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The (Email) Things That Make Me Go Hmmmm…

As an email marketer, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t sit at my desk, look at my email and scratch my head in absolute bewilderment — or amazement, depending on the day. On a good day, one of the marketing messages I get will really strike me as interesting, but I also have those days where I just have to scratch my head.

As marketers are focusing more on the strategy of their email and creating interesting elements that make people want to talk, we will see an increase in innovation. Some innovation will succeed and other attempts will sink like the Titanic, but at least, we as an industry are truly trying to evolve the email channel with the time — and the communication channels available.

The one thing that this week’s (infamous) WSJ article did not account for in its blatant statement about the end of email is the unwavering dedication and passion of industry mavens like David Baker, Lisa Harmon, Ryan Deutsch and others (me included). We love this space too much to let it go by the wayside — but sometimes we all have to realize that it isn’t just black and white, and we do have a little ways to go.

As I step off my soapbox, let me share the recent inbox moments that made my go “hmmm.” For better or for worse, here they are:

Number 5: Bribing readers to open their email - (2 thumbs up)
I just love this! Who needs subject lines anymore, let’s enter our readers in a sweepstakes just for opening (and rendering images) in their email. See how Southwest Airlines is driving opens for its email program.

Number 4: Not recognizing geography - (2 thumbs way down)
I am a big fan of Room and Board, but when I received a recent email about its new location in Los Angeles that finished off with  “we are looking forward to meeting you,” I was left with that “you don’t know me at all” feeling. I live in Chicago…

Number 3: Including bacon in email (real bacon) - (2 thumbs up)
Everything is better with bacon, and Cooking.com knows it! How could you resist opening and interacting with an email that is all about what you can cook with my favorite (and yours, admit it) ingredient, BACON! There just isn’t enough bacon in email today (and not the 2007 definition of email BACN — email you want, just not right now).

Number 2: Creating a sense of urgency in email (2 thumbs way up)
One thing that member-only shopping sites such as Hautelook, Ideeli and Gilt Group  have done is put some urgency back into email. When they tell you that products are available for a limited time only, or that the next Dior sale starts in 15 minutes, people listen. A tried and true tactic,  leveraged effectively.

Number 1: Keeping me on the ball (2 thumbs way, way up)
I am LUVin’ Southwest these days (no, they are not a client). In advance of my trips, I receive a friendly reminder that my trip is coming, providing me opportunities to convert against an early check-in offer, check the weather in my destination and even let me read what other Southwest travelers have said about the destination.

Let’s face facts — none of these things are ground-breaking, but clearly not enough marketers are employing the basic tactics that make email marketing so amazing. Iif they were, would these things really make me go hmmmm?

By: Kara Trivunovic
Email Insider

Making Your E-Mails Go Viral

Spread the word

Online retailers want their marketing e-mail messages to reach as many eyeballs as possible. Taking advantage of subscribers’ natural desire to share info about a great deal with their friends is one way to do just that.

Dedicated links that allow e-mail subscribers to easily “forward to a friend” (FTAF) or “share with your network” (SWYN) are two ways marketers can help their messages go viral. Though social networking is hipper than old-fashioned e-mail forwarding, marketers are much more likely to provide a “forward” link (48%, including those who provide both links) than easy sharing capability (13%, including those who provide both links), according to data from Smith-Harmon.

Only a few online retailers used both types of links in their e-mail campaigns, and nearly one-half did not offer any link at all for passing on messages.

Links to share content with a social network can potentially give messages much more exposure. After all, such e-mails are shared with the subscriber’s entire social network, rather than just a few friends chosen specifically for the purpose.

Smith-Harmon found that among those retailers that did provide social network sharing links, Facebook was the clear favorite. Every campaign studied that had a SWYN capability had a link to Facebook. Twitter came in second, at 67%, while only 44% of sharing-capable e-mails linked to MySpace.

Online retailers also directed subscribers to share offers via social bookmarking sites and social shopping sites.

“Despite FTAF’s incumbent position, I expect SWYN adoption to overtake FTAF usage over the next 24 months as more marketers and consumers become familiar with it,” wrote Chad White, author of the “FTAF vs. SWYN: The State of Email Sharing” report, on MediaPost. “Also, just as FTAF has to compete with the ‘forward’ button in every email client, I expect that we’ll see SWYN links built into email clients in the future.”

