The Email Wars

Well after 8 months and countless hours of thought, design, re-design, coding, hosting, sweat, tears, anger and finally love we have launched the new Konami Video Games American Idol KKR site. It is a labor of love in the end but I can tell you it was no easy task. We went to the bench with our team to write all the code from scratch instead of just taking some apps/code libraries off the shelf to build this one.

But the main point is not that it is done, but that email is going to be the main driver of the community. When we designed this, as we do with every site we launch, we think about how to use email in a social network. Not only in this site but also in the new MatchPointCorp.com site we launched a month back we rely on email to grow the community spread the word and drive new people to discover it.

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Now you might be thinking how does this play in a Web 2.0 world? Why not RSS or Blogs or a wiki or vertical search, well it is simple… email is the glue on the internet and we like the way our glue holds it all together.

These two examples as well as any other “2.0″ site that you might find uses email to grow the Alpha audience, invite to Betas and then grow the whole engine without a lot of marketing dollars with the community as your marketing engine. And did I mention that email is trackable and measurable? Is AJAX or Flash or XML? Not as a marketing measurement now, maybe someday unless you use load times and response as part of your marketing plan.

I invite you to try them out and see how they work and if nothing else, watch some good and bad performances of people attempting to be the next online American Idol.

The Audience has voted now it is your turn.

New IPs are going to be watched more and regulated.

This is good news to many but a word of caution to ESPs (Email Service Providers) and companies out there that try to switch IP addresses or add new ones. Some mailers actually decide to switch IPs and abandon them once they are permanently flagged and/or blacklisted. And if you start a new IP broadcasting from scratch without any prior solid and good traffic on it, expect a poor delivery rate until you establish a REPUTATION on this IP.

As for companies that decide to take to setting up their own PHP mailer or other in house system for email marketing you should not expect great open and read rates out of the gate. I think that this actually puts more benefit on good ESPs with solid IPs and good ISP relations and reputations. It should make more marketers think twice about rolling their own email marketing solution.

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Microsoft last week verified it is significantly throttling the volume of e-mail it will allow to come into its Hotmail accounts from new IP addresses.
The admission won’t come as a surprise to many e-mail service providers. However, it will help them explain to ornery new clients why their e-mail delivery rates temporarily drop when they switch providers.

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I love to see that this trend is growing. We have set up SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys for all of our customers at eROI for a long time now. We have actually seen it to help delivery and it is not just a hoax or fad. What surprises me is how many companies really don’t understand the importance of setting these records up and we really hammer it home on our customers when they first come on board. The funny thing is the push back so many IT departments give the marketing departments when we send these records over to them to set up. Now you would think that the IT folks would be all over this as they are battling this factor each and everyday. But nope. They give some push back and set it up in the Queue to implement when they have time.

Folks it takes all of us working together to do the right thing. Teamwork right? You have heard of it…

E-mail authentication is expected to see wider adoption this year as senders and ISPs implement standards like Sender ID (define) and DKIM (define). Marketers benefit by having forged and deceptive messages filtered by the ISP or carrier.

At the third annual Authentication and Online Trust Summit this week, Microsoft released findings from a two-year-long study observing the effectiveness of Sender ID on deliverability. An average 3.8 billion deceptive e-mails are identified daily within Windows Live Hotmail messages alone.

“The landscape has changed dramatically, spam is now the carrier or attack of choice for online criminals,” said Craig Spiezle, director of online safety technologies at Microsoft.

Fraudulent and spoofed e-mail accounts for between 40 and 98 percent of e-mail sent to Windows Live Hotmail users, depending on the brand. False positives are prevented among marketers using Sender ID; up to 85 percent fewer messages end up in the spam folder, according to the study.

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Does Design and Coding Matter in Email Marketing?

We are closing this survey down at the end of the week. We would love a few more people to take part. IF you have 5 minutes and would like to get the results of this study, please give us your answers. We really appreciate it.

We like to ask people what they think about certain issues facing email marketing. We started last fall asking people about their email inbox preferences. Seemed that we hit a nerve as so many marketing sites and bloggers picked up on it and carried the message around the global block.

This month we are curious about another issue, Email Design and Coding Perceptions. Does either design or coding of your email marketing campaigns really matter? Do you design emails for specific segments in your audience or do you keep your messaging broad so that you don’t seem like you are only speaking to one group of people? With the email client market so fragmented, are you changing the way you design and code emails?

Help us understand how you feel about this issue and we will post the results for you this month in our latest quarterly study. Thank you for your help with this study.

Take the Email Design and Coding Perceptions Survey

I love it when I get an email that is right on the mark of talking to me based on what I have done and giving me some benefits for doing business with an online brand.

