Engagement Marketing

Email: In Transition, Not Fading Away

2009-10-19T13:52:55Z

Has email outlived its usefulness in a communications world where social networks generate the most buzz? Or, is it still a vital part of this evolving world?

The email industry has been debating those questions since a Wall Street Journal writer suggested that email is on its way out.

I agree with her initial assertion that communication patterns are shifting, especially in personal email use.

For me, Twitter direct messages (one-to-one private messages) have replaced email when I need a quick response or my primary relationship with someone is on Twitter. For other situations, email remains the most efficient means of communicating when I have to say more than will fit into a few 140-character Tweets.

However, I disagree that email's time is up. On the contrary: Email is the linchpin of a diverse network of communication channels, which users will customize to meet their unique and personal needs.

For example, some users will rely on Twitter direct messages, Facebook postings or text messages when they want instant access to friends and family.

Instead of emailed flight check-in reminders or weather advisories, they'll opt to receive them in SMS or text messaging. Organizing an event might be more efficient in Facebook than by repeated emailing to a group.

You don't lose access to your customers if they don't want emailed payment reminders anymore. You just need to offer the channel that best suits their individual needs and preferences.

The Case for Email Marketing
Too many things have to happen before commercial email will die.

First, recipients have to stop opening, acting on and converting from email.

Next, marketers have to stop sending email. Given that commercial email goes beyond the standard broadcast message to include lifecycle communications triggered by customer behavior, this is not likely to happen.

Finally, companies would have to halt their transition from print to digital communications. That's not likely, either, because the infrastructure currently supports email, not Twitter or Facebook.

Also, many companies are increasingly seeing how email can support business goals, solve problems and save money all the way through the organization, such as resolving customer issues via email instead of through a more expensive call center, or sending prospectuses or reports in email instead of spending money on paper and postage.

Social Network Limitations
Until something better comes along, no social network can replicate the positives of the email experience and eliminate the negatives.

Many network messages are ephemeral. If you aren't paying attention when a friend Tweets a message, or if you go days without checking your Facebook page, you'll miss those messages unless they are sent directly to you, you hunt them down, or you have them emailed to you. (This is another vital use for email in a social networking age.)

Assuming you have decent delivery, your email messages will sit in the inbox until your recipient opens it, deletes it or moves it to a folder for better management.

Many messages aren't suited to the public exposure of a social network. Email offers privacy, space to develop your message unhindered by a 140-character limit, and easy access.

Finally, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (three of the best-known social networks) can't match the rich experience of a well-crafted email message: images, navigation, the space to provide inviting copy, and multiple facets such as product info, promotions and articles.

Marketers Cautioned: The Real Enemy Is "Us"
As the cartoon character Pogo once proclaimed, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

While the explosion of mobile applications and social media outlets is clearly creating shifts in email and channel usage, bad marketing practices will likely have the biggest negative impact on our beloved channel.

These are just a few activities that will take a few years off the life expectancy of email marketing:

Poor permission and opt-in practices. Consumers don't know or care what the CAN-SPAM Act allows. Getting permission is a must.
Lack of relevance. The vast majority of emails sent today are one-size-fits-all, lacking any personalization or segmentation based on preferences and demographic or behavioral data. The "blast" has probably had the single biggest negative impact on email marketing's vitality.
Overmailing. Marketers have gone crazy with frequency. The mantra at many companies seems to be "Heck, if six times a month works, let's send 12 times." This might work in direct mail, but in email, this is a strategy that generally backfires in the long run.
Lack of differentiation. I subscribe to dozens of emails from retailers, and quite frankly, I see little difference between most of them. Every subject line is almost identical—"Free shipping and 20% off"—and the content and design of the emails do not leverage the actual differentiation among these various brands.
Lack of personality. The more successful brands have discovered that people are turned off by faceless corporate-speak. People are attracted to communication that is real, transparent, human and full of life.
Poor design. Messages that don't render properly across browsers, email clients and platforms (basic cellphone, smartphone, desktop or laptop computers) are simply annoying to recipients.

Email as a marketing channel is not likely to die anytime soon. But its efficacy is clearly at an inflection point.

As a global community, the choice is ours: to change our ways and make the channel as vibrant as ever, or watch it head into a long and painful slide into irrelevance.

