The Email Wars

Do you ever stop and pause to think about how much time YOU spend on managing your email inbox? I know that I deal with between 300 and 600 emails a day. Yikes that is a scary number. Sure many of these are junk and ones that do not require any action on my part, but let’s turn the lens on our subscribers. Just how much time does the average consumer spend on managing, processing and reading email? 

As I do not have any hard figures around this number as it exists today I took a look at a program I use that measures what applications I use on my laptop on a daily and weekly basis. Scarily enough over 40% of my time each week is spent in and around the inbox. Wow I need an intervention. 

So what about the subscribers that we are all trying to target better, be more relevant to, and grab the brand mindshare of our products and services? Do they have time? And if they do are your messages standing out during the barrage of daily email triage that they are waging as well? I think taking this into consideration might help you to think more about how, when and what you are sending. Think in terms of your subscribers and not your programs. 

Now I am sure that most of them are not like us. But many of them have their own lives, jobs and issues to deal with. So one campaign is not going to make you hit your goals. But dropping campaigns over time (I like the number 3 for a messaging metric myself) with a few touches that are relevant based on behavior might make the difference in this busy environment. 

Funny but back in the day we named the company that is now an interactive marketing agency eROI, emailROI as this was our first product. Did you know how we came up with the name? Well it was a tag line based on the French word “le roi” meaning the KING with the whole ROI thing out there. We knew back then that email marketing is king and not going to be dethroned no matter what was next out there. 

Over and over again people have tried to attack email in hopes of shifting people to the next “trend” in communications. Let me tell you this, email is not a trend, unless you consider the chart released from Social Media company ShareThis that only shows it as the leader in communication percentages. So if being a leader is a trend… sign me up to drink the punch. 

CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE THE FULL CHART LARGER

Read the whole study at the ShareThis Blog

Sure is was a funny sophmoric joke, but people that mess with email marketers data with false names, fake names, friends names, or my favorite asdf@asdf.com (look at your keyboard) make our jobs hard. Now to get some mileage out of you and your buddies getting emails from a brand or person that are dynamically loaded with the fake name you opted in with is fine in your inner circles. But placing your “joke” out there about how you loaded false data into an opt in form is crap. 

When you do this do you realize how many hours a year the marketing and email marketing industry is spending to clean out crap like this? These data points go into our CRMs, our ecom sites, our lead capture systems and more. And to top this off data that is bogus can cause us deliverability issues as ISPs that we all try so hard to avoid. Do us a favor, if you want something, sign up for it with real info, if you want to streak the quad, do it on your own site. 

Now Ken you are a persona in our space, and sure you got a joke out of this. Hell I do some pretty odd things myself, but data integrity is everything to our industry and to me this is insulting to us and not funny. 

I think that as someone that covers the industry and espouses the things that make us strong, tear us down, threaten our industry, and lift us up… you of all people should be helping us out and not hurting us.

Here is the article from Frank the Tank Magill. Enjoy your weekend at Bed, Bath, Beyond.

We came up with the idea of trying out the horizontal email technique with one of our clients, Zinio. We thought that as a company that is showing how digital magazines are different, that we wanted them to challenge how emails were read, just like how magazines are read. We have seen 4 examples of this in the past and heard great things from folks that did it for Coors, FHM, Diesel and a luggage company, so why not give it a try. 

So far it has performed well and as the list grows we will watch to see how it works out. Now this being said, we did make a standard back up email layout just in case it went the other way. Well luck was on our side. 

My thoughts are why not challenge the medium. Why not make something stand out that not only grabs the readers attention, makes them pause to look at it, and if it works see if the media picks it up. Well all three things happened. 

So what is next? We will see as the months go on. We are always up to try something different. Are you?

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I at one time subscribed to this email, but it just was not relevant all the time. And what was an initial turn off to me as a web marketer is that it was by invitation only for a newsletter. It is not that cool to demand a velvet rope. Here is the EXACT copy on their site “UrbanDaddy is an exclusive, daily email magazine devoted to keeping you in the know.”

