The Email Wars

I am not sure if you often look at the adwords surrounding your emails in your Gmail box but this one stood out. I saw a post about in in an advertising blog that caught my eye as it was a clever use of the interview with Michelle Obama last week when she stated that she shopped online and her outfit was from JCrew. 

So being smart marketers, or having a smart media buying agency working with them, they bought that keyword (which I bet cost a pretty penny) and used it in the inbox. It is a good example of getting smarter around email marketing and using the social media and behavioral lift that natural or organic terms and search can give you in the inbox. 

I have not seen that many clever campaigns yet but this one is a great example of thinking about the inbox and how you can leverage word of mouth to drive your conversions around relevant and timely content. 

Nice work!

Click on the image to see it full size.

I can’t stop spreading the great work that the NYC eROI office is doing with our clients.

And Chris there takes it to the next level with giving us weekly treats on his life, weeks, meetings, and great campaigns he sees. He followed the Diesel campaign from email, to street, to event the other week and put together some great footage of it all. 

This week is gives us a treat about the things going on this week, and things we are all thinking about. The great ideas and work he shows us week after week makes us so happy to have him as part of the team and working with our clients there. Want to meet him? Let us know.

See you in NYC this week after London Chris.

The Freakout from Christopher Masagatani on Vimeo.

In London? Want to meet up with some email marketing leaders? DMA UK Nov 4th.

I have the pleasure of being the keynote speaker at this event I am am very excited to be speaking with such a great caliber of email marketers. I just need to refine my deck for the event so that I can be somewhat “inspirational” as that is what I am told I should be. I am a little nervous as to how my ideas and humor will go over as I have not spoken in England before. I hope that if you are in London you find time to join us at the event. I am only there for 3 days total but would love to meet anyone that has time for a beer. I could be enticed to stay a few extra days if you want to talk business…. hint hint.

What I am really excited about is I will get to hear many of these great speakers from Europe that I hope to learn a lot from. There are some differences in strategies that might give me some new ideas for email marketing campaign execution.

See the line up of great speakers from around the world on the next page.

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I subscribe to newsletters from all around the world to watch for ideas, trends and tactics that we might not be using over here in the USA. I am constantly wondering when I get this email from a publisher in the UK as to why they always go so narrow. It is less than 500 pixels wide and over 700 pixels long. 

We always try to focus on using the majority of the preview pane to give us the most impact in the space that we know most often will be seen in the preview pane. So this one always throws me for a loop as it seems that they go the opposite way with their layouts. I tried to think as to why they go narrow. Could it be that they have stats from their users that they majority of them (they might have surveyed) are reading in a side preview pane? Could it be that they are designing of mobile clients more in England and they think that this layout works better? I am truly not sure. 

I would love to hear some thoughts from those of you that read this blog from across the pond as you might have some insights to share with us. 

As always you can click on the image above to see it in full screen. 

Thanks for the help.

For years I have seen most of us using small fonts in our email marketing campaigns. Now I know we do this for many reasons. We have a lot to say in a small space. (often times too much to say) We have email templates that are set up to use the same size fonts that we expect to get in email. We think that using the same size font in our emails as we use on a web page is right. 

Now all of the above MIGHT be right, but until I got this email I never thought too much about it. Really what made sense to me was just how easy it was to read when it was so big. It gave me this idea, why not start making the most important part of the email the largest font? If I want it to be easily read, quickly scannable and make an impact why not go BIG? 

I am not thinking that 12pt font is the right way, but the conditioned way that we are all used to. This email has me considering trying it a few times to see what happens. Now don’t let me make you think that a font this big should be an image silly rabbits, but font should be text. 

As an email marketer and an ESP I am always looking at how other ESPs append the footer of an email. So many people HATE having any other brand in their footer around their email, and heck I don’t blame them. Why would I want someone else’s brand on my email campaign. Email does help with branding no matter how many articles of conversations I have with other people. 

But what struck me about this footer was the addition of “Report Abuse” in it. I had to think about it for a few minutes as it felt as if they are asking someone to press it and cause a delivery issue with that IP address. But then I looked a little closer. In essence it is an internal ESP feedback loop that channels the report back to the ESP and, I assume, channels that as a red flag to either their deliverability team or automatically suppresses that address in their account from ever being sent. 