The "Bulletproof" Button

2009-09-25T11:07:15Z

We all know that image blocking by ISPs and email clients can wreak havoc with your HTML emails and affect click-throughs and conversions.

This is particularly a critical issue with image-based call-to-action (CTA) buttons. But all hope is not lost.

In our recent Webinar, "Using Innovations in Email Creative to Drive Increased Engagement," Aaron Smith and Lisa Harmon of the email creative agency Smith-Harmon outlined a great technique that enables email marketers to use image-based buttons but still convey the CTA if images are blocked.

Here is Smith-Harmon's "bullet-proof" button approach:

This technique uses the BACKGROUND attribute in HTML to place a graphic beneath font or link tags. For optimum results, also using a background color (with the use of the BGCOLOR attribute) will ensure the area still shows up as a color block even without images enabled.

It also will render in Outlook 2007 when images are disabled, either by purpose or without changing the default images-off setting.

Aaron and Lisa said they've tested this technique many times against purely graphical buttons. The vast majority of results come out in favor of the bulletproof button technique.

Here's what the HTML code looks like. In this example, "View the Catalog" is the text block that will appear even when images are disabled:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr>     
<td align="center" width="118" height="21" background="http://www.smith-harmon.com/downloads/btn.gif" bgcolor="#e1792e">        
<a href="" style="color: #ffffff; font-family: arial; font-size: 12px; text-decoration: none;">View the Catalog</a>
</td> </tr> </table>

View the Catalog

One final caveat: The width and height of the container object (in the example above, the TD tag around the link with "View the Catalog" text) should match the dimensions of the image being used.

Otherwise, if the container happens to be bigger, the background image will repeat in a tiled fashion (much like old Windows 3.1 wallpaper patterns).

If you or your email designers would like more tips and advice on creative innovations in email, download the hour-long recorded presentation and the slideshow.

Silverpop Share-to-Social Study Establishes New Benchmarks

2009-09-19T20:09:46Z

Sharing email messages on social networks can increase your reach by exposing your messages to large audiences beyond your subscribers in ways forwarding to friends can't match.

That's one finding revealed in Silverpop's new study, "Emails Gone Viral: Measuring 'Share to Social' Performance," now available as a free report.

This new study analyzes key aspects of social sharing and uses a new series of benchmark metrics we created to report our findings. Leverage these benchmarks to assess the performance of your own social-sharing program or to forecast what you might expect before launching a campaign.

study report also presents a detailed set of best-practice recommendations and a comprehensive list of additional resources to help you maximize the benefit of your email social-sharing initiatives.

5 Key Study Findings

1. Share-to-Social significantly outperforms FTAF. Even though social sharing is still new to email marketing and consumers in general, it is already outperforming that old standard, forward to a friend. We found that organic social sharing rates (done without an incentive or reward) average 0.5 percent, compared to an estimated 0.1 percent or less when sharing via forward-to-a-friend links. Based on an average overall click-through-rate of approximately 5 percent, this means that 1 out of 10 clicks is on a social sharing link.

2. Share-to-Social's biggest return may be its extended reach. With the average number of social network friends in the 100-200 range, the promise of social sharing to greatly expand exposure to email messages is strong. To understand this additional reach, we developed a model as part of this study, which estimates that social sharing delivered an average 24.3 percent increase in reach. On top of that, the shared messages generated on average another 1 percent of message opens.

3. Facebook rules, but � All the email messages we studied included a link to share the email on Facebook, and Facebook, along with MySpace and Twitter, accounted for the majority of messages shared to networks. However, links shared to Bebo, Delicious and LinkedIn actually drew a higher percentage of clicks.

4. Brands in subject lines tend to beat offers. While specific creative elements did not seem to factor heavily into an email's shareability, we found that the emails most frequently shared were more likely to feature a brand or product name in the subject line rather than a specific offer.

5. Sharing activity lasts about one week. As with email in the inbox, the majority of opens and clicks of shared emails occur in the first couple of days following posting on a social site. On average, the last click on a shared email messages occurs about seven days after the initial share, with activity ranging from 1 to 44 days.

Download Study and Additional Resources

Following is the link to register and download the study, and additional related articles and resources:

� "Emails Gone Viral: New Measurement of 'Share to Social' Performance"

� "Email Marketing Goes Social: What It Takes to Make Email Sharing Work" (Webinar recording)

� Silverpop's "Share-to-Social" Feature (video)

� Posts from Silverpop's Engagement Marketing blog with advice, tips and tactics for incorporating email into social networks

We welcome your comments and questions on the study, our recommendations and other aspects of social sharing. Post them the comments section below, and look for our response in future blog posts.

