The Email Wars

Could you imagine if this was for an email ESP or agency? What would the implications be to such a company. I think it would shut them down 100%. Every client under the sun would think twice about using them, trusting them with data, and even the impact on online ISP reputation would be cripling.

Now InfoUSA does own some ESPs and does do email list rental as well, so I am interested to see if clients tie this bad news back to those businesses.

From Mediapost:

IN ANOTHER PROUD MOMENT FOR the direct mail industry, The New York Times this week expended 2,858 words on how infoUSA sold personal information to criminals who used the data to swindle senior citizens.

A company official deftly defended selling lists to those classified as Elderly Opportunity Seekers (3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money”), Suffering Seniors (4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease) and Oldies but Goodies (500,000 gamblers over 55 years old described as: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change”) by saying “My people aren’t investigators, they’re marketers, and it’s unfair to expect them to know everything about who is buying from us and every database that is listed on our Web site.”

With all of the studies we read about more ecommerce sales taking place online as a record rate, why would you every give the option to send someone to a REAL store? Well, because you have stores and some people still like to try things on, touch the fabric, see things in real life and browse. I know that even with so many opportunities to buy online, I still like to hit the stores.

You might think that this is counter intuitive to the whole interactive email marketing agency idea that we live and breathe at eROI, but it’s not. We do so many campaigns that drive people to a real world location. Sales are sales are sales, right?

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But why am I showing you this Brooks Brothers email you ask? Well due to the fact that they have embedded a trackable bar code in the email that I can take into a store for the same deal. Now not only does this drive the sale to where the consumer wants to shop, but it is trackable back to the actual email campaign.

We built this feature into our emailROI system some time ago and are happy to see more and more retailers stepping up and using it. Could you use it? Well that depends if you have a POS system that ties back to your CRM system. If you do, maybe you should give us a call and take a look.

Funny that we chose to use the concept of broken images (notice the red “x”s in the creative) to hammer home the idea of of last webinar. We actually had record attendance for this one and even more emails and phone calls in letting us know that our creative might be broken. Some people were shocked to learn that we did this on purpose.

Really an email marketing agency that had broken images in the creative? Are you kidding me? Yep we were kidding you, but the creative did the job and moved people to take action to attend, call and start a conversation.

When you do email right, take risks and challenge the norm you can see great results. Don’t be so glued to your programs that you don’t take a risk or try something new. Testing after all is what propels success. In the words of Wieden and Kennedy… Fail Harder. Without testing, risk and failure you cannot ever reach success.

After the amount of form spam we have seen the past few months, even in double opt in, we are releasing a built in Captcha Authentication system in the emailROI platform this month. It is ready now and will be available to ALL emailROI customers to implement and use in their own sites with ANY emailROI opt in form.

It is really just another line of code to select which makes it incredibly easy for all of our customers to implement. All that it requires is going into your account settings and checking this box “Require Captcha Authentication for Optins”.

If you are having any issues with form spam now is the time to use this new feature in your account to slow it and even put and end to it.

If you are using another email platform and are tired of these issues, time to drop us a line to see how it works. You asked, we listened, we gave.

When this email came into my inbox I actually had to look twice. One win there for Getty Images. This email was so spot on with the concept, the creative and the execution. It is a funny play on the idea that images (using image suppression as the hook) make the email and hammer home the message.

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It makes me laugh a bit as it is so anti-best practice yet so perfect. I wonder how many people got this and what they thought. Do you think that this campaign got a big click through and conversion? I am not sure as I would assume that many people thought it was junk or broken, while I found it to be more enticing to be different.

I think if they are to keep this up in a series or campaign they would do well with it. Repetitive times in front of the consumer would let them know that it is a great campaign and one to be trusted.

In Business to Business emails I really like to hammer home to get to the point quick and work to keep the actions above the fold in the email preview client. When I see something like this, in this case from Cisco, I want to share it with the world as too many times the action button is either below the fold OR a text link.

In order to get the person to take the action, you need to show them what to do. Most people need to be told or shown what to do. They do a good job of communicating what the event is, what the action on your part needs to be and the fact that it falls above the fold is a tri-fecta in my book.

Lesson: Don’t hide the action and try to move it towards the top. If someone has to read too much or hunt for the action, you might as well not send it.

As a family we are BIG fans of Coldstone. My wife actually opted me on right before my bday so that we could get a bday ice cream. But I never heard from them again. Then 2.5 months later this shows up in my inbox. Wow. So many missed opportunities with a house file if it takes that long to get me in the cycle. And this is the only one I have got since. I am waiting to see if I might get more.

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One would think that they would be on a two-week cycle and not a quarterly one. In the food services and retail business weekly, if not more seems to be the M.O. but not here. Should they be sending more? Are they missing opportunities OR have they already tested and found that this is the frequency that works for them?

Maybe I just like email a little too much….or ice cream.

I know I was upset not to be able to attend the Email Insider Summit, but thanks to MediaPost you can watch most of the event online. One thing that does not make it as good as being there is that they only focus on the presenters and not the slides they are speaking to. Maybe next time they can have two cameras on the event to match the slide decks with the speakers.

http://www.mediapost.com/videos.html?bcpid=464120922&bclid=900701308&bctid=900644695

If you thought banks only had to worry about email and “phishing” seems that they are combatting more than that. It seems that technology makes banks even more of a risk with so many people trying to huck us. Is this is start of online gypsies?

Here was an email I got from a bank today, and it was a valid email from the bank and not a spoof. How do I know… they are an emailROI client of ours. I removed the bank name from the emails.

SCAM ALERT! VOICE PHISHING BECOMING MORE WIDESPREAD

“Insert Bank Name here” has been educating members about the danger of online phishing scams for years. The latest version of this criminal attempt to steal your identity is called voice phishing or “vishing.”