Email deliverability: what’s it all about?

You can think of email deliverability as a fancy word for describing all the issues involved with getting your email delivered to the intended recipient. Anything that affects whether your outgoing email appears in front of the recipient comes under the heading of deliverability.

The expression is also used to describe your relative success at getting email delivered. That’s why you hear people talk about “improving” their email deliverability, which means taking action to ensure more emails reach the people who signed up for them.

If you’re new to email marketing, you might wonder just what issues there could be around delivery. After all, you write an email, you put in the recipient’s email address, you click “send”, and you expect it to land in front of that recipient a moment or two later.

Unfortunately, when you send marketing email that goes out to dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of recipients, not all of those recipients are going to get your email. In fact, it’s not unusual for a good 10% to miss out on your message.

Nobody can click on a link in an email they never see. Which is why deliverability is important. The worse your deliverability, the less successful your email marketing efforts.

So why don’t all the emails you send land at the desired destination? There are two main reasons: bounces and anti-spam measures.

1. Bounces

You can think of a bounce as an email that is “returned to sender.” The email gets sent off OK, but for some technical reason it can’t get through to the recipient email address. The email infrastructure recognizes the delivery problem and normally informs the sender that the email has not got through by sending back an informative email (the bounce message).

Here’s an example of just such a bounce message:

There are many reasons why an email might “bounce”, but they generally fall into two camps.

The first group of reasons is where there is some permanent technical problem with the recipient’s address. For example, the email address you’re sending to just does not exist. If you tried to send email to mark@aol, it would bounce (just like the original email referenced in the above bounce message.)

There is no mark@aol. There might be a mark@aol.com, but the email systems we use can’t think for themselves. They just see a bad address and bounce the email.

If people submit their email address to you so you can send them marketing emails, you might rightly ask how you’d ever end up with a non-existent address in your list.

Fact is, non-existent addresses are inevitable. For example, people change jobs and their old email address gets deleted. Addresses in your email list “go bad” over time. A certain level of hard bounces (as these permanent address problems are often called) is to be expected.

The second group of reasons for a bounce is where there is some temporary technical problem with delivering the email. One reason for a temporary problem is where there is a dodgy connection somewhere along the line. For example, if the website you’re currently reading went offline for a few hours, emails sent to me would not get through.

These temporary problems (often called soft bounces) are handled in a variety of ways by the email system, depending on the nature of the problem and the services being used to send and deliver the email.

Often, the system keeps hold of your message and tries to send it again later. Sometimes the bounce message will tell you this. Sometimes you might get a bounce message several days after you sent out the email, telling you that the system has just given up trying to deliver to a certain address. Sometimes you might get no bounce message at all.

Bounces are a science unto themselves, but for now it’s enough to know that technical difficulties can interfere with delivery of email.

2. Anti-spam measures

Anti-spam measures are where the system receiving the email at the recipient’s end deliberately interferes with delivery of your email.

Unwanted spam emails are a scourge on the Internet, and the businesses who provide the services, software and infrastructure for people to use email go to great lengths to prevent spam emails getting through to people. So there are various mechanisms in place for identifying email as spam.

Any email so identified is either deleted undelivered or sent through to the recipient’s junk/spam folder, rather than to their inbox. So the recipient never sees the spam email…either because it was never delivered in the first place or because it disappeared into that junk email folder.

The problem for email marketers is threefold.

First, the anti-spam mechanisms in place are not perfect. Sometimes they label a perfectly normal email as spam. That’s the so-called false positive problem, where perfectly legitimate marketing email gets caught up in the anti-spam net.

That’s why you can’t assume that just because you don’t spam, you won’t have delivery problems due to anti-spam measures.

Second, the number of different anti-spam mechanisms out there is enormous. Each email service may take a different approach to controlling spam. This makes it difficult for marketers to create and send out legitimate marketing emails that take account of anti-spam mechanisms.

Third, when your email gets called spam and dealt with accordingly, you very rarely get any feedback. You rarely get a bounce message like you would if you were trying to send email to a non-existent address. So it’s not always easy to pinpoint the cause of any particular delivery problems. Or even to know if you have one.

You can begin to see why deliverability is such a big issue among email marketers. Fortunately, there are things you can do as a sender of marketing emails to ensure as many get through as possible.