Now if it works in this way I think it is a great idea. Why not ASK them to keep the report in your ecosystem rather than driving it out to the ISP? Right? If you can keep your abuse reports in your own backyard it might just help with keeping your lists clean and your IP reputation even cleaner. 

I am going to test it in some upcoming campaigns to see if it has that impact.

I was forwarded this email from a friend (yes people still forward emails and make them viral) and I was amused at how simple it was. Now typically I would have not thought much about this email IF I was to have found it in my inbox and even might have thought that it was junk or spam. But it was compelling enough to make me want to see what it was all about since someone took the time to send it to me.

Now the address bar is going to give it away a little bit, but you should check it out. Pretty interesting new site and the email directly corresponds to the landing page once the flash loads. So what this showed me is trying something different might at times be good idea. And If you are an eROI Resource Center subscriber or newsletter subscriber you will find that we do different all the time in our creative, copy, subject lines and campaigns. If you have not signed up, you might want to just for the sheer fun we have.

MarketingVox and others seem to think so. And if they are batching and blasting at the increased rates that they report then I think that these marketers are shooting themselves in the foot. I always hate when I get email with the gender focus wrong, emails more than 2 times a week from a brand (unless it is a driven campaign that depends on telling me more of the story each day.

Have these marketers shown that if they send out to everyone as many times as they can produce an email that it actually lifts sales and does not either negatively impact the brand or cause too much list churn?

“In a survey of 174 online retailers, Internet Retailer found nearly half increased the number of monthly emails sent, compared to last year. The DMA reports an 8% increase in the number of emails that stores sent for the week ending October 17, compared to the same week a year earlier.

All told, Forrester forecasts over 158 billion marketing emails will be sent this year — expected to increase 63%, to 258 billion in 2013. As volume rises, consumers seek new ways to evade the wave of what they consider to be spam.

The problem, in part, is relevance. “I am a 32-year-old guy who lives in an urban area with no kids,” Porter said. “In other words, I don’t need blouses, high heels, or kid’s juice boxes.”

Less than 20% of retailer emails are tailored to consumers’ individual needs, even though targeted messages are easier to produce than they were a handful of years ago, says VP Stephanie Miller of market development at Return Path.

But Miller also believes this lazy attitude will evolve, because merely increasing email frequency won’t work in an environment this noisy.”

So you have your email campaign designed. You have sorted your lists to target them with the right offers, images, copy and links. You have made more changes and refinements in your testing and pre-testing, but have you written the best performing subject line yet? And HOW important is it? 

Well IMHO in light of the Sender Name of the email the Subject Line is the second most important. WHY you might think? Well because it is either the first or second thing that we read in the email inbox before making our decision to move forward with an open or send it to the trash. 

Here are my thoughts:

1. Does it inform me or tell me what to expect?

2. Does it make me want to find out what is next? 

3. Is it clear and succinct? 

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Many traditional retailers know that ecommerce is important. Many others still want to help the channel and drive sales to the physical stores. This is great on both sides when an email campaign in a retail situation can give the space in an email to make it actionable at either destination. Online or Offline.

I had the opportunity to talk with two people at Nike this past week and learned more about the channel and how the channel is important to support, but at the same time a brand that sells anything MUST have a retail store online OR it actually erodes the brand credibility. What I mean by this is IF Nike.com did not actually have ecommerce and allow you to shop their products they have found that it would actually impact the sales that their channel partners/retailers do in online sales. Funny finding huh?

Also of interest were the numbers which you might find surprising in total sales that the ecom store for Nike drives. Ready… wait for it… wait for it… less than 1.5% percent of total global sales. Now this number is large, make no doubt of that in the case of Nike, but yet it is a little shocking. Less than 1.5%? Wow. I would have wagered that over 5-7% at least. But then Nike did not build their business to be a consumer direct model, but built all design, manufacturing and distribution to handle the large channel sales. 

Back to the email. This email from J Crew gives you a scannable coupon that you can print and take into the store. Me, believe it or not, I am not a large online shopper unless I am shopping for others. I like to still go into the stores and check things out in person. I find it odd for a person like myself that I live online yet prefer to shop offline. I am sure that I am not all that unique, but this email gives me choices and I like choices. Do you?