Vishing works like this: a consumer receives a voicemail or email warning them that someone is using their credit cards or bank accounts improperly.

They are given a phone number and urged to call to resolve the issue immediately. When they call, an automated phone system asks them to enter their credit card number, PIN and expiration date to pull up their records.

This is when the scammer captures the account information and uses it.

Be careful! If you are ever contacted unexpectedly about your credit card or other financial accounts, call the institution back using published customer service numbers.

“Insert BANK Name” will never request sensitive account information in an email, nor will we contact you asking for your credit card number or PIN.

If you receive an unexpected voicemail or email about your accounts, call our main number to confirm that the message is valid.

Well after reaching our 5th year and getting past a change in the rules that would have placed us in the top 20 last year (they increased the years in business requirement).. we made the list of 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Oregon by the Portland Business Journal. The event will be held June 21st and you can bet the eROI team will be there in mass to see where we actually rank.

Thanks to all of you for your support and business as we charge forward this year to be an even better company and great business partner for the 1000s we work with each and every month.

We could not have done this without all the great clients, agencies, brands and people that allow us to do great work.

We just completed a study with ReturnPath on Reaching the Inbox and Rendering Solutions and how to design so as not to encounter these issue pre-campaign.

http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-q207-reaching-the-inbox.htmll

eROI uses this data primarily to educate, consult and design. We like to help the troubled mailers become good ones and enjoy the increased response that comes from improved deliverability. Of course, if education fails, they can segregate their IPs so top-notch marketers don’t suffer because of other mailers misdeeds. (Which is why eROI has so many IPs and spend so much time monitoring, balancing and segmenting mailers on volume, reputation, list hygiene, vertical industry (say banking), and even by brand.)

eROI also uses Sender Score Campaign Preview to help their clients with content assessments. Content is another area where many ESPs typically have little control, so having a mechanism to help clients pinpoint where they need to make changes is crucial. But eROI is a hybrid ESP with full service and self service clients, agencies and other partners; due to this they can head off or test for issues prior to a campaign drop that they are creating, or test on behalf of a self serve client that requests it. Read more about how eROI uses the Sender Score suite to help its clients.

If you are struggling with deliverability issues, talk to eROI about how they address these problems. They help you assess your content? They segregate high reputation mailers from low reputation ones to protect their deliverability. You can’t expect your ESP to solve the problems that you are causing in your program, but you can expect eROI to help you diagnose and solve your problems so that you can increase your email success. Why else would we have so many great long term clients and even more each month selecting us as a partner.

http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-q207-reaching-the-inbox.html

If you did not have a chance to read this one today you should.

I found this study to be right on the mark. I know that I wake up each day to on average 110 emails in my junk folder. It used to bother me, but now, I just delete it and move on. I would say that my thoughts would be different if I was getting ones that were hard to tell or too much, but the junk folder is an easy solution to set rules for. Now this being said, it does hurt email marketing that there is so much of it and it can really cause issues with the sending of spam that looks to be coming from your domain. I actually had a co-worker come to me and say that we were being spammed from one of our domains. I quickly showed them how to read the headers of an email and tell that it was just ghosted and not sent. But how does this bode to someone that really has no idea? This is the part of spam that worries me the most. As it can really damage a brand quickly and you have no way to defend against it.

Read the study on the next page.

(more…)

Sorry for the lack luster posts these past few days. I had the pleasure of welcoming in my 2nd son this past Sunday AM. I will be back on today writing away and have a lot of material saved up.

Cheers and funny how a life event takes you away from the screen, probably a good thing right?

A special thanks to Deirdre Baird, CEO of Pivotal Veracity, for sharing this breaking news with us VIA the Email Experience Council

Today, May 22, AOL officially introduced and rolled-out a new interface for customers who access their email using AOL.com & AIM.com. In addition to a number of other changes to the interface, AOL has decided to disable images in both of these web based email clients.

As a reminder, images have always been OFF by default for AOL 9.0 (AOL’s desktop email software) but, prior to today, images were ON by default in AOL.com and AIM.com. The new interfaces for AOL.com and AIM.com now turn images OFF by default exactly like AOL 9.

Turning Images Back ON

Just like AOL 9.0, images will be turned back back ON in AOL.com and AIM.com by any of the following:

1. the recipient enables the images by clicking the SHOW IMAGES link for THIS MESSAGE or THIS SENDER that appears for each email,

OR

2. the recipient adds the mailer’s from-address to their address book,

OR

3. the mailer’s IP is on AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

Implications

Mailers should expect to see a drop in open rates due to the new interface. Since open-rates are typically tracked via an invisible gif (image), when images are disabled, this method of open-rate tracking will result in no opens recorded when images are disabled.

Be proactive in getting images back on! Encourage your recipients to add your from-address to their address book; if your from-address is in the address book, your images will automatically display. In addition to an explicit add-to-address book campaign, strive to keep your spam complaints and unknown user rates low so you qualify for AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

“Spamtrap” is an interactive installation piece the prints, shreds and blacklists spam email. It interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses the artist has created specifically to lure in spam. He does not use these email addresses for any other communication. He posts individual email addresses on websites and online bulletin boards that cause them to be harvested by spambots and then to start receiving spam.

Because he knows that all email sent to these email addresses are spam, he has set the installation to print and then shred each email as it arrives. Simultaneously the installation is feeding spam blacklists on the web with information gathered from all the received spam. This in turn helps to feed spam filtering systems across the web that are working to reduce the amount of spam we all receive.

The installation uses a Pentium II computer connected to a wireless network, personal printer, personal shredder, aluminum rails, Spamtrap email addresses, automatic printing software, email client software, antivirus software, and a SpamCop user account. The paper is recycled after the spam email has been shredded.

See it in action (Video)