Improving deliverability

The nice thing about delivery problems due to bounces is that you know about them. You get bounce messages that usually (but not always) contain information that explains the problem. So you can take the appropriate action.

If you use an email marketing service to send out your emails, the reports they give you should include information about bounces. Here are excerpts from a report created after a small batch of emails went out to subscribers: it tells the sender how many emails bounced and why.

 

The sender can now take those two non-existent addresses (”user unknown”) off her list. And she should keep an eye on those addresses that have connection problems (”timed out”.) If those same addresses continue to bounce when she sends emails to them later, she’ll need to take them off her address list, too.

Many email marketing services build this bounce management concept into their system. If an address produces a soft bounce for X emails in a row, then it’s automatically removed from future mailings.

It’s important to “clean up” your address list like this because bounces are more than just an inconvenience.

Repeatedly sending email to an address that doesn’t exist is something spammers do. So such behavior can result in one more tick on the “is this spam?” checklist used by email systems when deciding whether to deliver your email or not. Increasingly, these systems are restricting the delivery of emails from senders who produce too many bounces.

Managing bounces comes under the heading of “list hygiene,” and you can learn more about that here.

Coping with anti-spam measures is another issue entirely. And this is a hot and complex topic in email marketing. You’ll find dozens of appropriate articles and documents in the deliverability category here at Email Marketing Reports. But let me offer some words of reassurance…

Anti-spam measures are there to stop spam. They’re not there to stop legitimate marketing email. In fact, the anti-spam fraternity and marketers are on the same side. Neither want spam to get through and neither want normal emails to get blocked or filtered out from the delivery flow.

The anti-spam groups dislike spam because it uses up infrastructural resources and annoys the heck out of people.

Marketers dislike spam because it clutters up inboxes and casts a bad light on email as a whole. And because it forces the email community to put up delivery hurdles and blocks that legitimate emails get caught in too.

There are lots of clever practices to ensure your emails are not labelled and rejected as spam. But the basic message is this…you can go a long way to maintaining good deliverability by sticking to this basic principle:

Send useful, relevant emails to people who have explicitly requested them.

Spammers send email to people who don’t want them…so don’t do that.

The emails that spammers send contain nothing useful…so don’t do that.

Good email deliverability comes from bounce management and permission-based email marketing. Permission-based means ensuring that what you send and when you send it reflects not just your own business needs and wishes, but the needs and wishes of the recipient.

By: Mark Brownlow
Source URL Here

Integrating email and social marketing: 20 questions to ask first

Email marketing is hot…and social marketing is even hotter.

The two fields are already holding hands and exchanging shy smiles across the dinner table: talk of marriage is in the air.

But before rushing off to add those Twitter links to the next email promotion, perhaps it’s worth thinking through the consequences.

Here a few relevant questions that crossed my notepad this week…

1. If we add “share this” links to an email, pointing at sites like Twitter and Facebook, do we have the kind of email content people will actually want to share?

Such links give people a way to share, but not a reason to do so. That’s the bigger issue.

2. If the content is not particularly shareworthy, does asking people to “Digg” our new telephone number make us look lame?

3. If the content is indeed shareworthy, do we get some benefit out of that?

4. How can we measure that benefit?

5. In fact, what kind of content/offers should we develop to give value to the recipient, encourage sharing, and give value to us through this sharing?

6. What sharing tools and links best maximize this value and spreadability?

7. Do these sharing tools and links take up email real estate that has better uses? Or draw attention away from other important calls to action?

8. If we add these “share this” links to social networks, are we raising expectations that we ourselves have an adequate presence on the destination sites?

9. If we use email to get people to follow us on Twitter, get our blog feed or become Facebook fans, are we simply switching people from one channel to another or are we creating extra contact points?

10. If people are switching from email to Twitter, Facebook, RSS etc., does that change their value to us? Is a Twitter follower more or less valuable than a Facebook fan…than an email subscriber…than a blog subscriber?

11. Does that matter? Is perhaps giving people more communication choices the only way to ensure their long-term attention and loyalty?

12. If people are switching, how can we deliver as much (or more) value through these new social channels as we do via email, so we don’t disappoint people?

13. If people are adding channels and following us at various places (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and via email), should the content delivered at each place be the same or different?

14. If the same, are we usefully reinforcing the message or simply contributing to fatigue and information overload?

15. If different, how different? Do we know how expectations and response behavior differ between email and social channels? Can we find out?

