The Email Wars

From Wendy Davis, Wednesday, Jan 17, 2007 6:00 AM ET

A SIZABLE PROPORTION OF MARKETING e-mails land in people’s in-boxes without images or working links, according to a new study slated for release today by the organization Email Experience Council.

“Our research shows that less than 50% of marketers are creating emails that render appropriately,” states the report.

For the study, the group looked at 1,000 e-mails–both business-to-consumer and business-to-business–sent during the last quarter. Twenty-eight percent of the e-mails arrived without links, according to the report, while 21% of the e-mails appeared completely blank when images had been turned off at the e-mail service provider level.

Get the Full Study

(more…)

I am not sure about the rest of you, but what is currently going on with the black hats sending emails that you can’t even understand? Enough with the clever subject lines sent from a first name that of course you know someone by that name, but why in Russian or and Asian character set? Seems this is just pure laziness. Not that I really care about the junk I get, well I actually do and take that back as I like to look and see when it actually makes it past into my inbox, but at least make it somethig good for my time.

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If you have not seen this great blog where this writer takes time to cleverly craft an obituary on the sender of emails to their junk box, you should. Just for the fun of the idea. Not that would have time, but I would love them to try to craft one in all of these foreign characters or just write one about a lone Russian peasant that crafted these emails.

Always a good place to learn what and what not to do is the Junk Box and the inbox when they make it through. Enjoy the weekend.

So I placed an order for a shipment from Wine.com. Not something I typically do as I like to shop for wine and pick it up in person. But when I need to order something for someone else that lives far away, I do it online. Makes it easier than finding, buying and shipping (what if it breaks).

So the process and check out was great, but I never found my emailed receipt. Seems this transactional email went straight to my junk box. Could it have been the sent from email address? That alone scares me. (do-not-reply@support.wine.com). Couldn’t this email simply come from orders@wine.com or support@wine.com? Then they could use a reply address that goes somewhere else. Seems like the right idea to me.

Either way I found it huddle against a ton of junk (which I always peruse for educational reasons) and flagged it out into a folder. But my assumption is that many others woudl have never found it.

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This new check box in the footer of an email caught me as odd. Why would I want to take the step to check a box, then use the unsubscribe link. Seemed to double the amount of work to simply take myself off a list. I was trying to understand the rational behind this idea, but truly can’t. I would think that complicating the process just leaves a strong disconnect and a bad UI.

My suggestion to you is to keep it simple, make it feel safe and don’t think that adding complexity or steps will make it better.

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I found this email to highlight a great idea. It is a simple one, but it drives forward a method to keep the subscriber fosuced on you during the month. Now the idea is solid, but I am not sure why many men would make this calendar their wall paper. Tell me if I am wrong that most people that buy flowers are male so a cleaner, simplier calendar or wallpaper might have been better. I don’t have the metrics on this retailer personally, but I am going to ask them as they are based here in the Portland Metro area.

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Taking this idea into your own campaigns could be a good idea. I know that many people search for wall papers to replace the dreaded plain old, everyone has the same thing screen, so that is the opportunity. Can you build a series of wallpapers that your audience might like? Stay infront of them for more than 2-3 seconds and increase the value of your offerings based on just good will?

I am going to push for some eROI designed wallpapers this year. I get most of mine from TheFWA.com and suggest you take a look as well for simple inspiration. (As well as some of the best flash campaigns we see each year.)

If you have not yet taken advantage of subscribing to our weekly Blog recap newsletter yet, you must be an RSS purist. Well as an avid user of RSS myself, I can tell you that I enjoy getting recaps from some of the blogs I read. Not daily, but weekly. I think daily frequency is a little overkill personally.

Many of the RSS subscribers are using Netvibes, Google Reader and PageFlakes, which we do as well, but with all that happens each and every week in our collective lives, it is good to get a reminder. Who knows, you might have missed that one post that would have lifted your email marketing knowledge.

And did I forget to mention that not only do you get a recap of this blog, but as a bonus we throw in some posts from two of our other blogs, ReturnOnSubscriber and EmailDays. It is automatically produced using our RSS to emailROI system. This system is so much better (not too opinionated on our own products) than others I have seen competitors hawking and is included for all emailROI clients to use.

I have not nailed down the “Best Day” for this email yet, so you might find it shifting from time to time based on my own testing.

Cheers and thank you all for your readership and for your ability to read past my typos from time to time.

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I came across this interesting campaign from Brio last week. Seems it has been up for a while. They used it to introduce their new Networking Toys. Really toys for office workers. I am not sure about any of you, but my office is a toy haven. I have found over the years that these little things sprinkled around my office help to drive creativity. Ask any of my co-workers and they can tell you that these type of things keep popping up in my office on a weekly basis.

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Back to Brio… they have a collection of toys centered around the office worker, email, search, video, etc. With a great send to friend feature built in. That is why I actually think that this is relevant to you. Viral email marketing can be a large traffic driver.