Fandango did just that. Not only did they hit me with a relevant email, but they went a step farther in rewarding me with 6 magazine subscriptions for simply being a frequent customer of theirs. Now I read a lot of offline content, and I still believe in print 100%. There is something about reading that is still a good experience for me.

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I thought a bit more about this and I know that some say print is dead, rubbish. I think that print is still relevant in many cases and this was a great cross promotion from Fandango to use a partner to reward me at little cost to them and at the same time lift print subscriptions. I am curious how well this promotion worked not only for Fandango, but for the magazine publishers.

Have you seen any good examples of partnership emails lately? You might think about how you could align your goals with a partner that mutually benefits you both.

So I was hopping through the Junk box on my MSN.com account today, fishing through the weekend’s sends when I noticed something. It not only took ONE click to see the email, but 3 clicks to actually get it to truly open. So if your email is not getting to the inbox, will you click three times to read it? AND if you do, you MUST be a qualified responder, right? I mean after 3 actions to get to the email creative, you must WANT to get this email.

Three clicks to get the content is ridiculous. Bill, I know you are trying to “protect” me from the dark forces and I appreciate it, but find a way to stop me from drilling down 3 levels. It is much easier to check the box next to the “Select All” and then “Delete” and just wipe the box clean.

Not to base all of this on the new MSN Live email system, which I do like a lot, but then when I did get to the creative… it made me wonder why I put some much effort into it to begin with. They did not get the click from me…

Will your customers take these steps if you have not instructed them how to “white list” their address book with the email you send from? And are you educating them how to do this?

STEP ONE:

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STEP TWO:

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STEP THREE:

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So a trend that is hitting consumer brands across the planet is the fact that “everything” is going green or is green friendly. I have seen so many brands use the “green” factor in emails of late. Now does letting people know that you are environmentally correct help lift a campaign? I know that from the stand point of brand association it makes me feel better as a consumer to buy things from companies that are responsible or have less of an impact on the world we live in and leave behind for our children.

Keep your eyes on this trend as I expect us to see it even more in the coming months and years.

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News:

BITS, a nonprofit industry consortium formed by many of the largest financial institutions in the USA, has announced their “BITS Email Security Toolkit” white-paper, describing “protocols and recommendations for reducing the risks” in institutions’ email correspondence, addressing prominent problems such as identity forgery and phishing (password fishing). BITS held an industry e-mail security summit in November 2006, which developed these recommendations. The SPF Project participated in this summit.

The BITS Email Security Toolkit points out, and recommends to BITS members the deployment of, three major complementary technologies that are considered to provide a significant contribution “to [mitigating] the threat to email security and [restoring] customer confidence in email as a channel of communication with financial institutions”:

* Transport Layer Security (TLS) (an update to the well-known SSL)for message transport confidentiality and server-to-server authentication,
* Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Sender ID (a Microsoft derivative of SPF) for sender address authentication, and
* DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) for sender authentication and message integrity.

According to BITS, SPF is a computationally light-weight means for protecting the credibility and reputation of brands and domains while improving the deliverability of messages and reducing the volume of non-delivery receipts received by spoofed domains. It also acknowledges the ease of deploying SPF.

Specifically, the BITS Email Security Toolkit calls for e-mail senders and recipients to:
* publish SPF records for both e-mail and non-e-mail domains enabling sender authentication within eighteen months,
* enable SPF record validation on incoming e-mail immediately,
* publish SPF records as (hard) “Fail” (-all) as opposed to “SoftFail” (~all), which should only be used while testing out one’s SPF record,
* honor records in receiving environments that are published as (hard) “Fail”, and reject failing messages.

“We welcome the initiative of BITS and we support their clear recommendations for financial institutions to deploy SPF in combination with other e-mail security technologies”, says Scott Kitterman, member of the SPF Council, the project’s steering committee. “Sender address forgery is among the biggest problems of the e-mail medium and provides significant potential for criminal conduct. However, SPF is
not just for banks and insurance companies. Anyone with a domain or a mail server, ranging from governments through sports clubs to hobbyist individuals, can benefit from protecting their domain and brand name with an SPF policy and checking SPF on incoming e-mails.”