16. If different, have we thought through how the content and messages interact across these channels?

17. How do we design our social and email presence and content so that it works for those getting all of it AND those subscribing to only one of those channels?

18. Might we segment email subscribers by social channel? So that those who see us at Facebook and on Twitter could get different content and offers to those who don’t?

19. Who is in charge of all this integration?

20. How much is it costing and is this cost justified?

By: Mark Brownlow
Source url Here

How to get the click (even when you can’t)

Most people don’t click on emails. And most marketers don’t care.

You can pull out all the tools in the email marketing shed: copywriting, subject line optimization, calls to action, trigger mails, segmentation…but you still can’t avoid the problem that most people don’t click.

Why? Because right now I’m just not interested in buying a new pair of trainers or reading about changes to tax laws.

But who cares, right?

The click is the first real action on the road to a conversion. Whether that conversion is a sale, download, registration, donation, whatever.

If somebody isn’t going to convert, then why would you worry about getting the click?

Here are four reasons…

1. Email isn’t only about conversions. It’s about getting people to interact positively with your brand or organization. The deeper this interaction, the greater the impacts on the “relationship” between sender and recipient…the more attention and influence you gain.

2. We are creatures of habit: if we found something clickworthy in one email, we are more likely to pay attention to the next one.

3. A click takes people to a website, which is a much richer display environment. It gives you more opportunities to engage the reader and drive some kind of positive (inter)action.

4. Positive interaction with your emails sets you apart from “bad” emailers. According to a recent Pivotal Veracity report, webmail services are increasingly taking user-email interaction (including clicks) into account when determining whether a sender’s emails are worthy of delivery.

So clicks are worth having in their own right, but here’s a crass example of the problem. These are the last few emails received from a domain name registrar:

If I’m not interested in actually buying a domain name, I’m not going to click on these emails.

[Incidentally, even if I am, there's no sense of urgency, since clearly I can wait a few days for the next discount to come trundling along.]

So we want a click, but we come back to our original problem that what we feature is simply not relevant to the majority. So what can you do? Here some ideas…

Offbeat items and humor

Newsletter expert Michael Katz writes:

“…I find this consistently across all types of newsletter, my own and those of my clients. No matter how “serious” the subject matter, the highest clicks are always the diversions.”

I can echo that for my own newsletter. Links to such things as Darth Vader’s inbox or a talking email regularly score more clicks than even the most insightful marketing articles.

Of course, humor is tricky. We can’t all be Ricky Gervais. But you can think of these “diversions” in other ways. Amy Hamilton, for example, notes:

“I find that the emails I tend to click on and forward the most are the ones containing the most outrageous products, just for the humor of it.”

Ancillary calls to action

Your email usually focuses on getting people to do something very specific (buy the product on offer, read the article, register for the webinar).

Provided they don’t distract from your main content, additional calls to action can pick up clicks where the main focus is not relevant to the recipient.

Navigation bars, for example, are menus of links to one side of the main content:

In his report on the topic, Chad White says navigation bars:

“…give your subscribers a clear and familiar path to engage with you even when they’re not interested in your email’s main message.”

Another example is outlined in this post: adding footer links to content from previous emails lifted the number of clicks per opened email from 0.47 to 0.61.

Video animations and “click to find out…”

I’ve talked a lot recently about video email, and one post cites various examples where video lifts clickthroughs quite significantly.

Is there a broader principle at work?

Anne Holland reported on a website video test and noted:

“…perhaps being forced to interact with the video to hear sound got more prospects into ‘interaction mode’ so they were then more willing to click a ‘join’ button next.”

Perhaps, then, part of the click appeal of the audio-free video .gif approach in email is a simple desire to hear the sound. The click puts the reader in interaction mode and leads them further down the conversion road.

The only Ology I ever studied was biology, but it seems reasonable to suggest that “teaser” video might work just as well to gain clicks as the teaser email summaries used to get people to clickthrough to online articles.

You might make broader use of the teaser concept, for example by featuring mystery offers (”click to reveal the discount offer”) or linking to the coupon code (”click here to get your personal coupon code”).

Teaser summaries for articles enjoy widespread acceptance among recipients, because they understand you can’t fill an email with too much article text and they enjoy the ability to quickly scan and choose what to read.

The same might not apply to those kinds of teasers where there is no clear reason why you can’t just put the content in the email.

