The Email Wars

The blogger panel will take your questions now

At the eec’s Email Evolution Conference in San Diego next month, I’ll be sitting on a panel with fellow email marketing bloggers Tamara Gielen of BeRelevant, Chad White of The Retail Email Blog/EEC Blog and Maddy Hubbard of Blue Hornet. We’ll be talking about why we blog, how we keep up with it, and lots of other aspects of our blogging. We’ll be answering questions from the moderator and the audience — but we also wanted to give our readers a chance to chime in and ask us questions. So if you have burning questions for me or any of my co-panelists, please let me know by either commenting on this post.

If you’re attending the conference, super! You’ll see us tackle your questions first hand and learn from the other 100+ speakers at the event.

If you haven’t signed up yet, don’t miss the early bird pricing deadline. Sign up by this Friday (Jan. 18) and save $300 on registration with the discount code “EMN.” (Not an eec member yet? Become a silver member for $179 and save even more since members get an additional $200 off the registration fee. So if you’re not an eec member, now is the perfect time to join.)

For those of you who just can’t join us, we’ll have Alex Williams of eROI blogging about our panel session from the show. Visit this blog on Feb. 13 in the morning to see the play-by-play.

2008 Return Path Predictions

What is in store for large BRAND marketing using email and what opportunities and challenges exist for major brands?

Email is already getting more attention from brand marketers. Due to the power and success of email as well as the need to create more synergistic 1:1 relationships with customers, many brand marketers have already made the shift from being mass marketers to becoming direct marketers. As a result, brand marketers will place more value on email as a vehicle for message impression – primarily provided by a subject line, but also a preview pane. One way to track the effectiveness is to watch search traffic on keywords featured in subject lines and offer headlines.

What should small to mid size businesses be doing to make their programs more successful and what resources should they dedicate to it?

Every business can afford to have a world class email program. Tools are becoming more accessible and affordable at the low end. All it takes is a clear goal, a specific owner, consistent execution and the stitching together of free and inexpensive vendors.

How will consumers have mind shift to email campaigns and subscriptions as they become more astute as consumers and are more conditioned to email they get?

Subscribers have always been in control of their email inboxes. Providing relevant and interesting messages at a volume valued by subscribers remains key to customer engagement. Today, the penalty to marketers for not doing so is steeper than ever – irrelevant content drives ISP complaints, unsubscribe requests and tuned out subscribers. As a result, we marketers will finally be forced to really listen to our subscribers and deliver high quality experiences through message content and value. Technology is improving and will help us understand and tap behavior as well as self reported data. It’s still, and always has been, always about the subscriber experience.

I have seen two good examples of brands incorporating social media assets into email campaigns. I think that this is a great natural extension of content that a community is building for you. Instead of always trying to create new content, why not leverage your community content into the email? Time savings? Yes. Credibility and Trust? Yes. Encouragement to get your 15 minutes of fame in a brand campaign? Of course.

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If you are using or thinking of using social media (blogs, message board, forums, reviews, etc, think about how you are leverage it as content in 2008. And if you do also take a look at your content use and privacy policies so you don’t encounter shock at your use of this user generated content.

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It came to our attention earlier today that Comcast has officially retired the following Road Runner domains:

- jam.rr.com
- midsouth.rr.com
- mn.rr.com
- se.rr.com
- sport.rr.com
- swfla.rr.com
- ucwphilly.rr.com
- houston.rr.com

What does this mean for your deliverability? Any mail sent to these domains is bouncing with permanent, network DNS errors. Comcast has been forwarding mail for several months and reminding subscribers to update their accounts — and just recently retired these domains permanently. These dead addresses cannot be translated to @comcast.net – the individual user must update their own account.

What action should you take today? We recommend a proactive approach, start by disabling any address that has the above listed domains. In addition, check your system for addresses that return a bounce code (usually a 500 error, with: ”PERM_FAILURE: DNS Error: DNS server returned answer with no data”) and suppress any that are associated with the domains listed above.

This is an odd topic I know, but after getting my first spammy email from someone purporting to be Facebook, I was wondering what impact these type of emails have on the brand and trust with social networks. From past experience I know that with MySpace I get 100s of emails from people “wanting to be my friend” and I don’t even have a MySpace page. So when I get one in a new social network that I have some trust in, it makes me wonder how far off this is for Facebook. Will this same issue ruin trust, reputation and credibility with users? A few more like this and I know my perceptions will be affected.