Now I find this current study very interesting. It seems that the luxury retailers in this study do not find email to actually be good for them, or at the end it seems like although 85% of them want to use email only 50% of them actually do. So maybe it is not a “not good for them scenario” but one that they either don’t have the time, resources or see the immediate payback from these efforts. TWO UPDATED Articles from this AM

High-End Brands Do Low-End Job Online

Mercedes Gets Buzz Going For C-Class With Web, Direct Mail

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Well from this email I got I can tell you it works. I am not going to be plunking down $100K anytime soon on this new Benz, but it did get me to click through and complete the PIN coded offer to test drive this ride. I am a car fan and seem to have a new one every 2-3 years. I actually had the opportunity to drive the new LR2 from Land Rover the first 3 months of 2007 as a test driver (one of 6 in the US) to see what I thought of it. I can tell you I was close to wanting to keep it after driving it for that period of time and I know that 3 of the 6 did in fact keep theirs. And yes, they reached out to me in an email to ask me if I would be interested in being a driver for a short time in a new pilot program. So email, maybe for luxury autos works in my opinion.

Luxury brands might not have as much impulse buying as the price points are high, but if they convert just a few, I am sure it covers the minimal cost of the email campaign and effort.

That is right folks, today is National HIGH FIVE day. Now don’t act like you did not know it, but this is the reason you can justify SLAPPING 5’s all day long throughout the office, at a client meeting, with the damn meter maid leaving you another ticket, your kids, your spouse, heck… just about anyone you see.

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And if they are too far away to cover the distance of the length of 2 arms outstretched, use the site we built last year (and restored to it’s glory last week) to send a HIGH FIVE.

It is totally cool. At least you can justify it is cool with a “National Day” right?

Well on the tails of so many emails I get that just can’t get the gender right when sending email comes this SIMPLE solution from Swell.com. I know that I have only bought hoodies, flip flops and a few pairs of shorts from them, but still maybe they don’t know. That being said why not play the safe bet right?

I am still amazed with all the email marketing tools that are out there that companies are not segmenting right or at all based on who they sell to. I mean if you have types of people then you should ASK which one they are at the opt in right?

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I am going to be spending the next few days in Central Oregon speaking at a conference on Tourism. I am presenting on a few panels about how the internet impacts tourism and travel. Not just in research gathering and decision making by travelers and travel planners, but the level of communication companies, brands, organizations and others can have before, during and after the travel experience.

We have been fortunate to work with many regional travel organizations and some major online travel companies which has allowed us to really dive into what makes people attach themselves to an “online” travel experience. What makes you book, go, see, do, and tell others? Do you know why? I have been saving up a ton of Travel emails to share with you this month. Both the good and the bad of course.

We were fortunate to work on a new project recently with TravelOregon.com to produce a project that is REALLY different for the travel industry. We worked with other agencies like wieden + kennedy to use the XML data and information to show Oregon in a whole new way. Just the first in many new initiatives in travel and using “Web 2.0″ ideas to change the view of the travel experience.

How does email change your travel experience? Do you appreciate pre-travel emails? Post travel follow ups/surveys? And if not, why?

That is right folks, only 6 days left till National HIGH FIVE day. Now don’t act like you did not know it, but this is the reason you can justify SLAPPING 5’s all day long throughout the office, at a client meeting, with the damn meter maid leaving you another ticket, your kids, your spouse, heck… just about anyone you see.

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And if they are too far away to cover the distance of the length of 2 arms outstretched, use the site we built last year (and restored to it’s glory last week) to send a HIGH FIVE. With a week’s lead time I say you start sending them today!

It is totally cool. At least you can justify it is cool with a “National Day” right?

I had meant to share this one a while ago. A good game from Hormel that capitalizes on the SPAM name plus the Broadway show based on Monte Python’s Holy Grail classic.

Worth playing a few times. Warning… totally addicting advergame. That is why it has taken so long for me to blog it…. been playing for weeks straight now, for work and research puposes only though I swear.

And it being Friday and all, thought you would have a few minutes to burn.

I have no clue what this Association is. I am familiar with the EEC, ESPC and MAAWG but never have I heard of this group. Funny thing is I got this email introducing them tonight. Now I would assume having quite a few years in this space that I MIGHT have heard of them OR seen them in a publication, at an event or in conversations with other ESPs or Agencies, but nope. Any of you ever heard of them?

I am the Chairman of bema, the Bulk E-mail Association. We have made it our business to protect the rights of the emailers, publishers, and users alike. We offer wide array of services to companies that mail, offer email, or 1st party list owners. I would be interested to exchange some ideas at some point with someone at your company about ways we can work together, please contact me or visit bemanetwork.com for more information about what we do or how we can help.

Sincerely,
Bill W. Bateman
Chairman
Bulk E-mail Association (bema)
http://bemanetwork.com/

Site says that they have been around since 1998. Well it must be a secret hand shake kind of organization. They are selling cetification that “proves” you are a legimate email marketer. If any of you know about this ORG, let me know.