The 2009 Email Marketing Haiku Slam Wants You!

2009-09-14T22:40:17Z

Email done quite well
Is loved by ISPs
And subscribers too

Okay, so I'm not the Shakespeare of the haiku world yet. If you can do better, your creativity could win you a one-year membership in the Email Experience Council, a $399 value and a great way to connect with your fellow email marketers, download resources and improve your email skills.

To say nothing, of course, of the thrill of seeing your content entry displayed on the EEC site for the world to appreciate and envy (more on that later).

It all started when a group of self-described "email snobs" started talking via Twitter and blog posts/comments about the language we use to talk about email marketing. Some of the conversation was inspired in part by my latest Email Insider column, "Warning: Blasting May Be Harmful to 'Our' Health."

On an email discussion list, someone posted a response to the conversation about language in the form of a haiku, which begat more haikus and eventually drew the EEC into the fray. Now the EEC is sponsoring the (sort of) official 2009 Haiku Slam, with EEC members voting on the winners.

We're still working out the details, including the page at the EEC site where you can view other entries. In the meantime, you can track various fun and serious discussions on email marketing via the hashtag #emailsnob - or Twitter search. Follow me - @LorenMcDonald � and @Silverpop and other participants, and we'll pass on the particulars as they become available. Feel free to contribute to the discussion, too.

Once you have crafted your contest entries, send them to aswerdlow at the-dma.org. Post 'em in the comments section here, too, if you're especially proud of them.

Here is another of my planned entries that might inspire your own creativity or your competitive spirit:

Blasts are from the past
And relevance they will kill
ROI, think not

Also, in an upcoming blog post I will go into more depth about why I think the language we use to talk about email marketing is so important and where the real threat to email's future is coming from, so watch this space.

Now, put down that coffee cup and start haiku-ing!

Relevance: "The Right Message" at "The Right Time?"

2009-08-18T18:38:56Z

Saying "relevance" is the key to success in email marketing is a bit like saying something is "American as motherhood and apple pie." Whether you've heard the phrase before or not, you can probably guess the general meaning, but what does it really mean?

Similarly, "relevance" in reference to email marketing success is generally understand and agreed upon. But we don't really have a single, agreed-on definition for the term, let alone the elements that go into making an email relevant to recipients.

So, on a whim recently, I polled the Twitter community, asking people how they defined email marketing "relevance." Here's a sampling of the responses:

"Relevance in email, to me, means I get what I want (whether or not I know what that is), when I want, how I want it."

"The higher my affinity for the brand, the more 'gap' I am willing to tolerate. � Affinity is an influencing factor on relevance."

"� When the gap is short or nil between the content and what is top of mind in my life."

"Timing and message (content)."

"Relevant email marketing delivers the right message at the right time. Timing + Interest = Relevance."

"Relevance = an email that I can personally relate/identify with and panders to my customer profile �."

'Right Message' + 'Right Time'

Although the respondents answered the question differently, the essence of everyone's comments seemed to boil down to "the right message at the time."

So how do marketers develop an email program that delivers messages when subscribers want them and with the right content and offers? In my latest Email Insider column, "Relevance: What Is It, Anyway?," I begin to answer those questions with a description of email qualities I believe are essential to relevance.

Here's my list below:

The Right Time:

Your email is:

� Wanted
� Trusted and Recognized
� Expected
� Delivered
� Timely
� Surprising

The Right Message is:

� Usable
� Personalized
� Differentiated
� Valued
� Humanized

Next: Detailed Definitions

You can find quick descriptions of each quality that contributes to relevance in the Email Insider column, but here on the Engagement Marketing blog, I'll go more in depth about how each email quality helps make it more relevant than the next one.

I welcome your questions and thoughts here, too. Did I miss anything obvious when it comes to relevance in email? Post your comments below.

Email Practices of Top Online Retailers - Upcoming Webinar

2009-08-15T00:52:28Z

How are email marketing practices of the top online retailers changing, for the better or worse? Find out at a free Webinar on Thursday August 20 at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, when I present results from Silverpop's latest study comparing the email practices of retailers from Internet Retailer's Top 500 list and 395 additional companies.

