The Email Wars

Dell has recently made some brand changes and with the introduction of a new line of color infused laptops has caught my attention. Not for the new case mods, but for the way that they are carrying over the colors of the new brand into their emails. For so long the were so standard, yet nice, and even business vanilla. But these new series of emails are catching my attention in the inbox.

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I know that many of you don’t change out the looks very often to the old tried and true newsletters, but change it good. We get into this whole conditioned behavior routine of doing what is comfortable and nice, but mixing it up works.

Now mixing it up is not just for the one-off campaign email, but let it carry over to all your activities. Change up your emails at least once a year, and tie them around a change in products, campaign messaging or even just to do it different. Templates are made to be used for a while and then to move on.

Would running the same print ad fit your model? Most likely it would not as that is why you are always innovating with print. Do the same with email as it can have a segmented testing range and a shorter shelf life when it hits the inbox time and time again. I think you will see response rates go up as there is a curiosity factor with change.

Now one would think that with more money to promote an artist or record that a record label would get email. I know the team at Warner Music Group and I know that they GET email. But unfortunately the labels and artists groups handle the outbound marketing. I have signed up for quite a few to see if I see something revolutionary hitting the inbox, but often times I am faced with emails like this below.

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Now you would think with an artist like Diddy or others of his public profile caliber that the emails would follow best practices, or even push the envelope. Sorry to let you all down but they are image heavy, have most of the text below the fold, and even with this one as an example… do not deliver any content that make you feel inclined to click through.

Have any of you seen some good label or band emails? If so send them my way to tell me which ones so that I can sign up and take a look.

A new antispam technology that recently got a preliminary nod from an international standards body holds promise, but an engineer who helped develop the technique says it’s not a surefire way to evade e-mails from criminals.

The technique called DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM for short, relies on a quietly inserted digital signature on the sender’s end, which is designed to vouch for the identity of a message’s sender. The Internet Engineering Task Force, a key standards body, adopted a draft of the standard in May.

The standard, which has backing from Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sendmail and PGP Corporation, doesn’t require that messages with invalid signatures be flagged as junk, but Internet service providers are likely to do just that.

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Spammers, beware: more criminal spam prosecutions–complete with stiff prison sentences and mandatory forfeiture of relevant valuables–are on the way in the coming months, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney said Thursday.

“I think the healthy dose of jail time plus lose-your-money is working,” Mona Sedky Spivack, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s computer crime and intellectual property unit, said at the second day of a Federal Trade Commission spam summit here. “I hope that provides a deterrent effect to other would-be criminal spammers out there.”

Justice Department and FBI representatives contacted by CNET News.com weren’t able to provide any numbers on how many spam-related cases have already been prosecuted in recent years. The FTC’s experience may offer one clue: a spokeswoman said her agency brought 26 civil actions against spammers since the 2003 passage of a controversial antispam law known as Can-Spam, and four of them also involved a criminal component.

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Senders, ISPs and ESPs need to adopt Domain Keys

When e-mail was first developed, the network was a friendly place.

Most users were researchers, and they had a vested interest in making the network work well. For the most part, they knew each other; in fact, there was a directory of every network user, including their names, physical and e-mail addresses, and phone numbers–printed on paper and weighing less than 2 pounds.

Security consisted of little more than simple passwords, and encryption was rare. In fact, the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet, first started operating in 1969, but the RSA algorithm, one of the first great advancements in Internet security, wasn’t invented until 1977. Heavy e-mail users sent and received perhaps 10 messages per day.

How things have changed. There are times of day when I receive 10 messages a minute–and most of those are spam or phishes. In fact, I receive more than 1,000 unwanted messages every day. Spam is nasty, but phishing is worse, resulting in the theft of money and identity that equates to significant losses for both individuals and businesses. Global research firm Gartner estimates that 3.5 million Americans divulged personal information to phishers in 2006, nearly twice the number of 2005. The average loss per incident was around $1,244, more than double the amount in 2005, and barely half of those consumers will get their money back.

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Do you use Captchas to try to keep your opt in records clean? We implemented it in our emailROI platform about 4 months ago as a built in system our customers could use, but looks like the spammers have already figured it out. Paul at U of Arkansas shared a new way with us (in private) to stop the form spam from entering our opt in ecosystem, and I have to say Thanks Paul, it worked. We have found his secret measure to be more effective than other ways we have tried to slow the increase in form spam on our sites.

If you are interested in learning about it from me directly, add a comment and I will contact you offline, as we don’t want “them” to learn about this trick.

From a CNET Article below:

According to security vendor BitDefender, spammers have defeated a system designed to differentiate humans from machines when registering new accounts online. Known as Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), the system won’t allow users to advance until distorted characters in a box are correctly entered. BitDefender says a new threat, Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using more than 15,000 automatically generated bogus Microsoft Hotmail accounts to spread and is registering 500 new accounts per hour, suggesting the Captcha system has been defeated.

BitDefender says the Trojan horse accesses one of the free Web mail accounts from Microsoft or Yahoo, pulls encrypted content from a Web site, decrypts the message (usually spam for a pharmaceutical product), then sends the e-mails to presumably valid addresses obtained from another Web site. Exactly how the Trojan is able to create the bogus Web mail accounts is not documented.

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What impact will Google’s acquisition of Postini have on business email filtering? Will postini start shifting to be used in the gmail environment? Will those that use (yes this is a growing trend) gmail as a first filter and then port the cleansed emails into their Outlook client going to change consumer email?

It seems like Google is trying to move more and more into the Microsoft turf of business applicaitons. Only natural for the web superpower.