So those kinds of teasers need to be used sparingly, otherwise you give the impression that you don’t value the time and attention of your subscribers.

The content approach

I’ve asked before whether email marketers should become content publishers to keep people engaged and solve the “most don’t click” problem.

There are different ways to approach this. For example, you can:

• …go the newsletter route and focus mostly on engaging content, like Backcountry does with its newsletter.
• …tag content onto promotional messages, like Columbia Sportswear does with the video review feature in this email discussed by Dylan Boyd.
• …integrate promotional messages into content, as in this simple self-tanning how-to from Bliss.
• …supplement promotional mails with tidbits of free information.

Feedback, surveys, competitions, reviews, polls, loss leader offers

Of course, building interaction into email dates back to the first use of a question mark in the text. So let’s not overlook tried and tested ways to get people to respond without having to follow a “shop now” or “continue reading” or “register today” link.

Some examples:

• Jake Holman describes the great copy used by MarketingProfs to solicit feedback on an online seminar
• Blue Tent Marketing won a MarketingSherpa award for their holiday-themed customer survey email
• …as did Air Canada for their Dream Destination email competition, which carries the tagline “Dream. Click. Win a trip.” (my emphasis!)
• SmartPak send out automatic emails 14 days after a purchase soliciting product reviews. The tactic increased reviews sixfold.
• Poll scripts don’t work in emails, but you can ask a single question and provide a selection of answers in the form of links. People vote by clicking on a link and your tracking data records the winning answer (and who voted for what). David Dennis explains the technique and how you might use it to build out your subscriber profiles.

Note that all these efforts drive engagement, but serve other goals too: data collection, profiling for later segmentation, content generation, etc..

Any other suggestions for encouraging clicks and interaction?

By:Mark Brownlow
Source URL Here

If Someone Says ‘Buy’ A List One More Time

Time to update the list of “Killer Bs” I first wrote about here in 2007. We’ll save the upcoming “ban the blast” initiative for another time, so the next “B” word I would like to excise from the email marketing lexicon is “buy,” as in “Where can I buy a list of a million dentists/Democrats/dog owners?”

Sorry if I sound like an email snob, but I cringe when I hear someone, usually (but not always) an email newbie, talking about buying lists.

Why? Because it indicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how email marketing works. Worse, it perpetuates the false expectation that all you have to do to have success via email is to “buy” a list and then start sending messages to it.

When people use the “buy” word, to me it means one of two things:

1) They really mean “rent.” They are either careless, don’t understand the differences between “buy” and “rent” in the list world, or are not a snob like me who cares about the subtleties and advancement of the industry.

2) They truly don’t know or care. They think that purchasing a list is the quickest way to email nirvana.

Don’t Think ‘Buy’ — Think ‘Rent’

Maybe the best way to put “buy” out of business is to persuade people not to buy lists anymore. After all, “buy” is just a word, a symptom of a bigger problem.

The best way to stop people from trying to buy lists is to show them why it doesn’t work, the harm it can do and how it wastes money.

After all, marketers who ask about buying lists could just be asking, “How can I build my list quickly, and where can I acquire email addresses?” Unfortunately, there is no easy way to build a good list quickly. If there were, presumably we’d all be doing it.

Here’s the truth: In the email world, you can’t buy legitimate email addresses. You know those $399 CDs with 50 million email addresses? Most of the addresses are probably harvested or gathered in some less-than-stellar manner. Many are probably either out of date, converted to “honeypots” by ISPs looking to trap some spammers, or otherwise undeliverable. The owners of those addresses certainly haven’t given you permission to email them.

Is “buying” a list illegal? Not according to the CAN-SPAM Act, as long as you provide a means to opt out among other requirements. But let’s be serious. Do you really want to risk your brand and sender reputation to send unsolicited email to millions of people?

A house list you build yourself through double, single or confirmed opt-in will still deliver the best results, but I can understand that sometimes you can’t wait that long.

List Rental: A Viable Option

Legitimate email list rental is a viable method to help build up your house list. But here’s what some folks new to list rental don’t understand:

First, you don’t receive the email addresses that you’ve rented. The list manager sends your message for you and provides you with the performance reports.

Second, suppose you rent a list of, say, 50,000. The only addresses you will see are those that convert and opt in to your list from the call-to-action in your rental campaign. Apply click-through and conversion rates and you end up with a small percentage of what you rented, but a list of quality subscribers who want what you have to offer.

