical components of successful e-mail marketing are content, timing and frequency, list hygiene and list growth. Company sources also see “savvy use by marketing departments of transactional and trigger-based messaging such as purchase confirmations, statement-ready alerts, and flight confirmation letters to deliver marketing content.”

The next bit of data I find somewhat hard to believe involves purchases that are attributed to e-mails.

Another recent Epsilon study found that 59 percent of Asia Pacific consumers made offline purchases as a result of e-mails. That figure was 53 percent for North Americans and 37 percent for Europeans, said Epsilon. “Sophisticated marketers are incorporating triggers, transactions, preferences, segmentation and other advanced analytics to produce more successful campaigns,” the report said.

For you e-mail marketing pros out there do these numbers sound on target? Am I just one of those folks that probably won’t be reached by e-mail while the rest of the world is waiting with bated breath for the next sales pitch in their inbox? Do tell.

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So why shouldn’t you waste money on email marketing?

Because wasting money is bad—and why waste money when you can make sure your email marketing is even more cost effective?

The Forrester study takes a look at the email marketing forecast for the next five years, and there’s good news: email will continue to grow in popularity among users and marketers alike. Total spending on email marketing will soar to $2B in 2014 (up from $1.2B this year):

Of course, this popularity means that there’s a lot more competition for email users’ time—and a lot more messages bombarding them, and likely to be perceived as spam. With more than 9000 messages per inbox annually by 2014, users will become even more discriminating about what they read.

One of the effects of this is that “retention email”—permission-based email messages targeted at keeping customers—will become increasingly important. This will grow to more than 40% of total email messages annually. This effect also highlights how important it is to make sure that your messages are well-targeted and stand out from the crowd.

Forrester offers a few suggestions in this area:

• Embrace relevancy-empowering tactics, specifically segmentation and dynamic content, as we try to do more with less in the current economy. Also look for innovations coming in this area.
• Increase the use of services, social sharing, and data integration. Because of the integration of the social services in the email inbox (creating what Forrester calls the “social inbox”), email marketers may have to do as the Facebookers do. They should also use more “web analytics data, [build] more robust subscriber
  profiles, [use] engagement-based targeting, and [use] share-to-social mechanisms.”
• Make today’s best practices tomorrow’s required practices. In addition to maintaining good, current email lists (see more below), marketers will also see behavior-driven engagement messaging tactics, such as sending unique

  messaging to “clickers” and “non-clickers,” become commonplace. Relevant email marketers and ESPs will see growth.

Also, to further increase the cost-effectiveness of email campaigns, be sure to practice good “list hygiene”—remove bouncing addresses, dedupe, malformed addresses, etc. By 2014 companies will be wasting up to $144M on email messages that never reach consumers’ mailboxes. Forrester also recommends sender- and message-level authentication and reputation services to make sure your messages aren’t accidentally caught in ISPs’ spam filters.

What do you think? Do you use email marketing? Do you think its future is looking bright?

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