The Email Wars

Well it seems that the battle with the watchdogs is not only on the ESPs and clients but also on the ISPs themselves now days. Interesting take on this and wondering how Microsoft and Verizon are going to handle this. Will they shrug it off? Or will they take it seriously as all of us do? 

Microsoft is listed fifth in the Top 10 list of the worst spam service ISPs compiled by Spamhaus.org.

Spammers are advertising links to sites that “peddle fake pharmacy products, porn, and Nigerian 419 scams” on Microsoft’s Live.com and Livefilestore.com sites because they know that the Microsoft sites won’t get blocked by antispam groups, writes Brian Krebs on his Security Fix Blog at the Washington Post.

Spamhaus has been alerting Microsoft to the problem for some time, but to no avail, Richard Cox, Spamhaus’ chief information officer, told Krebs. Other security companies, including McAfee and Marshal, have also been warning about increases in spam and scams on Microsoft-hosted sites.

Read the full article and the comments >>

Over the past 10 years, a once little known brand called Zappos has worked hard to build a company based on the principals of customer service and going the extra mile for customers. I have long been a fan of Zappos and what they have accomplished running at full speed, making decisions, embracing the community and having shipments of shoes at my door steps many mornings when I exit the house and head to work. 

Many have faulted the way in which a now major (on track to do 1 billion in revenue this year) brand had approached email marketing. They took an entirely different approach to the task of driving revenue by instead using engagement and community from the start to build a successful strategy. Many of you that have bought from Zappos in the past have seen the Zappos Digest enter your inbox either daily or weekly, and found it to be filled with all sorts of content from customers about shoes, feet and issues that they want to discuss. Now notice it is not an email about selling shoes… or is it? 

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The twice annual gathering of the Email Insiders is rapidly approaching again. It will be held in Park City, Utah December 7th to the 10th. It is one of the events in the email marketing space that I always look forward to. Now not only because it is where some the great minds of email come together in a Fight Club type of dialogue, but more ideas are advanced and shared at this event than any other event in the email marketing space. 

Here are just a few sessions that I am looking forward to hearing: 

Keynote: Email and Politics – Case Study of the Obama CampaignVoter Advocacy, Social Advocacy and building communities were the keys to Barack Obama’s campaign.  Stephen Geer from the Barack Obama Campaign will talk about the campaign experience and how digital channels were used to build communities, for fundraising and keeping advocates connected during this year’s presidential election.

Stephen Geer, Director of Email and Online Advertising, Obama for America

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Email as a Social Media Tool

As social networks such as Facebook and MySpace continue to grow at mind numbing rates, email marketers are trying to understand the role and relationship of email and social media and networks. This panel will look at real-life examples of how companies are integrating email into social networks, incorporating user-generated content into their emails and leveraging user data from social networks back into their email program – and explore what portends in the future.

Moderator: Loren McDonald, Vice President, Industry Relations, Silverpop

Jay Stevens, VP, Online Marketing, International, MySpace 

Karla Venell, Manager of Database and Email Marketing, General Mills

There is still time to book your flight and head on over. But if you are unable to do so look for daily wrap up posts from me as well as some live Tweeting/Blogging from the email industry leaders.

What do you do with those people on your email list that are not converting? They might read over and over again, yet they are not clicking through and buying from you. I have long been a fan of what we term the “Break Up” email campaign. It is a simple one and very similar to a list cleaning, but when done right it has some humor to engage as well as some steps to re-qualify those on your list either into other programs OR taking them off your list.

Many people ask me “Why would I do this?”. Well the answer is a simple one. If you are emailing people over and over again what you want to tell them and they are not taking actions, it would illustrate that you do not have campaigns that are relevant to them. So by continuing to send them your emails you are just reducing the chances you have to engage and convert them into sales. Now they may be past purchasers and not in market. Dell, the example I am using, sells things that to me are not purchases we make all year long. We buy laptops and desktops and we are good for a while. So you need to have a relevant Customer Life Cycle dialogue set up to find ancillary products of which to sell them OR get them excited to move on a new larger purchase down the road.

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So this week I has Dela Quist’s Study from AlchemyWorx on my brain. I was watching the flood of emails from retailers I have been getting and wondering based on Subject line length ONLY which ones were converting. Tell you the truth, it was all a crap shoot to me. I need to see the data and just making guesses only gets you in trouble. 

What to do? Well I emailed it to Dela and called on him to apply his learnings and knowledge of Subject Lines and conversions and tell me his quick impressions. Here is what I got (and yes he told me I could share it). 

Q: How Does this Subject Line work?

A: It is always difficult to answer a question like that without a clear understanding of what they are trying to achieve opens? clicks? sales online? or sales in store? Or as I can probably guess all of the above which is why I don’t think it is a very good subject line.

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Study Finds Some Top Brand Marketers Are Struggling To Provide Adequate Email Unsubscribe Options

Twenty Percent of Marketers Sent Additional Email Messages To Consumers After Confirming The Person Had Unsubscribed

Twenty percent of top brand marketers sent additional emails to subscribers after confirming an unsubscribe request, Return Path discovered with its new research study titled Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After “Unsubscribe Me.” Eleven percent of the companies studied emailed subscribers more than 10 days after confirming an unsubscribe request – a violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act. Marketers risk impacting their overall email reputation with spam complaints if they have a faulty email unsubscribe process.

Return Path, the leading e-mail deliverability and reputation management company, conducted the study by unsubscribing from the email lists of 45 companies from the retail, consumer goods, travel, and media/entertainment industries. Return Path originally subscribed to these email lists to conduct its Subscriber Experiences study.