Join me in battling the use of yet another “killer B” word. Let’s eradicate the word “buy” from the email marketing lexicon — and, even more importantly, from actual practice.

Until next time, take it up a notch!

by Loren McDonald
Source URL Here

YOU Control Your Deliverability — Not Your ESP

by George Bilbrey

From time to time we run into marketers who think that they have deliverability covered because they have signed up with an Email Service Provider (ESP).  You’ve probably even seen some ESPs that are promoting their very high delivery rates.   This is confusing and misleading, because the ESP fully controls only one of the five major drivers of deliverability failures. 

Major consumer mailbox providers and business filtering applications look at five key data points to evaluate the trustworthiness of incoming messaging streams.   They are:

1. Well-configured infrastructure: Since spammers typically send email from compromised machines on botnets, they don’t have the access to properly configure these machines.  Therefore, badly configured mail servers look spammy and will cause the mail coming from that server to be blocked.  ESPs completely control their infrastructure and typically do a fantastic job at keeping them in good working order.   Look for your ESP to authenticate your mail with DKIM, SPF and Sender ID.  They should also be able to provide you with a reverse DNS address that does not look dynamic.  And, they can and should be able to throttle email sends to conform to the ISPs thresholds for how much mail they are willing to accept in a certain period of time. But the absolute most important thing your ESP can do for you is put you on a dedicated IP address.  Ask for it and be willing to pay a little extra for it.  You don’t want to inherit the reputation of those other mailers that are on your IP address.

2. Complaint rates: When one of our clients runs into a delivery problem, more often than not, it’s high complaint rate that causes the problem.  End users at the ISPs are hitting the “this is spam” button at a higher rate on their email.  This causes their mail to get rejected by the reputation systems at the various ISPs.  The ESP does not control the factors that drive complaints:  proper notice and choice at the point of opt-in, relevance of offer, frequency of mailing and sourcing of data are all in the marketer’s control.  But your ESP can help you by making sure you are signed up for all available feedback loops and then processing those complaints as unsubscribes.

3. Unknown user rate: Spammers don’t tend to clean their lists of bad addresses.  When ISPs see a server sending a high number of emails to unknown users it looks spammy. To avoid looking like a spammer, don’t have dead addresses on your list.  Your ESP can help you, by implementing good bound processing that can tell reliably that a dead address is really dead and quickly removing it from your list.  But you have control over keeping dead addresses from getting onto your list in the first place.  Send a welcome message when someone signs up for your email.  You can also implement list hygiene algorithms that prevent the addition of addresses that cannot be good (because they contain typos, or don’t conform to the ISP naming convention, for example).

4. Spam traps: Spam traps, also called honey pots, are email addresses maintained by ISPs or blacklist operators to catch spammers.  These email addresses have either never signed up for anything or they are extremely old addresses that have been dormant (and returned a hard bounce) for some length of time.  Most ISPs have spam trap feeds of their own or use a  filtering technology powered by spam traps or both.   How do spam traps get on the lists of legitimate senders?  They most often come from mailing to an old list, mailing extremely infrequently (thus hitting those very old addresses) or from using bad data sources.  There is nothing your ESP can do to keep spam traps off your list. 

5. Content: There are many systems that filter based on content.  While content is a less common reason for messages not being delivered than reputation, it is a factor.   Systems like Symantec Brightmail, Cloudmark and others are widely used by ISPs to fingerprint messages and determine the reputation of those fingerprints.   ESPs clearly don’t control the content of your messages. 

Take charge, marketers!  Deliverability is your responsibility.  And the good news is that you have the skills to rise to this challenge.  Good deliverability comes from good marketing.  Maintain a good, clean list.  If a data offer is too good to be true, beware.  Send fun, valuable, relevant messages.  And analyze deliverability metrics alongside response metrics so you can assess the true effectiveness of your efforts.

Delivered’ Does Not Mean ‘In The Inbox

It’s rather amazing how much confusion there is between the bounce rate and the inbox deliverability rate. I’ve been on the road much of May and June speaking at online marketing conferences — and while every marketer understands that if they don’t reach the inbox, they don’t earn a response, there is a sense of complacency around inbox deliverability that is not grounded in the right data. Marketers think they know their inbox deliverability rate, but in fact are either misinformed or just do not have access to that information.

