The Email Wars

I came across a new email marketing community site that is bringing a lot of different data into one place. It does not have the chops and resources of the EEC, yet, but it is another good place to reference as you are searching for more data to help with your email marketing plans.

Looks to be built by Gold Lasso, an ESP.

Dot Email is an online community for email marketers to share ideas, keep up with news, learn tricks of the trade and complain about the vexing issues that hurt the industry. Just as anything communal, you get out of it what you put into it.

DotEmail

We often get approached by client looking to just do a newsletter for their business. Now there is nothing wrong with the newsletter, but why do companies and brands often overlook the One-Off email. The One-Off, as I refer to it is the campaign email. The one that is focused and targeted to engage to make someone move to take action. It is not a resource laden email and really gives one path to action. Sometimes we see two paths, but really to be true to the idea, you need to focus on just hitting the goals of the campaign.

Wine.com does a good job of illustrating this with these two examples:

The Newsletter
Note that there are so many things to chose from and it is the email format that is to educate, steer and channel the behavior of your subscriber. The most important part of the newsletter is to actually organize the content in a clear, concise format. If you miss that mark, then you will see a low click through and conversion rate.

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The One-Off (aka Campaign Email)
Focused offers make the best ROI in the campaign email. Strike the value proposition as the lead item and drive them to conversion. I actually bought some from this email and I am not one that really acts immediately from offers. Maybe I am just a little jaded with the medium at times. I typically tuck them away, re-read them and go direct to the site to hunt.

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This post is really just to get you thinking about what you are doing. If you really want to sell and not educate, focus on the One-Off campaign.

Well the votes came in Thursday night last week and we had some tough competition. But turns out that we WON for the Kettle Foods Passport To Flavor Campaign. It was a great win for us and for our client Kettle Foods. Special thanks to Maxwell PR as well for all the brand work, PR and blog outreach they did for the campaign. Stellar job by all and so happy to have a big win under our belt.

Looking forward to some new site launches this week for the new Konami American Idol Video Community and as well many others. This is going to be a long week for the whole eROI team.

We have been hard at work adding new features, code, XML API Updates, Additional IPs, Servers, and new Feedback loops with ISPs. On top of all of the hard coding work, we are changing out some of our default template settings for clients. We spent a few months looking at all the footers out there with the other ESPs, testing the rendering and deliverability impact of our change, and just this last Friday moved it live to all of our clients.

Now this might seem like a subtle, why are you telling me this — change, but trust me, it has an impact. Everything has an impact in email.

Let us know what you think or how do you feel about the footer as opposed to a header?

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What if it was illegal to actually set up or represent your email address with false information? This is an interesting law finding traction in Europe. I am not quite sure how this would be policed, but it sure would help email marketers from having bad lists and email false positive rates with the ISPs. Just how many of you are barraged with false email addresses at sign up each day? And how many of you have to constantly monitor your lists to keep them clean?

Some European countries are proposing outlawing the use of fake information to open e-mail accounts or set up Web sites, a move intended to help terror investigations but which could face resistance on a privacy-conscious continent.

The German and Dutch governments have taken the lead on the proposals, crafting legislation that would make it illegal to provide false information to Internet service providers and require phone companies to save detailed records on customer usage.

The aim, analysts say, is to make it easier for law enforcement to access information when they investigate crimes or terrorist attacks. But Europeans have long cherished their privacy, railing against measures that would see personal information stored for commercial use or government examination.

Read the Article

I was thinking about the FTC today and wondering where they are with any changes, updates or filings for the Can Spam laws. It seems to me that it was so loud some time ago (like 2 years) and then all the noise has died off from them If I am wrong and you know something else, let me know.

I took a few moments to check the site and see if I have been asleep at the wheel, but nothing since January 12th, 2005. At that time they had this notice posted and nothing since. The release cites a 60 day review time line but then nothing.

Do you think that they FTC policy is going to change at all this year? Will we see any new filings? Or just actions against more companies under this act? We have seen a few in the past and many hunts after some of the more prolific spammers, but no real change to how legitimate email marketers are doing business. Are we as an industry doing better at self policing?

It really makes me wonder as we are all seeing and hearing about the increases in spam and the new techniques that the nefarious black hats are using everyday. I wake up to 100 plus junk emails each AM and I have not really seen a reduction in the crap myself.

Love to hear your thoughts on this?

Our Creativity Journal Contest is nearing an end on February 28th. If you are still interested in getting your creative into the mix, send it on to create AT eroi.com.

This past holiday season, we put together a creative journal and send it out to some of our select customers. These journals were a hit, finding their way into the hearts of all who received them. Thank you emails rolled into our inboxes, many asking, “Can I get one more for a co-worker?” Well due to the love of these Creativity Journals, and the fact that we have a few boxes of them left, we wanted to hold a contest with our subscribers to send us their BEST email campaign creative. Now this is open to eROI customers and subscribers alike, so no pressure as everyone has a chance to get a journal. The only requisite: the creative must ROCK.

To enter, simply send us your email creative in HTML, JPG, or PDF format by February 21st, 2007 and we will hold an internal review by our entire team to choose 10 winners. These winners will have their work featured on ReturnOnSubscriber once they are chosen and our comments will follow on this blog. Please make sure to attach your name, company, email address and 100 – 250 words describing what the campaign was for, the target audience and what time of year it was sent. Also important is the Subject Line, or lines if you did an A/B list split by Subject Line.

We look forward to your submissions and if you have any questions, reach out and touch us at “create AT eROI.com”
Submit Your Campaign By Feb 28th

I can tell you that the site actually is much better than the email. It is not that this email is poor, but the layout is challenging to the inbox. The reason I say this is that they action is way below the fold and they have only used one link. I was clicking away on the top red image as well as the “See The Winning Designs” copy, thinking that would be the link. Right? But no it was buried down in the body copy and used the old “here” link.