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It was interesting to read this from the UK. Really you don’t like video in email? It does not make you click? I would totally be up for testing that one. Instead of asking maybe we should run a test against UK subscribers. I know that video (I use video loosely as in fake video player jumping to the landing page) works a lot in email tactics and people “loves thems somes” videos!

Anyone up for the challenge? Tink from Dot Mailer? Dela from Alchemy Worx? Want to see if we can disprove this? 

The Study:

Social email marketing loses favor with 22% of consumers

Consumers are less likely to respond to social email marketing linked to video, microsites and social networking sites, a new survey shows.

According to the 2008 Email Attitudes Survey from e-Dialogue, 22 per cent of consumers said they are unlikely to respond to social marketing, while just 12 per cent said they would click on messages on sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

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Might be old news, but news none the less. Let’s get on our game guys and get DKIM compliant with ALL ESPs and clients using our ESPs. Not an option. Time to force compliance.

Either mandate DKIM, SenderID and SPF or get out of email marketing services and use. These things are not hard folks and we all need to push our brands and clients into compliance. Are you cool with this AL? Just wanted to check that I pass your litmus test.

Read the AOL News 

Whenever another study comes out everyone has a different take on it. Media loves to create a story don’t they. And in times where we are seeing sales struggle in the asiles and ecom stores we don’t need to erode marketing confidence anymore. 

Open Rates are down! Email is slowing! RSS and 2.0 will kill your programs. Sunday nights are the best night to send emails with colored links! College Students only read SMS in class with subject lines that are less than 4 characters!

Folks, I love the studies and data, but take everything you see with a grain of salt and spend more time looking at your own email marketing programs. This is the time to focus on the 3 Things You Should Be Good At and not what is happening to everyone else. Typically this is the time we are focusing on the end game of the year and marching to the finish line. Stay the course and dive deeper into your results and programs. Not those of your neighbor. FTW (For the WIN)!

Head down. Eye on the Ball. Be the Ball.

Read the eMarketer Article, then return to your focus.

I have seen this email “trick” used over the years as a great ploy to make you think that you are part of a secret insiders only group and that this discount is one that only you are privy to. Not this being said it is a good trick that works. 

If you were to just tell me 30% off it would feel like another ploy to tap my wallet. But when you put it out like this we seem to feel that it is something that we MUST take advantage of. To the typical consumer an insider discount that ONLY the employee gets is a great campaign in the making. 

I love that not only did they make it online but also bar coded it so that you could take it in, use it, pass it to others, print it out and make copies for friends, etc. Well executed and well done. And guess what, you don’t need to get that holiday night and weekend job to get the “employee” discount. Now when it fails is when you do it more than once. If this becomes a once a year deal or even twice a year fine, but you cannot run this promo more than once in the same season. It loses it’s implied value. Sure it might drive some more sales, but you are just making it another couponing event that makes us numb. 

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So often we talk about making sure that we design for the preview pane. Make your actions clear, your creative work, your buttons pop, etc. But what happens when you do it and it works out right, and you don’t follow the above ideas? Well it works out a genius in this case. 

What I loved about this email was that it gave just enough to make me want to open it and see more. I have attached the preview in my email client to first show you what I saw. They below you will see what I saw after I opened it all the way. What makes this so powerful in the preview pane was the FREE part. I had no clue what I was in for for free, but it made me want to know more. WIN. 

The idea behind designing for the preview pane is to make people want to know and read more. Even if it falls out of line with the idea of giving them the actions first, it gives you a little mystery that makes it work for me. And I assume others as well. 

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It is not very often that I see an email that is meant to challenge and deflate the market factors hitting a competitor. Could you imaging a brand like Starbucks using email to say, “Dunkin Donuts Coffee not good enough for you? You should try ours.” I could not fathom a brand using email to build a campaign around the failures of another brand, but maybe that is where the business world is heading now. When their is market share erosion and brand fears just add email to get the word out. 

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If you have ever tried Fat Tire beers you are most likely a fan. But why do some brand kill themselves with bad email marketing. I have long been a subscriber to many beer email lists (for business reasons only I assure you) but these guys kill me. I think I might need to make a charity phone call soon as these emails continue to hurt my good senses each time I get them. 

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I know that the Facebook momentum has gained a ravenous pitch as I see more and more people jumping into it. And not only are they jumping but they are guzzling the addictive life streaming service at a pace that is at times scary. So as the Nigerian email scammers that rose to rapid fame/hatred have found it too. They realize that there is an opportunity to stop using email, as it might be played out, and now are using Facebook to run the same scams. 

Thanks for leaving email to us and jumping on the social media bandwagon. You will not be missed. 

When I get an email that is so beautifully simple it makes me smile. Really I smile. This email was sent to me from the Mini campaign that was IMHO executed so easily that it did a great job. They distilled the information into 3 things. Yes, I love list that are short and 3 is a Magic number. 

This email helped me to know What was going on, Who could participate, and Where those that could take part are located. Now could they have done it different? Sure they could have sent it just to those in the area that are qualified to participate in the event, but why did they not do this? Well to me it has a viral effect with this email. If you were passionate about this idea and knew people in the geographic area that might be candidates for the program then you might be inclined to send it on to those in your address book that could participate. Simple, yes. Genius, yes. Easy, you bet.

When you distill down a program in email into bite sized, relevant information that has clear actionable steps you win. I would wager that this small program (that is a big idea) was forwarded on to many people thus growing their email marketing efforts and reach, with a possibility to grow their qualified list of people that might be future consumers and brand enthusiasts of Mini.

Home Run.