The Webinar (30 minutes with a Q&A to follow) will compare retailer performance on these and other factors:

� Location of opt-in forms
� Options offered to registrants during the opt-in process
� Number of emails received during a 30-day period
� Percent of emails offering sales or discount incentives
� Whether unsubscribe links led to preference centers

During the Webinar, I'll walk attendees through the study findings, outline best practices and share both good and bad examples from top retailers.

Here's a sampling of the results:

1. More retailers added email to their marketing programs in 2008.

3. Surprisingly, fewer retailers give recipients choices to customize their subscriptions at opt-in.

4. More companies offered sales and discounts in the 2009 study.

5. Fewer than 3 in 10 retailers give unsubscribers the option to change preferences rather than unsubscribe.

Survey Methodology

Silverpop researchers opted in to receive email from 895 online retailers. Messages received during a 30-day period in late 2008 were evaluated on seven characteristics. Findings were compared with data compiled during the same period in 2007 and reported in our 2008 study.

Want More Information?

� Sign up for the Webinar Email Marketing Practices of Top Online Retailers

� Download the new Silverpop white paper "2009 Top Online Retailers Study: Retailers Increase Email Frequency, But Offer Fewer Options"

Resources for Your Email Marketing Education

2009-08-04T19:34:40Z

My most recent Email Insider column outlines the specialized knowledge email marketers need to have to run their programs successfully. It goes well beyond the basics you learned back in Marketing 101:

1. Email strategy
2. List-building/acquisition
3. Email design
4. Deliverability
5. Copywriting
6. Database marketing
7. Legal issues
8. Email trends and best practices

You can find more detail about each topic in the full column: "Email Success Requires Well-Educated Marketers."

If you're ready to start learning or take your program to the next level, following is my quick list of email resources to bookmark, download, read, buy or attend. This is not intended to be an all-encompassing list but rather a "get started list"�which I will expand and update in Silverpop's Resources center in the coming months.

1. Books: These step-by-step manuals explain the principles of effective email marketing. My shortlist:

The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing by Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey

Email Marketing, An Hour A Day by Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels

The Truth about Email Marketing by Simms Jenkins

2. White Papers/Research: Dozens get published every month, most often by email service providers or consultants. The most useful ones go beyond promotion to deliver solid information on best practices, the state of the industry and more.

3. Blogs: These are some blogs you should bookmark and visit often or get updates on via email or RSS reader:

Silverpop blogs--Besides this Engagement Marketing blog, also check out Bill Nussey's "Email Marketing Strategy Blog" and "Demand Generation" for B2B marketers.
"No Man is an Iland"--Written by independent consultant Mark Brownlow, one of email's sharpest writers and my personal favorite blog for the last several years.
"Be Relevant"--Tamara Gielen tracks and circulates the best blog posts so you don't have to.
Deliverability.com--Breaking news, thoughts and advice from people on the deliverability front lines.
RetailEmail Blog--From Chad White, now with the email creative agency Smith-Harmon.

4. Email Newsletters on Email Marketing: Almost all these are examples of best practices in action, not just for content but also formatting, delivery, etc.:

5. Webinars: Most are free, and in any given month there are probably 20 to 30 presented in the industry. Silverpop and other vendors present these email marketing Webinars either on their own or via publisher sponsorships.

6. Conferences: Rub elbows with other marketers and get tips, answers and advice from experts. Here are just a few examples:

7. Online Communities: Post your questions and help out fellow marketers:

8. Twitter: Great forum for news, advice and commentary. Start by following these folks (don't forget @LorenMcDonald and @Silverpop):

John Caldwell--@jacaldwell
Chad White--@RetailEmailBlog
Tamara Gielen--@tamaragielen
Stephanie Miller (Return Path)--@StephanieSAM
Mark Brownlow--@markatemr

Your Suggestions?
This list is just a start. If you have a favorite information source you'd like to share, I urge you to post it in the comments section below.

The Value of Email Goes Beyond "Marketing"

2009-07-08T18:50:07Z

Email is a marketer's dream channel, as you well know, but when done correctly, it can work wonders throughout your organization, too. However, few outside the marketing department understand this or know how to leverage email for maximum benefit.

As your company's email guru, you should look for opportunities where you can put your know-how to work, helping a department improve its efforts or begin using email to achieve its goals or solve problems. Offer your email team's expertise on technical and best-practice matters such as design, content and deliverability.

