The Email Wars

I chose this example soley on the basis that I really don’t like when I get emails from a company and the sender email and reply to addresses are some whacked out ESP alpha numeric email address rather than that of the company. It is not that it is all that bad, but it is close to impossible to whitelist, trust or reply to this email address with any confidence.

I am a HUGE proponent of visibility and not cloaking a sender contact through an ESP email. As a consumer it does not build any trust with me and it makes me feel as if this email is quite possibly spam of some sort. That being said, does an email address like this cause a large opportunity for blacklisting if the emails are being sent out from a larger shared IP address? Something I am not positively sure of, but seems if the domain become a flagged one on a watch/block list due to another client on this IP’s bad campaign, I could be impacted.

My word of advice is to be as transparent as possible and send email from your own domain.

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Mexico Presidential Hopefuls Spam for Edge

Mexico’s presidential candidates have moved into cyberspace, where the campaigns are bombarding voters with online games, cartoons and attack e-mails ahead of the July 2 vote.

With more than 20 million Mexicans now using the Web, this is the first election where the Internet could make a real difference in Mexico. Most Internet users are young, and so is the electorate: more than 40 percent of the 71 million registered voters are under age 30.

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Where Are Your Customers This Summer?

School is out and people are on the move. Many are planning vacations and this affects both consumer and business marketing plans. A large number of clients and partners that we have spoken with have not really taken this into account for planning and adjusting their summer campaigns. You may want to be asking yourself the following: Will your audience be online at home? Or will they be on the go in the parks, at summer camps, in the woods or at beaches and fairs? How will these factors impact your email campaigns?

We suggest allowing for more time for responses to summer campaigns come in as many people will be traveling and schedules, no matter the audience, will change. Think about adding 3-5 days onto any measurement rates you have in place and allow additional time to convert recipients and respondents into sales or leads.

On the flip side, expect to see people having more time that they can allocate to sitting in front of a computer. The computer, and especially the email Inbox, have become more of a fixture in everyone’s daily life, so it will be interesting to see if a noticeable behavioral change in response rates occurs.

Either way, get out and enjoy some of these longer days and sunshine for yourself. We here at eROI certainly plan to do so.

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Here is a good article from Jeanniey Mullen at Ogilvy One on email. Worth the read.

A question at an ESP user conference I spoke at last week was whether I thought e-mail was an art or a science. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and couldn’t provide my opinion.

A few days later, the same question came up during a call with Pivotal Veracity. We were discussing teachings Pivotal Veracity is currently assembling on the use of forms and search boxes within an e-mail. (These will be compiled and put into a report, which I’ll cover next column.) During the conversation, I was interested to hear the report will focus on the science of e-mail. My initial responses to the findings came straight from the art aspect.

So, is e-mail an art or a science?

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I frequently applaud the efforts of Diesel at truly pushing the envelope of cool and shock. They once again had my attention this past week with the profile update creative. The importance of “knowing” your audience is a top line deliverable, but this one had to surely drive the click through.

The only thing that left me a bit lost, was that the click threw me to the home page and not to my exact profile update. Made the conversion a little harder, but trust me, I wanted them to know that this spring’s surgery was a success and I would look great in relevant offers for strapless tank dresses.

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I was at this event and just had a chance to read the article today. I have been a little slammed, but what is new. The teeth of CAN Spam

From Erik Sass, at Mediapost

THE CAN SPAM ACT that went into effect in January 2004 has proven to be far less disruptive of the e-mail marketing industry than many had feared–but the general feeling of relief has grown into outright complacency, leading executives warned at a “town hall” meeting on spam on the third and final morning of MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit here. Some popular methods could land e-mail marketers in trouble if used improperly, they said. Ben Isaacson, privacy and compliance leader for Experian and CheetahMail, summed up the general thrust of the discussion when he said “the slightest mistake in an otherwise legitimate campaign” could result in fines or legal action.

Before delivering the bad news, Michael Goodman, a former staff attorney for the FTC, confirmed that the CAN SPAM Act did indeed have fewer ramifications than originally feared: “In the industry its nickname is the ‘You Can SPAM Act,” he said, since “it doesn’t prevent you from sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to anyone.”

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I have always found gmail to be great at limiting the amount of Junk or spam I get at this address. I actually rarely use this email address for anything else than personal emails. Now all of a sudden I am seeing a flood of spam coming in the box. It only takes one clown to sell a list and watch it take off. The good thing is that it is all being caught in the Junk box, the bad thing is that there is actually so much of it.

