It is cool to see how Comcast is sharing how your email delivery works better with a higher Sender Score rating. We watch our IP Sender Scores all day long using ReturnPath and I love to see this sort of ISP transparency. I would hope that more ISPs could share how this impacts email delivery in 2009.
It just goes to prove that email reputation and best practices do make a difference.
Yahoo!7 in Australia has launched the new Yahoo inbox as Think Outside The Inbox. It shows how easy it isto have your friends upfront and the rest – well elsewhere. As Australia is struggling with broadband this is cool to see a video ad that pushes them.
A cowboy tells you all about it in a video.
Well the holidays are almost here. Many of you have been burning the midnight oil to get your email campaigns together, tested, sent, and it might have felt like the “shampoo effect” at at time (lather, rinse, repeat) but you made it. And yes you will get a few days to hunker down and enjoy some time away from the glowing screen… OR will you.
Many of you are just now gearing up for the rush to target the shoppers on Christmas day or the days following. So either way we wanted to give you something to enjoy. If you are not already a subscriber to our email newsletter, but a reader of this blog… here is a treat from us to enjoy at your holiday party, in the car, on your iPod or even while cranking out that next stellar, revenue generating campaign.
I had to use that title for this post as I know that many of you out there are always jaded when it comes to list rental campaigns. Now I am not talking about buying lists, but partnering with other like brands or list managers that have double opt in lists where they have allowed subscribers to opt in for emails from like or relevant brands.
Now here are 4 reasons why I dislike them (yes I changed my mind from hate).
1. They often will not perform to the expectations. Many brands expect these lists that are so well found and segmented to give them the same reach and performance from their own lists. This will not happen, ever. These are lead generation campaigns and if executed right can drive new subscribers to your lists and even sales/conversions. But don’t expect miracles.
2. They are not from your brand. And they should not be. They should be sent from the brand that has the relationship and contain your offers. Many times they are sent from that brand and the disconnect with the user is bad for all. They can result in more list attrition from the list owner in the end if done wrong.
Sure you have worked hard to build a list. You have plans and goals to grow that list by massive amounts. You have plans on how in 2009 you are going to segment more, get more relevant, look at your offers and frequency so that you perform at top levels.
But what about your subscribers being a catalyst to your plans? Have you taken into consideration how they pass emails to others? How they share opportunities with the click of a Forward button to their own distribution list? We all see it and do it ourselves, but what makes it work? How do you incent this action?
What has emerged at minimum levels at first has now jumped the shark (a thing or program gaining mass market appeal) to become one of the fast growing programs in retail email this year. We have seen the emergence of the “Friends and Family” sales, the employee discount programs, the shop with a friend programs, and the leverage this discount on and offline programs. All of them are great ideas and stand alone work. But what happens when everyone in your brand universe and target markets begin to use them as well? Is there a value or loss of value in these programs?
You took a great job, part of the perks were the 4 weeks of time off you were getting in the package. You had so many plans on how you were going to take advantage of these days to get offline, travel the roads and even just hang lazily around the house. Whatever your plans were seems you forgot them as the year got busier, the business climate changed, more projects were thrown on your plate, and your team had more to do with less time.
In the end you will end the year with days you never took off. Sometimes you can carry them over, other times you have to use or lose those days. Your fault? Maybe. A travel brand like Jet Blue’s opportunity. Yes.
This email landed in my box, as I am sure it did so many other people in the same situation, where it poked fun at the opportunity to book travel when you did not burn your days. Now so many other brands I have seen in this space did not even consider this opportunity, so kudos to Jet Blue for seeing this as an opportunity to connect in a relevant manner as well as find business in it. Not only does it resonate with the audience but it drives business to a hard hit travel environment in the cruise line side of the business.
What I wanted to illustrate with this is that there is always an opportunity in any market or any time of the year. The trick is thinking as a consumer, even like yourself, to identify what those can be.
And we all deserve some time off, whether we take it or not is up to us.
Email Data Source is giving away a trial of their new alerts system. I have seen the past versions and it is a very powerful platform to check across your comp and industries to see what others are sending. So instead of signing up for everyone under the sun and hoping you get a cluttered inbox and even worse yet hope that you are in the segmentation list of all the companies you opt in for… you get a login to view them in a web interface. What a great idea.
For those of you looking for a competitive view you should sign up for a trial account. And if after the beta you want more if it is is an easy cost item to continue in your budgets.
Don’t delay as this offer stands only until Dec 31st, 2008.
From Email Data Source – Overview:
Alerts is a new service from Email Data Source that notifies you when we receive email marketing messages that match the criteria you set. Alerts automatically checks the more than forty thousand email campaigns we process each day, and sends you a digest of the results.
Here are some examples of just a few of the Alerts you can set up:
With the markets in a downturn, which some have now officially called a recession, using a little humor in your emails can go a long way. Especially when you are throwing a party.
For those of you not familiar with the Barbarian Group, who brought us The BK Subservient Chicken viral site and many more, they sent out their holiday party invite to friends, partners, and others to show how they were cutting costs in order to still throw the bash we would expect from them.
Often we see in online and offline business the acquisition of a company by another company. And when this occurs it is not just the change in overall business, or merging of business units… but the switch of email marketing permissions from one brand to another. Now I know that many of you will hammer home that you ONLY gave permission to one brand to email you. I agree with you here, but how does a company go about changing permissions from one brand to another?