Spend some time with other department heads, finding out their pain points, learning what they hope to achieve and devising ways to incorporate your email resources into the process.

Example: Email Supports Customer Services

Email can help trim costs without sacrificing customer contact by driving subscribers to automated services and online customer support. One of our clients has calculated that outbound email costs 1/60th of an outbound call from a call center.

A few other suggestions:

Promote surveys via email to measure customer satisfaction and use of products and services.

Use newsletters to educate customers on how to use specific features, with links to user forums and social-media channels where users can post questions and advice.

Send a "getting started" email series after opt-in, with links to a welcome kit and FAQs.

Send payment reminders with links to Web-based payment centers.

In my latest Email Insider column, "Are You Using Email To Help Other Departments Achieve Their Goals?" I outline ways email can drive value and help achieve goals for finance, human resources, MIS/IT, sales, product development and merchandising programs run outside the marketing department.

Your goal is to help people rethink email's place in your organization, as not just a revenue generator, for example, but also a key driver of employee education, customer retention, cost reduction, and other corporate and departmental initiatives.

By helping other departments see the benefits email can bring them, you build respect for your own email program, which can manifest itself at budget time.

My suggestions above are just a few examples where email can play a greater role in your company. If you have any great examples of how your company or clients have used email beyond the standard marketing initiatives, please share them in the comments area.

Fight "Cheap Email" Trend by Emphasizing Value

2009-06-30T18:04:30Z

When a company finds itself struggling for sales in a tight economy, the first response is often to start competing on prices.

Although price slashing, discounts and other costly promotions can bring short-terms gains, they could end up tarnishing your email program if you simply turn it into "the discount channel."

Frequent discount offers simply train your customers to wait for a deal before pulling the sales trigger. Your best customers, though, will likely be more interested in getting better value for their money than yet another 20 percent discount that all of your subscribers receive. When every other commercial email is pushing the same promotions, your email is fighting harder to stand out in the inbox.

How to do it? Find ways to strengthen your relationship with your brand-loyal, high-value customers. These are the people who will continue to buy from you, but you must offer something more tangible than another free-shipping promotion.

Use customer data to create targeted or lifecycle messages, such as shopping-cart reminders, cross-selling, upselling and restocking reminders, which build on preference data or previous purchases.

If big-ticket items aren't moving, feature lower-cost alternatives, such as a pair of earrings that match a previous necklace purchase, or a three-day domestic cruise instead of two weeks in Italy.

Keeping email a high-value, high-return channel will help you resist the trend toward turning email into a low-value discount channel. I talk about this in more depth in my recent Email Insider column, "Strategies to Meet 5 Macro Trends Altering Email."

The other four strategies:

Market with global sensitivity to avoid sending culturally irrelevant emails.
Use a mix of channels--microblogging, social networks and email--to speed news and communications.
Build engagement to break through "attention distraction" from channels that compete for your readers' eyes.
Give your email messages a distinct personality through looks and "voice."

I welcome your comments about these strategies and what you're doing to help maintain your email program's value in these stressful times.

Are You Measuring How Email Helps Achieve Corporate Goals?

2009-05-27T14:55:43Z

If you're an email marketer, you've probably learned one hard truth: Your executive management doesn't care about email as much as you do.

These C-Suite executives are more concerned about the issues that affect the company bottom line, such as revenue, customer retention, profit margins, return on budget investment, costs to deliver products and support customers, customer acquisition costs, lead flow and more.

Your email program either does or can affect these critical aspects, but you have to use the most relevant metrics to tell that story. Think outside the box of familiar metrics such as open and click rates. Work with other departments to find ways to measure how email contributes to their areas.

So your last campaign drew a company-best open rate? Yawn. Only you care. Tell management instead that since incorporating FAQs and product tips in your email program, you've reduced the number of calls to customer support by 15 percent. Now you've got their attention.

You don't have to abandon your other metric approaches, because you need them to understand how your program is performing and where you can make improvements. But many marketers spend most of their time benchmarking their email performance instead of using metrics to measure how their email program affects management's key concerns.

Email Performance and Company Goals

Email metrics fall into two general categories: "process" metrics that measure your email program's performance currently and over time, and "output" metrics, which measure how your email program contributes to your company's strategic marketing and business goals.