Time for a new account right? And the email address churn continues…..

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What do favorable brand perceptions, trust, and relevance all have in common? They were all found to be the most effective e-mail marketing tactics for eliciting a favorable response, according to consumer responses to the fifth annual View from the Inbox survey of 2,500 consumers.

For the survey, consumers were asked to rank how likely they would be to respond to various e-mail marketing tactics. “Response” was defined as clicking on the links within the e-mail message to take further action, such as make a transaction, register for a Website, or access more information.

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Thanks to George Bilbrey, VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions, at ReturnPath for another great article. I like this idea and have a few questions around this technique. George, how many IP addresses would a customer need to do this and how would you be able to flag one honeypot email address if you are getting 5-10K new subscribers a day? Let me know as we have some ideas around a test of this.

Having spam traps on your email list causes a world of problems: listings on commonly used blacklists and blocks at top ISPs. For the uninitiated, a spam trap is usually an address that was created new and never signed up to receive any mailings. Therefore, by definition, all mail going to that account is unsolicited. This is a great tool to catch spammers who will often mail to addresses that they have harvested from web sites and newsgroups where the good folks who run the spam trap network have published their spam trap email addresses.

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China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII), the Internet Society of China (ISC) and the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA) have jointly launched a nationwide campaign against spam to educate consumers about unsolicited bulk email.

The campaign is called “12321″, which is also the anti-spam reporting phone number for MII.

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We were fortunate this week to hold the first Gather.com live chat about email marketing. The EEC members joined with many other subscribers and collectively had a live session of questions and answers. These will be held each month and I encourage you to join up.

If you have not yet subscribed to the Email Experience Council newsletter, time to click away from here and get it done.

Learn more about the Email Experience Council now

So this is an interesting ploy, I have not given much thought to ecom sites that don’t require an email address when you place an order anymore. Now this article is worth the read, but can someone find me an ecom site that does not require email? I challenge you. If you can, they must not be selling.

Don’t try to place an order with Queensboro Shirt Co. unless you are willing to give your e-mail address. That and Internet-only prospecting have made the company a pioneer in business-to-business direct marketing, though few others have followed its path, according to the company’s top executive.

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I was sent this from a partner agency today. Great read on email usability, newsletter subscriptions and other data I love to read. If you are reading this, I assume that this applies to you as well.

In a nutshell:

Four years is a very short amount of time, so it’s heartening to observe that companies have invested enough in user experience quality to win improvements in the 25-89% range. Such investment is evidence of the email newsletter’s importance to the bottom line.
Despite the improvements, however, much remains to be done. Users should be able to subscribe to a newsletter in less than a minute, for example.

Also, in the latest study, the success rate for subscribing to newsletters was 81%. While higher than the 66% we found when testing a broad range of websites, a success rate of 81% implies that a newsletter with 50,000 subscribers could gain an additional 11,700 subscribers by improving the usability of its subscription process

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Take the time to read this study if you do nothing else today.

I came across this in the Brightwave Newsletter today. Alot of it is not too new if you have been following this, but they give a good wrap up of all the states and what has happened with all the bills.

The kids’ do-not-e-mail juggernaut that for the last year has threatened to wipe legal adult content out of electronic communications is grinding to a halt—at least for now. A bill in Georgia that would have established so-called child protection do-not-e-mail registry died in April. A similar bill in Connecticut was gutted. Similar bills in Iowa, Wisconsin and Hawaii are also either dead or languishing. Though child do-not e-mail registries in Utah and Michigan still pose significant threats to e-mail containing legal adult content, other states allowing their registry bills to die or gutting them indicates the tide may be turning in marketers’ favor.

Read the full articleat Direct Mag

I don’t want to toot our horn, but EVERY quarter when we come up with a new way to present data - starting in q1 2006 this year - with a study based on list size, Exact Target and everyone else follows 3-6 months later. Kills me. Guys love the data and glad we can give you some ideas for your marketing and customer education efforts. But come on, there are 300 things you could focus on to stand out.

PSSSST> We are going to talk about “Dayparting + List Size + Relevancy - the Monkey Effect”…. hope you don’t write about that one too.

Look for our new stuidies coming soon that will be completely original, as marketing efforts and research should be.

“What’s the #1 indicator for best email open/clickthrough rates?
According ExactTarget’s data from 4,000+ organizations, 230,000+ campaigns and more than 2.7 billion email messages in 2005 the answer is LIST SIZE.

Get this and much more in our NEW WHITEPAPER.”

If you have not read our industry leading studies yet, grab a copy.