What I found to be interesting is that Ad Age is covering email marketing. I guess in light of the purchase of Ideal Bite and Daily Candy it makes sense. But here is one we love that I think you should keep your eyes on, the BeThree Daily email.

Here is an audio podcast from Ad Age about the daily email and it’s success.

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Return Path’s Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report

Return Path recently released its  Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Here is George Bilbrey’s high level take on what they found:

Most of the servers sending email shouldn’t be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were legitimate, well-configured, static email servers. It’s important to point out that this doesn’t speak at all to the quality of the messages from those servers - lots of horrible spammers know how to configure a mail server. The other 80% of the mail is coming from servers that are either identifiably bad or unidentifiable and probably bad. No wonder ISPs and other large receivers feel besieged. 

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I am sharing this campaign with you a little prematurely. Now I am not saying that this campaign has not gone out and did blow away the long running subscription control by a double digit factor, but it is getting a full campaign case study written up now. It will be out soon with all the details, but want I wanted to focus on was the slight factor that changed the response rate. 

When this creative was first passed by my desk I had to stop and think about it a little bit. How was it different from what was sent out prior? What would tell people what to do and would that effort beat that of ones prior? The whole idea of this campaign was to drive subscriptions and we did not want it to make people think of anything else besides the images and the value of having a print subscription. We loaded it up into an inbox to see how it displayed. Did it drive the eyes to the action. Did it convey value and on top of that did it make me want to get a subscription. Well it was close.

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No this is not a study about what the top use of word choices are in email marketing and subject lines. What this is about is Day Two of the Obama/Biden Campaign and their email marketing Suckiness. Did Biden’s team take over at 9pm PST on Friday and take the internet away from Team Obama? 

So first they missed the alert that they would control all the information stemming on the VP choice. FAIL. Now they are sending an email From “Joe Biden” (Note from info@barackobama.com so much for best practices) with the first time subject line of “Hello”. Weak, yes. Powerful, no. Expected, not at all. How about Introducing the next VP of the United States, Joe Biden OR from Barack with “Meet Joe Biden” if you want to keep it relevant and short. 

I don’t know if I am over thinking this but with the 206 emails I have got (yes you do the math on email frequency) since opting in to the Barack Obama campaign June 27th, 2007… this might be the weakest outreach. Right after the one yesterday telling me I could now get a car magnet for the campaign. I hate to sound jaded, really I do, but the voice in email of this campaign and the outreach is going south. They need to tighten up the reigns and head towards the finish line in a blaze of glory driving the vote, not the stickers, hats, t-shirts etc of the Barack-economy. 

And I have to end on this note… “Goodbye”. 

I found an interesting string about Gmail possibly getting a Trends system for analyzing your email similar to the Google Reader system. It has legs to be an interesting tool that not only users but email marketers might find a good use for. With so many email software systems I have seen falling short of being able to paint the full picture of your campaign history in order for you to easily find the trends of your campaigns (best day of the week to email, when you typically send email, when you email arrives at the inbox etc), this might be something others could use for email campaign strategy and analysis.

Imagine if you could harness the power of Gmail to start campaign frequency analysis of your campaigns, those of you competition or any other trend you are tracking. Seems from the post that it might be possible to do yourself now using the Google gmail IMAP structure. Now I am fairly smart, but I think that this might be beyond my skill set. 

Read the full post on RWW

So much was made these past two week about the strategy of Barack Obama using email and sms to alert those following the campaign and supporting the campaign to learn about the VP he selected FIRST by these two methods. So what happened late friday night when the news was released to the world? 

Well I was out that night, but learned of it first not by email or SMS from his campaign, but from Twitter, websites and friends that the announcement had been made. Heck the news channels even had it before anyone go the SMS or the email letting them know that the choice had been made. 