You employ both kinds of metrics in four basic measurement approaches:

Analyze performance of a single message or campaign and diagnose problems.

Gain insights into customer/subscriber behavior that can help you deliver more relevant messages.

Benchmark your program against your peers or your own past performance.

Measure your email program's performance against specific marketing or company goals.

(See my latest Email Insider column, "Are You Using the Right Metrics?" for a complete explanation.)

Most of these uses of metrics measure email processes, such as deliverability rate, open or click rate, or list churn. Unfortunately, this seems to be where most email marketers focus their measurement efforts.

Instead, spend more time measuring your email program against company goals. When you can show how email helps solve some of your company's most pressing concerns, you speak the language your executives understand. Your reward is increased management mindshare and resources.

For further information on key email metrics, download the new Silverpop white paper, "Beyond Opens and Clicks: 5 Email Metrics to Boost Results and Prove Your Worth."

Send Time Optimization Finds the Email Delivery Time "Magic Moment"

2009-05-18T18:49:25Z

Marketers who can reach their email subscribers when they're actively in their inboxes will gain a competitive advantage. Quite simply, having your message at the top of the inbox makes it much more likely to be seen and acted on.

However, finding that "magic moment" has been a major challenge for email marketers.

It's impractical, given your list demographics, time variables and mindshare, which I discuss in my recent Email Insider column. The key is being able to use recipient time-of-day open and click data.

Send Time Optimization Calculates Ideal Email Delivery Time

Silverpop recently unveiled Send Time Optimization (STO), which automatically calculates the optimal time to send to each recipient, based on a recipient's past mailing behavior. Your message is then distributed at the ideal day and time without requiring multiple segments or scheduled mailings.

Send Time Optimization (STO) analyzes when individual recipients interact with your messages over a rolling period of time and calculates the ideal email delivery time for each recipient on your list, no matter the time zone.

Clients See Measurable Lift

A number of Silverpop clients who have been using Send Time Optimization have reported phenomenal results. Across a sample of just a few clients, we've seen these results:

20 percent to 46 percent increase in open rates
30 percent to 50 percent increase in click rates
52 percent to 75 percent increase in total revenue
40 percent increase in net revenue (Encyclopedia Britannica)
30 percent increase in total number of orders per campaign
35 percent to 47 percent increase in value per order

These numbers are exciting, and not just because of improved performance. Like trigger and drip campaigns, Send Time Optimization leverages the power of marketing automation. In this era of tightening budgets, reduced resources and overflowing inboxes, email marketers need all the advantages they can muster.

Should You Use Rich Media in Email Messages?

2009-05-01T20:45:07Z

Rich media, like Flash and video, is immensely popular in Web-based communications. If a picture is worth a thousand words, isn't animation worth, well, something significantly larger? Rich media--usually defined as a combination of graphics, audio, video and animation--can be a great way to pique interest and deliver content in a limited amount of screen real estate. And for email marketers working with precious "above the fold" space to get a recipient action, that's a good thing.

We get a lot of questions about whether to include rich media in email messages. And while my knee-jerk response is an emphatic "no," there are a lot of ways to include different content in your emails without including it in your emails. Confused? Let me explain.

As you may know, there are a lot of different rules about designing for email as opposed to the Web. Every inbox provider renders a little bit differently, so it's best to make sure you render consistently for as much of your audience as you can. This is one of the biggest challenges with pushing the envelope with different media types.

Now back to my point: You can include this media without including it, and have the same effect and layout. Creative use of screenshots makes a great stand-in substitute. Having an alternate image that makes the recipient "click to play" in a new window serves two purposes. First, you've incented a recipient action--congratulations! Second, you're closer to driving a conversion, because the recipient is already on your landing page or Web site.

Use rich media wisely, and you can be enhancing your return on your next email campaign.

Deliverability Alert: Bell Canada Internet Subscribers May be Switching Email Addresses

2009-04-29T13:25:51Z

Bell Canada recently changed its residential Internet service provider division name from Sympatico to Bell Internet. Customers will be able to keep their existing @sympatico.ca address, get a new @bell.net address, or do both. Our information doesn't indicate a timeline for these changes to take effect.

If you have Sympatico subscribers on your email marketing list, we recommend that you contact them as soon as possible and ask them to update or reaffirm their email address contact information. Not only will this ensure you don't lose touch with valued subscribers, it will protect email deliverability by preventing you from sending messages to outdated email addresses of recipients who have changed email addresses.