Perhaps I should not be so surprised at the level of confusion. Most marketers are just going with the reports they are being given.Most email broadcast systems report something called “delivered.” It’s usually a pretty high number — like 95% or 98.8%. That’s because it’s probably only telling you how many messages bounced, and nothing about how likely messages are to actually reach the inbox. Bounces are the number of records on your file that either no longer exist (a hard bounce) or are having temporary delivery failure (a soft bounce), perhaps due to an out-of-office reply or a full mailbox or some glitch in the ISP server.

Most marketers who keep their lists clean and have good permission practices have a bounce rate of 1% to 5%. So that “delivered” metric is high, and often stays high consistently. Since it’s the only number most ESPs provide, this lulls marketers into thinking they also have inbox deliverability under control. Those deliverability challenges they keep reading about? That must happen to other people.

What’s the number marketers really need to know? Inbox deliverability: How many messages actually reached the inbox so you can try to earn a response? Let’s be honest. Very few subscribers will search for your message in their junk folder or contact you if they didn’t receive it at all.

You know about spam filters and probably know that some of your email gets lost. However, many marketers don’t know the full extent of the problem. In fact, about 20% of email marketing messages globally never reach the inbox (source: Return Path client and ISP data). And if marketers think it couldn’t possibly happen to them, they are fooling themselves.

Twenty percent is a big number. Most marketers would be very pleased with the instant revenue boost that would result if all the response metrics — opens, clicks, purchases, downloads, page views — went up by 20% this week.

The fact is irrefutable: Email must reach the inbox if it has any hope of earning a response.

The good news for marketers is that the factors that go into whether your messages reach the inbox are under their control. They can improve inbox deliverability rates by following best practices around complaints, permission, list hygiene, blacklists, frequency, relevancy and yes, bounce processing. Marketers need to pay attention to what their reports actually say. And then they must be sure that they know the inbox deliverability, and know it by campaign and by domain (e.g.: Gmail vs. Yahoo). This data should be considered an addition to whatever your ESP or MTA reports as “delivered.”

Knowing that your bounce rate is low is a good thing. But it won’t guide you on optimizing response. If you don’t see inbox deliverability data, then ask for it.

By: Stephanie Miller
Source: Email Insider

Crossover Learnings Between Email And Social Media

by Chad White

What Email Can Learn from Social Networks

Expressing personality. Most brands can no longer afford to be faceless entities. The interactivity and transparency of the Internet has elevated the need for personality. Luckily, there are several ways to do this: You can use an executive as TigerDirect does, staff members like Crutchfield, or your customers like REI. The most poignant expression of personality I’ve seen recently is Backcountry’s memorial message for skier Shane McConkey.

Expressing a sense of community. People want discounts and helpful information, but many also want to be part of a community. Including product testimonials from product reviews on your site is one way to do this. Backcountry goes a step further and highlights its top contributors in its monthly newsletter.

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports recently suggested another way to build a community feel: adding social proof to your email sign-up process, such as a running count of how many subscribers you have. Thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, subscriber counts are a well-established and highly promoted measurement of legitimacy and influence. I haven’t seen anyone try this yet, but the idea is intriguing.

What Social Networks Can Learn from Email

Providing exclusivity. Email subscribers appreciate it when they get exclusive deals and information not available to your Web site visitors. It helps justify them sharing their email address with you. With social networks, there’s a similar dynamic. Some people will ask themselves, “Why should I bother to be a fan if the announcements and other content are available on your Web site or to email subscribers?”

There’s value to making information available via different channels — being channel-agnostic is great m– but if you want to get people to engage with you via multiple channels, then the experience has to be different. Indeed, people expect to have a different experience with your brand via Facebook vs. Twitter vs. email, for instance.

Explaining the benefits of joining. Just as email sign-ups suffer when you don’t explain the benefits of receiving your emails, your “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” call-to-action put the burden on your customers to explore the benefits themselves. Quickly listing the key benefits can be effective in getting people motivated to take action. In a recent email, Fingerhut did a good job of selling the benefits for engaging with the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Driving subscribers to other channels. Providing customers with many avenues to take advantage of offers and exposing them to different channels has well-established benefits. Just as email programs aren’t maximizing their opportunity when they drive traffic solely to the Web, self-contained social networks are destined to underperform. Look for occasions to expose customers to multiple channels. Sephora did that recently by asking email subscribers to share a digital gift (a tote bag) with their Facebook friends; if they did that, they could get a real Sephora tote from their local store. But the most impressive utilization of a brand’s channels that I’ve seen recently was Buy.com and its Tweet n Seek contest, which had participants following them on Twitter, searching Buy.com, visiting their Facebook page, and reading products pages.