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Sure you have a pretty tight email program going. Things have been good. You have a routine, you are driving sales, everyone seems happy. So how to you shake it up and drive some excitement in 2008 to your online marketing? How can other mediums drive increases in brand, sales, and targeted list growth?

Well I am glad you asked as here is what we are doing for many of our clients in 2008. And do note it all starts or ends at the internet.

Are you Blogging?
I know such a scary word for many companies to think about allowing the outside world to see inside the machine, but it does more good to create open communication and participation than it does to work so hard on CONTROLLING the message. The Search Engine impact, the PR impact and the dialogue impact are huge and a blog can actively grow your email opt in list as well. There are some time commitments to consider about blogging, compliance issues in certain industries and some strategy.

Video in your campaigns
6 out of 10 people watch video online at least once per week. Now if that is not a viable audience that is looking for content from you then maybe you should wait until it is 8 out of 10. But video is a serious consideration in 2008 as it is accpeted and expected in both the consumer and the b to b markets. Not that I am telling you to add it to the email per say, but add it to the landing page. I personally don’t like a video in email for many reasons (does not play in all email clients and can force audio on you in a preview pane) and would drive you to place it on the landing page.

Widgets Spread the Gospel
Now besides being able to embed a video in your Facebook page, etc. Widgets are powerful communication devices to move data from one place to another (desktop, web page, mobile) and you can push stories, deals and community through them. Look at people like Splashcast.net for some really interesting widgets for video, chat, voting, news, etc.

Twitter
So Twitter really broke out about a year ago at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Many of us experimented early with it and are still using it today. From searching in Portland, Oregon alone there atr over 90,000 people using it on desktop and mobile devices. Take a look at some other locations and see who is there. We are using this to load mobile data and ideas from people into web sites and even into email campaigns. Allowing people to aggregate short stories as a community on the go, at an event, or during a collective time is really powerful.

Mobile
We have been using a new Mobile RSS News Reader to dirve branded and semi walled garden communications to our clients customers. By giving a mobile system to their customers we are gaining more daily brand and messaging control around things that impact thier lives. We have added a new mobile ad system that works with most ad networks or serve your own ads as well as a new interstitial page system to drive clicks to a phone number/call center, or email opt in for more info. Not everyone has a good mobile browsing experience, so why force them to a web page that does not render. Take a look at our one for Travelocity Business. Mobile Travelers Rejoice!

Social Networks:
Whether it was for ABC, Widmer, Justin Timberlake and HBO, the Seattle Seahawks or some new start ups; we are nailing the social network using our partner KickApps. We have also built some custom solutions for Wacom, Konami and MatchPoint. These niche communities are much more focused and powerful than the mass community sites. And people are very happy to join in and opt in. These people are more apt to want to interact on a daily or weekly basis vs how they might with a standard web site for a company or brand. Gathering like minds and opening up the channels works wonders to grow a list and grow a community.

Don’t Forget the Basics
We also want to help you to focus on the basics of email for 2008.

List Hygiene: In some recent studies we have been doing we are finding the majority of deliverability issues are stemming from list hygiene and bad email addresses that people are not cleaning off thier list. Make this a focus, or ask us to help manually clean your list. It is a tedious process but it opens up some other ways to engage with those that have not been reading as well as email addresses that you should retire all together. Stop knockling if they aren’t home.

Email Design: Let’s freshen up your look. Let’s create a series of email looks you can use to keep the program moving forward and engaging. And besides you have been sending that same old thing for at least a year now.

Rendering Testing: Do you know how your email looks in all the email clients? I bet you don’t.

Just some ideas to create a spark with you in 08.

Hello Brooklyn, or maybe Mid Town NYC. After 6 months in the planning we are happy to announce that our NYC office is open and ready for business. After reviewing our client base this past year and also our inboxes to see where we could provide the most help, we found that we needed a full time east coast presence. And is there really any place to be on the east coast besides Manhattan?

Chris Masagatani for our Portland office was promoted to a Director level role and is tasked with being there for you and growing the NYC office. Many of us are now catching the red eye once a month to jump into the city for a few days and meet with clients for campaign and strategy planning.

We are currently making our home at 23rd and Park Ave, but are eying some other digs a few blocks from there that will allow us better room to grow out a full team.

If you are in the city and want to set up time to meet Chris, take him to drinks (okay maybe lunch if you must), or learn more about eROI in time zone sensitive and possibly in person meeting… let us know.