Does Your Marketing Department Own Transactional Emails?

2009-04-29T13:14:00Z

The title of Silverpop's most recent Webinar says it all: "Transactional Emails: Loved by Recipients, Neglected by Marketers."

In this Webinar (view below), Silverpop Product Marketing Manager Whit Lanier and I showed how transactional messages, which are highly relevant to recipients, can drive engagement when you add carefully chosen marketing content to a branded design consistent with your promotional emails and newsletters.

For many marketers, though, these are an overlooked opportunity, often because the responsibility for transactional emails belongs in another department.

In my latest Email Insider column, "Transactional Emails: Make Your First Impression Count," I review the reasons why moving transactional emails into the marketing department makes sense, not just because you can create more useful and attractive messages but also because you can more easily monitor recipient actions and deliverability, as you do with your other branded email.

The following question on using HTML in transactional emails was the most asked question during and after the Webinar:

Q: There's the perception that transactional messages are text messages, and recipients have been trained for that. If you move to a more visual approach with images and HTML, doesn't that make them more suspicious-looking? Will it increase deliverability challenges?

A: Not necessarily, if you do them correctly. If you design transactional messages with the right brand, with HTML text that renders with images blocked, and if you test the message template first with a tool such as Pivotal Veracity to check for spam-filter triggers in content or design, you should minimize any deliverability issues and avoid raising trust issues.

Four tips:

The subject line must be crystal-clear: "Confirming your purchase from XYZ Online," for example, instead of "Order Confirmation."
Use a friendly "from" address that names the company or department that generated the transaction: "XYZ Online" instead of a vague email address.
Always place the details of the transaction front and center in the message to comply with CAN-SPAM requirements. Place promotional content below or to the side of the transactional content.
Always check with your legal counsel if you have any concerns.

Transactional Email Best Practices

View more presentations from Silverpop .

Don't Fear the Unsubscribe!

2009-04-13T21:24:25Z

The unsubscribe is perhaps the most misunderstood and ignored element of an email program. But given that a best practices unsubscribe process minimizes damage to your brand, aids deliverability and can help retain subscribers, it's worth a closer look.

Good Practice: Make It Easy to Unsubscribe
Unsubscribing is a normal part of the email relationship, and using tricks to make it difficult to opt out will backfire with an increase in spam complaints. Alternately, a trustworthy unsubscribe process can help your deliverability by leading more people to use it instead of clicking the spam button, deleting your emails unopened or leaving you when they migrate to a new email address.

Start by labeling your unsubscribe link clearly and in the same size type as you use in your email's main message, and use a text link instead of an image-based link so readers can see it even with blocked images. Locate the link in the same place in every message, preferably in an email administrative footer. In certain situations, such as when sending to segments that are completely inactive or have high spam-complaint rates, consider including an unsubscribe link near the top of your message.

Find more thoughts about where to locate the unsubscribe link in my Email Insider column, "The Unsubscribe Link Location: Top, Bottom or Both?"

Better Practice: Make It Easy for Subscribers to Do What They Really Want

Yes, you should keep the express lane open for subscribers who really want off your list. But some just want to change an aspect of their subscription, like their email address, format, interests or frequency.

Suggest alternatives along with the unsubscribe, and let them know in your newsletter that they can either unsubscribe or change preferences easily. You'll end up retaining more subscribers, even if they move to another communication channel.

Best Practice: Make Your Email Program Irresistible

Think about the reasons people unsubscribe:

Emails come too frequently
Lack of relevance
Email content isn't what they expected
Their interests changed
Never really wanted your emails to begin with

Look at every aspect of your email program for ways to improve it. Consider these:

Be explicit at opt-in about what you send and when
Add a welcome program
Use subscriber data to segment your list and send targeted, personalized messages
Move to a lifecycle program or triggered messages instead of bath-and-blast broadcasts
Design attractive messages that render well with or without images, regardless of platform, and tell your story with well-written copy.

Unsubscribes are generally a sign that you've failed with some aspect of your email program. Embrace this and work to improve those areas that aren't meeting subscriber expectations. However, don't fear the unsubscribe, because by making this option easier, you'll minimize more-damaging spam complaints.

If you still have questions or doubts, post them below.