Just my thoughts that you want to place something actionable higher up in the body of the email instead of making people search for it.

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Well the votes were cast and the finalists narrowed down for the 2007 American Marketing Association MAX Awards. We are honored to have one of our campaigns up for one of the Awards. It is for the work we did with Kettle Foods and Maxwell PR for the 2007 People Choice Campaign, Passport to Flavor. This has been an ongoing collective effort for 3 years now and this year we really tried to push it past the norm and deliver a full force flash driven campaign site and custom email send to a friend postcards to leverage the viral aspects of the vote. It was nice to have Fast Company write a full page on the campaign this month as well as a featured story on MarketingSherpa.

We will see what comes of it and if nothing else are honored to make the list of finalists.

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Interesting new site from Budweiser. The intro video gives you a quick idea of why you should opt in and what they are and aren’t going to do with your info. Interesting way to use video to bait the hook and prove the value.

Visit and listen

This came from Seth Godin and I think can apply directly to email marketing. Let me show you how after each line….

1.Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.

Email Marketers never have a “standard” day. There are things happening that impact their decisions in real time and things that they cannot anticipate at times. Learn to roll with the punches.

2. Selling is personal. When I make a promise, I have to keep it. If you force me to break that promise (by changing processes, features or a rollout schedule) I will never forgive you.

When you get an offer in email, you need to live up to it. If you are sending out offers based on behavior, you better know exactly what each subscriber has done or will do. I have seen campaigns that send a discount code AFTER the purchase as they are not changing customer lifecycle campaigns in real time and that created buyers remorse.

3. Selling is interpersonal. I am not moving bits, I’m trying to change people’s minds, one person at a time. So, no, I can’t tell you when the sale will close. No one knows, especially the prospect.

Will they buy now when they get the email in the inbox? Or will they sit on it to use it later on? Will that offer still be valid or will you lose the purchase?

(more…)

One of our Sales and Strategy team (Alex Williams) wrote a nice entry on one of our blogs this past week. Sheds an interesting take on email marketing.

Watched a great Miles Davis DVD this weekend (Electric Miles) and afterwards started thinking….

How does improvisation relate to marketing?

In a jazz composition, there is a basic melody and chord structure, after the melody is played the rest is mainly improvised. Much of the excitement in seeing live jazz is watching the players taking chances within the context of the song. Sometimes it fails, but sometimes it is perfect and magical. Taking a risk can be scary and may not work, but it can also be very exciting and lead to great things.

My question to you is…Are you taking chances?

Read the Rest Here

I was fortunate to join Return Path’s presentation last week in Seattle. It is the first in a traveling local series of events that they will be putting on across the US this year. I highly encourage you to attend if is comes near you. We were a quick 3 hour trip away up I-5 so we jumped in the car and took a drive.

Our CEO, Ryan Buchanan, summarized his take aways on his blog this week.

I attended Return Path’s Seattle Workshop yesterday and learned a lot more about “Email Strategies that Increase Deliverability and Response” than I expected. They even had a guest speaker from Microsoft Hotmail (now branded Windows LiveMail) – Product Planner Brian Holdsworth who shed light on Microsoft’s deliverability strategies. Apparently, over 50% of email browser use is MS Outlook, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.

Here are my notes from the event (Return Path speaker):
Large ISPs getting significantly more email volume each day – recently showing 7.4billion emails per day.

What is Email Reputation?
1. Complaints (Informal)
2. High Unknown Users (unclean list)
3. Spam Traps (spamcop.com and other types of spam-catching email addresses)
4. Sending Infrastructure (IP address must be clean)
5. Sending Consistency (similar daily email volume)

You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

This past holiday season, we put together a creative journal and send it out to some of our select customers. These journals were a hit, finding their way into the hearts of all who received them. Thank you emails rolled into our inboxes, many asking, “Can I get one more for a co-worker?” Well due to the love of these Creativity Journals, and the fact that we have a few boxes of them left, we wanted to hold a contest with our subscribers to send us their BEST email campaign creative. Now this is open to eROI customers and subscribers alike, so no pressure as everyone has a chance to get a journal. The only requisite: the creative must ROCK. Send to “create AT eROI.com”

To enter, simply send us your email creative in HTML, JPG, or PDF format by February 21st, 2007 and we will hold an internal review by our entire team to choose 10 winners. These winners will have their work featured on ReturnOnSubscriber once they are chosen and our comments will follow on this blog. Please make sure to attach your name, company, email address and 100 – 250 words describing what the campaign was for, the target audience and what time of year it was sent. Also important is the Subject Line, or lines if you did an A/B list split by Subject Line.

We look forward to your submissions and if you have any questions, reach out and touch us at “create AT eROI.com”
Submit Your Campaign By Feb 28th

I was reviewing one of my favorite email marketers Alaska Airlines the past week and they had a nice feature in the subscription area. This made me think for all of the time that we ask people “Text or HTML” when they choose how they want to get email. Are we assuming that everyone knows what this means? What if we are all wrong as we have been living in the world for too long? When was the last time you asked someone to explain what that means? It sounds simple enough right? But how do you know for sure if your audience or subscriber really knows what the differnce is.

What also comes to mind is many of us don’t even ask 90% of the time and just rely on sending multiparts (now go ask your mom if she can tell you what that means) so that we can decide for them or for their email client.

Although this is not a game changer, it is a nice way to help educate your audience. Thanks for flying with us today at eROI.

The Opt in:

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The HTML example:

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The Text Example:

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Now does your audience know or should you show them?