Google Buys Spam Fighter
Google dipped into its large cash reserves to buy e-mail security firm Postini for $625 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. The San Carlos, Calif., company provides software for companies to guard against spam and viruses entering their networks. The acquisition comes a week after Google closed another deal to buy telecom provider Grand Central Communications, which lets consumers have a single number for several phones.

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Ask and you shall receive. Thanks Bill. Just goes to show how great the blogosphere is. I posted the other day on the iPhone email mania I was seeing and asked Bill (like shouting into the ether) to run a report for us and share with us how many iPhone emails he saw using his system. 638 was the number. Quite a few more than licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop. Apple we heard you loud and clear. Many bought so it worked.

And many others were scammed it looks from Bill’s report. Thanks Bill for not only running the report and sharing it with us, but also keeping your eyes on the web to see when a small voice cries out for help. Hats off to Email Data Source and Email Analyst.

http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=466

Here at eROI we took a look at Q1 email statistics to identify trends and opportunities in both day of the week as well as time of the day statistics.

In prior studies we saw above average open and click rates on the weekend, however, recently weekends are not performing as they are in the past, this could be seasonal in nature as we typically see dips in performance as the weather gets nicer.

We first took a look at Time of the Day email statistics in Q2 2006 and we decided to take another look a year later. Similar to last year, we see spikes bookending the work day with a noticeable spike around lunchtime.

We encourage you to learn more about eROI, email marketing and this study, by visiting our Free Guides download.

With the launch of the new iPhone last week, I could only imagine how many emails people got that had the word iPhone in it, or was from Apple or ATT about it. Bill McCloskey most likely can tell us in his blog next week or in the Email Insiders column. (Bill did you hear me, I am asking you to share with us just how many iPhone emails crossed the web in the past 15 days up till launch and there after.)

This is a good showing to me of the importance of channel noise and channel control. I was in a client meeting last week talking about the Bog Box retailer issues they had in getting the messages sent with the right messaging to the employees of these retailers. Now if you don’t think it is an issue, Bill can let you know, it is.

If you are not aware of who else is talking about you, your product or your brand in other campaigns, you can face one of two things. One is the wrong information or brand statements get shared and you lose control of your campaign. The other is that if too many emails hit the inbox talking about the same thing from different people it causes confusion and frustration. Or even brand resentment.

Many people or brands think that it only builds buzz and brand awareness, but it can if not monitored, cause brand chaos.

Bill I want to see your figures on this iPhone bru ha ha this week. Right after I get back from picking one of these new fancy gadgets up for some “business testing and research”.

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You know I think the most of event based email. Using email to promote or tie into events like Christmas, Back to School, or even Mothers Day is the norm right? But what happens when your campaign is delayed in a tar pit OR you seem to send out your campaign after the passing of a holiday? Well it not only makes you look stupid, but it erodes your brand credibility. A friend (Thanks Jen) sent this into me knowing I would love to bang it on the head in this blog. (She knows me all too well).

But can you believe that an email for a holiday (Mother’s Day) that occurred in May, gets sent out at the end of June? Bad bad bad.

Maybe it was tar pitted by an ISP, got lost in the mail or just was a bad day for the person in charge of email marketing for this company and they mistakenly sent it out. Either way, bad brand image and it is not in the Hall of Shame on this blog.

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We were able to load up some video of our Battle of the Bands footage that we won a week back. Enjoy.

I have been watching the success of email campaigns lately that stay the course VS those that sling everything under the sun at you. You know the kind of emails I am talking about. Some people have a hard time narrowing down the amount of content they place in a sales driven email. They like to act like a bad chef at a subpar restaurant hoping that if they throw enough things on your plate, you will like one of them and think you had a good meal.

Well I am here to tell you to think different. If you have a goal to move products, keep it simple. Giving people too many choices just makes a mess of your campaign. When you are developing a campaign, try to give some top level choices with some options to dig deeper if they want to. Better yet use your website after you capture them from the email to explore in a clear and concise way.

Here are some examples of one campaign using two presentation methods we used this past winter with success. One focuses on the item the client wanted to move and the other was to test what categories were of interest for secondary email campaign touches based on what they clicked from.

Email is not a shotgun, it is more like being a sniper. Focus, wait, narrow, aim and bag the win.

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I am glad to see the hype of RSS killing email marketing dead did not come to fruition. Hell did you really think it would? I use RSS in a different method than I do email and I believe others do as well.

But one thing we have found powerful in RSS and email is the ability to use RSS to build a dynamic email from content you have already produced. If you want to see how subscribe to the weekly recap newsletter in the right hand side of this blog. We, as do many of our customers, use RSS to automatically build an email from content stored on a website. Makes sense right? Why would you want to create the content twice and copying and pasting is so 2006.

Ogilvy has used our email to RSS email engine to build the below email dynamically from content on the Digital Innovations blog. I love this blog as it is using RSS from so many sites I already read and pulling it into one searchable location for me. And to boot, as busy as I get this email below reminds me of the location and drives me back in to read more content.

A perfect balance… thanks RSS for not killing off email.

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I came across a site this past week that shows whether or not your domain is blocked in China. Why does this matter you might be asking? Well since China is the fastest growing economy and the population is coming on line faster than anywhere else in the world, you better make sure that your domain is not getting filtered at the Great (Fire) Wall.

I put in two domains that matter to me to test it. One being our corporate domain of www.eroi.com. And low and behold it was blocked. Well strike one for me and China. But what was more important was our emailing domains. And after a little fat fingering my keyboard (one would think after 12 years in this business I could type blindfolded) our email domain.. success. No blocks there. That is IF I trust this site to tell me the truth.

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