We wanted to share a recap of a campaign we just wrapped up this week that started in the month of December. Yeah, December, great month for a campaign right? Well actually even with all the noise in the retail channels it was a perfect time to make an impact with an idea that a large community was not expecting.

But for a daily campaign over a 2 week period of time? Is it going to have a frequency problem when this brand has NEVER emailed on a daily basis for an extended period of time? Would the participation be low based on the fact that they have never had a community site let alone a community campaign?

eROI did their homework in advanced because we nailed this one, drove interaction and even set the ground work for a year round social media community of artists and designers that we are brainstorming on as I type this.

Learn about the Power of the Pens and how email drove record results and built a community in our latest case study release. And take note of our new case study layout and design, it sure is pretty. Love any feedback you have on it.

I subscribe to over 20 auto brand email newsletters to see what they are doing on the large scale. And from what I have learned, no one is perfect. Even a great brand like Mercedes Benz drops the ball from time to time. As an owner, I thought this was a good email. Cross selling me on some items I might be interested in for my car. Well as I dug deeper in the content (which as 500 pixels wide and over 1600 deep, what email clients are they targeting?) I was shocked to see that there were not any links I could use to drive deeper into a product site and get info and make a purchasing decision.

Missed opportunity, but without failure there are not any lessons to learn from. Fail Harder….

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Here are some thoughts from the Blue Hornet team for 2008.

1. What is in store for large BRAND marketing using email and what opportunities and challenges exist for major brands?

Brand marketing via email will be all about building and fostering relationships and loyalty. Brands have the opportunity to do this by:
a) Actively managing their online brand reputation. Tools are emerging to make this process easier and more effective.
b) Brand marketing has attempted use email to focus on lifecycle opportunities, but they’ve either focused too narrowly on consumer life events (ie: making generalizations about baby boomers or new parents),
or they’ve tried to squeeze consumers into a mold that works in terms of their own product lifecycle (using email to sell as much as possible as soon as possible). 2008 will provide brands new opportunities to
centralize their customer transactional and behavioral data, which will help them make true lifecycle marketing a reality–understanding and predicting when a customer is more likely to buy or engage with a brand, then being there with the right message at the right time.

2. What should small to mid size businesses be doing to make their programs more successful and what resources should they dedicate to it?

Small and mid-market emailers still need to focus on improving list acquisition and hygiene efforts.

3. How will consumers have mind shift to email campaigns and subscriptions as they become more astute as consumers and are more conditioned to email they get?

Consumers will continue to approach their inbox with distrust and apprehension. As long as online marketers’ “strategy” centers around increasing message frequency without targeting their emails and building the relationship component of their email marketing program, consumers will ignore, delete, unsubscribe, or report emails as spam–whether they opted in to the program or not. So in addition to advanced segmentation, targeting, and respectful sending practices, ongoing adoption of authentication standards will be critical.

Thanks to the Blue Hornet Team for weighing in.

I was a little shocked to see this service roll out from a domain registrar, but then again it is GoDaddy. They like to make waves.

But releasing an email engine that is so cheap it is only going to allow the 1000s of people with zero knowledge or understanding of compliance to start dropping email campaigns and ruin the pool. Hey look is that a Baby Ruth the Daddy just dropped in the deep end? Kids, out of the pool.

This seems like an major issue to me to give anyone the power to load a list and send it for $7.99. Come on now, who was in charge of this genius decision?

Here is the service:
https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/blazers/cb_landing.asp?isc=cjcdom001t&ci=8898

It is definitely compelling for joe website owner but is it what the world needs? Giving anyone the ability that bought a domain for $3.99 an email engine ready to blast, and I mean blast, emails is dangerous and will end up ruining the IPs they use and most likely really tick off the ISPs and system admins.

Regardless, if you scroll down to the feature tabs, there is a neat way to “see it in action” and get yourself mailed from the godaddy platform different message types.

They are SO BAD. And the opt out link is a mailto: abuse@godaddy.com. Is that an opt out link or a way to file a complaint?

I think your Super Bowl ad this year should be a shot of you in the gray bar hotel or having coffee with the FTC.

I am not sure where you are at today when you read this… but it is 39 degrees and rainy here in Portland today. The only thing I have keeping me going is the promise of San Diego in 6 weeks for the EEC Email Marketing Conference. If you have not yet made plans, get on them. The panels are great, the registrants so far are amazing and it is going to be WARM. Can you say booze cruise? That should be enough to make you take some action.