Email Marketing Success Is All About the Value of Content

By: Steve Adams

A great-looking email template is important for establishing credibility and brand recognition with readers; but, as the old saying goes, never judge a book by its cover.

The same mentality should always be applied to email campaigns. A nice-looking template means nothing if subscribers aren’t engaged and interested in what you have to say. The content of your email or newsletter is vital to the success of your campaign.

Whether creating awareness, generating sales, or building customer loyalty, it’s important to remember what keeps customers coming back for more.

Why is content so important?

The first thing readers will do when opening an email is ask themselves, What’s in it for me? You have about seven seconds to answer that question.

Layout and template play a big role here. At first glance, your brand should be clearly visible and the content easily accessible, but that alone won’t capture your readers’ attention for long. No matter how good your email looks, the real magic for lasting beyond that seven-second mark lies in the content of your email.

Content should always be relevant and engaging. If either element is lacking, your reader will close out, hit delete, and move on. If that happens once too often, your subscriber may go one step further and block future emails from you or, worse, report you as a spammer.

The relevancy of your email answers the “What’s in it for me?” question, ensuring that your subscribers stay interested and keep reading to find out more. The engaging aspect promotes activity within your email, such as drawing readers to your Web site for a call to action, ensuring click-throughs to additional content, or encouraging readers to forward your newsletter or promotion to friends and colleagues who might also find value in what you have to offer.

What can I do to improve my content?

1. Know your audience

One of the most important steps to take toward providing more-relevant content is knowing whom you’re writing to. Are you writing to a 70-year-old retiree who enjoys golf or a stay-at-home mother of three? You could have a wide array of customers, and it’s important to target and segment your content based on their interests.

To determine those interests, use email marketing tools that offer reporting functions that allow you to learn more about your subscriber base, such as their open and click-through rates. You can also analyze past campaign reports to get a better understanding of what gets their attention and what prompts them to act.

2. Create a personal voice

Brand perceptions are established through the tone and personality of your communications. Instead of sending generic emails, personalize them to reflect who you are—to start, that might mean simply signing your name.

Establishing a personal voice in your communications not only helps the customer feel a connection but also fosters a relationship with your readers. Such a voice is crucial to gaining their trust in you and your email content. They will be more apt to open an email from you and more likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

3. KISS (Keep it short and sweet)

With only seven seconds to capture your readers’ attention, you can’t waste time on wordy sentences or fluffy content. Get to the point. Make sure your content is strategically planned to convey your messages in a clear and concise manner. Make it easier for your customers to sort through what they don’t care about and find what really sparks their interests. A helpful rule of thumb: The more frequently you send your emails, the shorter the email should be.

If you’re having a hard time coming up with ideas, try using a campaign-ready template. Such templates provide not only a format and a layout but also pre-populated content—the perfect solution for those who are struggling with what to say.

4. Add links and use themes

Adding links to your email campaign or newsletter helps to engage your audience and drive traffic to your site. Don’t limit yourself to buttons and banners. You can add strategically placed hyperlinks throughout the email. Have these links connect to more in-depth content and a call to action throughout your e-newsletters, and you’ll notice higher click-throughs, response rates, and increased sales.

Also, try using themes—whether holidays or seasonal changes—within your emails to get your creativity flowing. Planning content around a theme helps keep the audience engaged and makes it easier for you to figure out what to say. Be prepared and plan ahead, mapping out when you’ll send your emails based on events throughout the year.

5. Ensure the layout and design complement the content

Now that you have relevant and engaging content, make sure the look and style work in its favor. Keep your emails looking clean with white space between your paragraphs, graphics, and table borders. Be consistent with the look and feel throughout your email or newsletter. Maintaining a high contrast between font colors and background colors keeps your content readable, and columns or sections help readers with quick on-screen reading.

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Remember, the content you provide is the main reason your customers subscribed to your email or newsletter in the first place. Make your content valuable! It is the key to executing successful campaigns, growing your subscriber following, and getting them to keep coming back for more.