Others noticed this as well: 

“Word of Obama’s decision leaked out hours before his campaign was scheduled to inform supporters via text and e-mail messages, and hours after informing two other top contenders for the vice presidential nomination – Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia – that they had not been chosen.”

So the email finally arrived in the AM on Saturday after 7am. I have attached it below for two reasons. 

1. The promise made across the web was that you would know FIRST by signing up and opting in. And yet we knew from more sources besides those two 12 hours earlier.

2. The email I thought would include video a photo and some excitement from his staff since this announcement was so hyped and so media hyped for so long. What a let down to just get this HTML text email. 

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The Challenges with email and a lack of email standards across all the inboxes is that from time to time we can experience what we term an email blow out. What is an email blow out? Well is it quite simple. When you design an email there is the opportunity for it to hit an email client or inbox and go to hell in a hand basket. What you thought you might have designed has an issue you did not design for and will cause a table, a tag or an image to throw a wrench into the works and kill your formatting. 

What went wrong here? Well I am quite sure that it was a combination of a table and data feed error. I get this campaign every week and it has not had this issue ever before. What it looks to me what occurred is that the data being pulled from the CRM, CMS, or RSS feed had a character in it that did not play well with the formatting that this automated email template was prepared to handle. 

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I am not sure how many of you look at the spam emails you get, but I would wager that you all take a peek from time to time. I could be wrong, but they amuse the hell out of me. Not for the fact that they are so unstoppable but that they are so ridiculous. I saw this one today, shield your eyes if you are afraid of BAD emails, and I had to share it. Sorry if you are offended in any way but I had to tell you why. 

First: Look at the entire email header. The From line is completely inconsistent, the subject line is that of a pop star, the to line is to someone that does not even exist at this honey pot email address we have set up, and what the hell is that URL they spoof it coming from? Wouldn’t this stop you right there? Well maybe you but I have to look sometimes. 

Second: There is an attachment. When is the last time you saw an email marketing campaign that was legit and professionally done with an attachment? Warning… yes. 

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Microsoft has launched a new add on that in Outlook 2007 can add some functionality to email priority scoring while at the same time give you a little more control over your time and inbox management. Why do I find this newsworthy to share with email marketers? Well I think that this could have an impact on how people get, read and respond to email. More importantly will it change the way that office workers and users of Outlook 2007 read and act on email marketing campaigns? It is way too early to know yet, but worth keeping on the radar. 

Example: What if your marketing emails and newsletters are giving a lower priority to other emails, are shoved down in the importance scale and left unchecked? Or even worse just mass deleted? Well this bodes well for office productivity but not for your campaigns. SO in thinking about this from a high and early level we should think about the importance of the relationship, how people are interacting and responding to our emails and take the subject line to a new level of importance in our campaign planning. 

How will this impact your campaigns? Or will it? That is yet to be known or determined, but if this application has some traction we might need to think about it more in our email marketing efforts and planning.

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I saw the post this past week Tamara and need to think about it as many of the blogs that you listed are some of the same on my radar. SO I will take a look and see if they will pass the baton as you have to me. Hopefully we can find a few new email marketing blogs that we might not know about. I often use your shared aggregator page to review the news at the end of the day in the industry. 

And by the way great new profile avatar (weird when I use that phrase, feel so geeky and dirty) on your Twitter Profile. I need to hire that artist to do one for me. But it needs to still hold a baseball bat. That is how I roll. 

So here is the list….

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Here it is… another great survey on email marketing and email marketer from eROI. Now this one is juicy as well as good looking. I know I am a little biased, but I love the design work our team is doing. Also be on the look for new case studies coming out on Email Design, Campaign Sites, Publishing Client Campaigns, and new methods of email marketing that are delivering ROI in social media.

Here is what you will get in the new study:

We examine all the elements of a great email, and show where email marketers are hitting (and missing) opportunities to increase deliverability, opens, clicks and conversions. We uncover rising trends and current opportunities. How do your email marketing campaigns need to evolve to take advantage?

Download our presentation of the full results!