And if not a little gift from me to you might do the trick:

Here are you secret discount codes:
“EVIP” and share however you would like with anyone else in email marketing -it gets you $200 off.

Use it here
http://www.the-dma.org/conferences/emailevolution08/

Hope to see you there!

One of our clients recently sent out an email to let the subscribers help them clean up their email lists. I applaud this action as too many marketers use the total subscriber number as a metric to live and breath by and not the real one to measure. Who wants your email and who will be your most valuable subscriber.

If you are to segment as they did on opens, reads, clicks and conversions over a period of time (I often use a 6 month time frame, depending on how many campaigns you are sending) and then target those that are inactive or less active with an email like this, you will get the response you need to cull the list.

When your lists are healthier, then your campaigns will perform better.

We typically take those that have no action on a campaign like this and move them to an inactive list which then takes a less frequent and different approach with the Customer Lifecycle Value process.

It is a new year, and time for some pre-spring house cleaning of your lists. Ready to take the challenge? I hope so.

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Having some pretty good filters on our internal email system, I am often entertained and interested when one slips into the inbox. It is actually a good learning experience for me to open the email headers and take a look at how our systems filtered the email and why it let it in.

This one in particular made me laugh as it was complete spam, why would I opt in to TRUE and why would take up so much email real estate at the footer to tell me how compliant they are. When I see this it always tells me that they are just trying to cover their asses with those that might get this and not be sure.

Listen, spam is spam when someone thinks it is spam. Legally we know what spam is, but after many years in this industry we know that no matter what anyone can mentally make that call and you have to defend the opt in with the ISPs. Even when you have a closed loop, time stamp, double opt in, date stamp, web page stamp and 2 years of email campaign data on someone, they can file a complaint.

Lucky for you TRUE I believe in email karma and just deal with them with the delete and filter training buttons. Still makes me laugh that maybe sex changes the perception of spam.

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Stefan Pollard, Director of Consulting Services, EmailLabs

1. What is in store for large BRAND marketing using email and what opportunities and challenges exist for major brands?
Most major brands will continue to move slowly and attempt to go for reach and quantity over segmentation and quality. There simply isn’t enough mindshare with major brands for them to devote serious attention to the proper use of email as a communication channel vs. a broadcast medium. Consumers will continue to tire of “this weeks ad specials” and engagement levels will continue to decline.

Delivery will continue to be the major challenge as ISP’s place increased restrictions on large volumes of non-responsive email and reputation factors driven by consumer complaints. Eventually the downward pressure of delivery and decreased success will drive the marketer to seek professional help (consultants, agencies, educational webinars or conferences).

Some more progressive brands will continue to incorporate web analytics into their email programs and develop improved auto-responder campaigns that move beyond the transactional recipient or abandoned shopping cart.

2. What should small to mid size businesses be doing to make their programs more successful and what resources should they dedicate to it?

This group is more flexible and has tighter budgets. Small changes in performance are much more quickly noticed and gain higher priority attention. As such, the move to more integrated programs with Blogs, RSS, and Email all working together appeals greatly to this group.

Challenges come from the pressure to grow quickly – usually forcing mistakes by assuming permission, purchasing lists, bad co-registration partners, etc.

3. How will consumers have mind shift to email campaigns and subscriptions as they become more astute as consumers and are more conditioned to email they get?

Consumers will continue to experience inbox overload and continue to be discriminating over what belongs in their inbox. More tools for filtering or blocking, including disposable email addresses will increase consumer control. Inbox placement is a privilege that will be bestowed on only the most relevant and desired messages.

More “alert” style messages will be received both in inboxes and on mobile clients that drive the consumer out of the email client and back into the web interface of their favorite social network.

4. How will technology change for marketers?
Use the e-mail marketing platform as the basis for an interactive company – stressing a complete digital dialog that blends channels together with better integration. Shameless plug for our newly launched HQ product goes here.

No more will email be a stand alone tool, it will work seamlessly with CMS tools, SEO, Web Analytics, RSS, etc. Allowing the average marketer to better understand the “digital dialogue” and talk with consumers in the platform of their choice.

5. How will technology change for consumers?
ISP and email clients will continue to create more advertising opportunities, while providing the consumer the ability to control who they wish to let advertise to them. More education will be stressed over how to recognize wanted information from unwanted and how to filter it. Conversations will not stay in the inbox, but rather move seamlessly between web, client, phone. More multi-channel options will be provided for consumers.