Good post from the AOL Postmaster. 

Every year there seems to be a topic or a phrase that seems to take over the anti-spam industry.  This year, that topic is reputation.  What is IP reputation?  How do ISPs calculate it, and what do they do with it? 

Well, I can’t begin to answer that question for every ISP out there, but I can give you some idea how AOL calculates IP reputation and what we do with it.  This information is also available on a new page on our website called “IP Reputation, the Whitelist, and Inbox Delivery at AOL”.

If you are new to the idea of IP reputation, I hope this answers some of your questions. 

Read the rest of this post

Jeff Mills @EROI has a great article in iMedia today. Give it a read. 

Maximize your clicks and conversions by following these guidelines for smarter use of your email’s pre-header and snippet text.

It’s time to take another look at how you’re using that very first line of your email. As your recipients are getting bombarded with (and deleting) more and more messages, this small but valuable section of your email marketing pieces can be the deciding factor in whether your message makes it to your intended audience.

The snippet text displays in the pre-header, which is typically the first line of an email above the main copy or graphical content. It is also the very first sentence in a text-only or mobile email (e.g., on a BlackBerry). Email marketers now recognize this as must-use space when it comes to their email campaigns, but just using it isn’t enough to maximize its potential. You can improve email campaign stats even more by rethinking how you are using this space…..

Read the Full Article on iMedia

Google on Thursday announced that it has launched Gmail mobile 2.0 for J2ME-supported devices like the Nokia N95, as well as BlackBerry phones. According to a Gmail engineer, the focus in the second iteration of the popular email client was to produce a faster and more reliable experience for users.

According to Google, the new mobile Gmail offers faster performance and smoother scrolling with no freezing. Engineers also added multiple account management functionality into the software, which allows users with multiple email accounts to switch back and forth without using different apps to access messages. Gmail mobile 2.0 offers the option to save multiple email drafts in the phone and adds shortcut keys that allow users with phones equipped with QWERTY keyboards to press ‘z’ to undo, ‘k’ to go to a newer conversation, and ‘j’ to go to an older conversation.

As an added bonus for those who won’t find themselves in signal range, Gmail mobile 2.0 boasts offline support and lets users compose and read email when there is no signal. All outgoing messages will be saved in the outbox and sent automatically when coverage is restored.

Gmail mobile 2.0 is available now and can be downloaded by accessing Google’s mobile page.

AOL has updated its webmail application to include a set of plugins that allow users to quickly access current news topics as well as third party services, most notably Yahoo Mail. Historically portals have been reluctant to give users access to their messages on other services, but they have been recently been opening up (which makes sense, given that they want to be a one-stop hub for all of your internet needs). Last month AOL gave users access to both their Yahoo and Gmail accounts from its homepage, and is now integrating the features into its main webmail client (Gmail hasn’t been integrated there yet, but it’s on the way).

The move is another step in AOL’s attempt to prove that it is no longer a walled garden. Unfortunately Yahoo’s API handicaps how useful the feature is, as its integration is pretty clunky – instead of pulling in your messages and displaying them in AOL’s webmail interface, each message is actually a link to the Yahoo webmail client that opens in a new browser window.

Read more

Could this be due to the Obamaization of email marketing and “listening” and “talking” using email and new media? Does the iPhone give these folks more than they need? Really when was the past time your Senator dropped you an email back? 

News from The Hill

And you were worried the U.S. Congress was just throwing your money around! Rest assured, weary taxpayers. Your elected representatives in Washington, fresh off a $700 billion bailout package for Wall Street firms, is set to invest what little money of yours is left into something that will truly strengthen the union: iPhones for everyone!

Well, not everyone, just everyone in Congress. The congressional cell phone of choice since 2001 is the Blackberry, and switching to a new device will mean a costly reconfiguring of the House and Senate e-mail system — never mind the cost of the phones themselves. And we’re not just talking elected officials here — more than 8,000 Blackberries are in use once you count Congressional aides and others who work on the Hill. 

But it’s not like they don’t have a good reason for considering the switch: “The reason we’re trying them out is because we heard a lot of people wanted the option to have them,” said Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the Chief Administrative Office. – Read the whole story…