Fun ideas, but the flash execution was well done. Just a diversion for you and fellow office workers for today.

See the Site

I am a little confused here. I am curious as to how Circuit City got my email address in the first place as I have never signed up with them nor have I bought anything online from them. Not that this email is bad, but it made me wonder how they got my email to begin with and why it was coming from them and not maybe a 3rd party they might have rented it from.

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SO I did not opt in to this program from this email, only because I was skeptical as to where they got my email address from. I think that it was a good attempt to grow this list, and I would assume that it worked from my point of view, just not to happy with the approach. Is list growth your primary concern? Or is building a valuable list of people that want to hear from you that will buy more important? I vote for the latter.

Love to hear your thoughts on this.

I got an email this week from a client that was changing email addresses and removed one from the emailROI system. He loved the fact that he got a personal confirmation email letting him know that his wishes were honored and that if it was a mistake he could take actions.

I often wonder when I remove myself from lists IF it actually took place. I have in some cases removed myself weekly for 8 months (will not name the culprits now) and still get the emails from them).

Never let them leave without saying goodbye and always honor the request immediately. Just a tip for today.

Here is our simple confirmation: (it is all text)

This email address has been unsubscribed from all at eROI email lists.

We at eROI are sorry to see you go. If you unsubscribed in error, or if you would like to resubscribe, please click here.

Your email address has been removed from all lists.

Many of you are familiar with the challenges of content driven ads in the webmail clients. Interesting study below tha they actually lost some 3% this past December. When you are crafting your email you need to be aware that you could be driving competing ads next to your own creative due to systems like AdWords. I am always interested to see who shows up in my inbox around the email creative. Testing your offers let’s you see this before you send.

From Wendy Davis at Mediapost.
E-MAIL SITES CLAIMED JUST 44.2% of online display ads last month–down from November’s 47.5% and October’s 51.1%, according to new data by Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance.

Yahoo’s e-mail service drew 36.4% of ads last month–also down from November’s 40.4% and October’s 43.6%. MSN Hotmail captured 6.4% of ads, up slightly from November’s 5.7% and almost flat from October’s 6.3%.

Overall, online advertisers ran 257.7 billion display ads last month, compared to 259.6 billion in November.

Read Full Article

I found this area of the New York Times to be an interesting idea. It may have been around for a while, but first time find for me. I think that if you run a site with a lot of information and even a blog that it is interesting to not only show how many people either vote, digg or link to the post, but also show them how many others are emailing it on. I would assume that these are only the people that use the Send This Article to a Friend feature and could not track all of those that simply copy the link from the browser and send it on in their own email client.

Nice way to show what is viral.

See it here.

I found this from our friend Tamara Gielen at B2BMarketing:

Microsoft had published a pair of articles describing the support for HTML and CSS in Outlook 2007, and the news wasn’t good:

“Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007. ”

The limitations imposed by Word 2007 are described in detail in the article, but here are a few highlights:

no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
no support for forms
no support for Flash, or other plugins
no support for CSS floats
no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
no support for CSS positioning
no support for animated GIFs

In short, unless your HTML emails are very, very simple, you’re going to run into problems with Outlook 2007.

Read the Rest and See the new tool from MS to check your emails

So after cruising the floor of CES in Lost Wages Tuesday, we had this idea…. why not opt in for as many contests and booths we could to see what we get during and after CES. We wanted to take a look at companies large and small so that we could see what the qualifying and approach process is for each. We will be keeping them posted over at our other blog www.returnonsubscriber.com as they fly into the box. It will be interesting to see as I can tell you that the large companies based on the products and booths should make us proud, but some of the little guys here need to stand out in the inbox after the show to keep us engaged.

Well after watching the keynote last night and scouring the web for other articles, seems that this phone is a great thing for email marketing as well as for mobile marketing.

“Jobs claims the iPhone is the first to enable “real” rich HTML email, through any IMAP or POP3 service, and boasts the “first fully usable HTML browser on a phone.” That browser is, of course, Safari. In a demo, the device displayed the entire homepage of The New York Times, rather than just sections of it, as was shown by competing models.”

This new phone is going to help us better track emails to individual and not the device. The individual can now check email on the go in full HTML spendor and not simply text. I love it. I am going to pick one up next week… if I can.. and do some testing.

So I am at CES drooling from booth to booth when news comes in over my now OUTDATED blackberry about this. The new Apple iPhone. (http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/the-apple-iphone/)

Seems that one of the most powerful devices in the world just pushed the limits of what I want. It made the phone perfect. So on top of that it partered with yahoo for PUSH email services. Not sure yet how this is going to impact mobile email reading, but I can assume if it plays out anything like the iPod it is a game changer.

I am still looking to see what other email clients it supports for integration, but with the Safari browser all email is availble off the bat. Not sure about all of the data services, except I know it works with any open wifi network in range, so this might have less of an impact unless offered with a data plan from a carrier. I am still trying to fond out which carriers are going to sell this.