The value of the customer and the acquisition does play over to the email list. You can argue this till you are blue in the face, but I can tell you that when someone buys a company they expect that the consumer base is part of that deal. So what to do? How do you properly approach this situation?
I found this occurring in particular with one company that I had subscribed to lately. It was Steve Case’s Revolution Health. Now this company I thought was poised to go big. And maybe they did but in the end they sold/merged the business with another online healthcare/informational portal. Not sure of the overall reasons, but none they less they had to tackle this problem.
With the release of this new book written by Jeanniey Mullen, founder of the eec and David Daniels from Jupiter Research we can all learn more about email marketing and the most important things that we can all focus on to lift our campaigns.
Recently they were interviewed in this podcast by emarketingandCommerce.com.
Even for the most seasoned email marketers there are areas covered in this book that might bode us well to all revisit. And if you have that special someone you need a holiday gift for you should pick this up. We are sharing it with all of our own eROI employees as a place to start when they join our creative services and ESP team. Back to Basics.
Take a Sneak Peek Inside at the first chapter here.
Email Marketing An Hour A Day – (US)
If the idea of starting an email marketing campaign overwhelms you, the authors of Email Marketing: An Hour a Day will introduce you to email marketing basics, demonstrate how to manage details and describe how you can track and measure results. Case studies, step-by-step guides, checklists, quizzes and hands-on tutorials will help you execute an email marketing campaign. Learn advanced tactics including using mobile devices and leveraging social networks.
I think this site will actually let you get it for less in digital format>>
Q4 2008 HOW STUDENTS COMMUNICATE SURVEY RESULTS
Our latest survey uncovers exactly how high school students, college students, and recent college graduates communicate online. 283 high school and college students participated in the study and 29 states were represented.
These survey results reveal eye-opening trends and preferences of this demographic in how it communicates digitally. We also get valuable insight into the effectiveness of marketing messages received through email, and discover areas of opportunity for marketers to connect with this in-demand group.
Students can be an elusive demographic for marketers. From this study, you will learn about a lot of new trends and valuable information about students. You will also learn specific data on which marketing channels will carry and present your message most effectively.
Google has put out an official Gmail gadget for its Google Desktop product, giving users the option to run multiple instances of different Gmail accounts as standalone gadgets. The tool includes several useful Gmail features like keyboard shortcuts, mail, and contact search, along with the option to star messages. Users can also compose messages in a little pop-out window, which keeps them from having to fire up their browser.
The app is currently Windows-only and requires Google Desktop version 5 or higher, leaving Mac and Linux users of Google Desktop out in the cold. Anyone looking to use Amnesty’s Generator program to convert it for other platforms like OS X’s Dashboard are also out of luck, as Google has not offered it as an iGoogle, Web-ready widget.
We are lucky to have the jobs and clients that we do at eROI. Being able not only to work with some of the best clients out there who are working to deliver the best possible email and interactive marketing campaigns to their subscribers, but also to have the control over not only the email but the landing page.
Why is this so important to us? Well often we see email campaigns that go out that direct people to a home page, a already existing lead capture page, or worse, an irrelevant page. Why does this matter? Well if you spend so much time in crafting the message, the list, the timing and the creative to have it land at a page that does not tie the whole experience and subscriber expectation together simply does not guarantee a successful email campaign.
Well it has been one year since we released KillROI into the wild. He has been infiltrating agencies, high rises, corporate offices, and maybe even your office. He has been sitting, waiting, listening, and silently fighting the war on spam and good emails leaving your desk.
We have begun to get reports, via photos, from places that he has been deployed. It has been like a secret mole from the Cold War days being activated by a call to action that only he knows. Yes, it is time. The holiday season bring so much email into our collective inboxes and that might have just been the impetus of his awakening.
I ask you, if you have seen him around your desk, office or in your travels, to capture photos of him like we recently received and send them into us. We need to know of his exploits and his travels.
If you have not found one yet, there are two ways to find out how to have one deployed. First please visit this site to learn about his battle and help him take on the fight. Then drop me a comment on this post and I will reach into the isolation cell (which has been locked since last December) and see if there are still some rumbling around. If I hear from you with a compelling comment, I will attempt to safely ship one of the remaining soldier of goodness to your clutches.
Also, if you are subscribed to our newsletter, then you will learn of his next exploits around December 17th. So subscribe to get the next installment. Trust me… It will be worth it.
What a great day to be in Park City with so many smart people from agencies, ESPs, brands and think tanks. Heck we were even lucky enough to have the lead email marketing strategist from the Obama campaign here to share with us how they used email to be the most important fund raising and organizational engine. Great work on Day One by Mediapost and the volunteer chairs that helped put on Email Insiders this year.
Overall the panels and speakers were great. They covered a lot of topics and took time to make sure to allow the audience to ask all the questions they wanted.
Looking forward to Day Two.
My Notes:
The Obama team uses the 3 M’s: Messaging, Mobilization and Money
Messaging: Strict Messaging Discipline – We followed everything that was said in the press, long term and short term messaging themes. Using email as the vehicle to drive home the points made that day, week or based on an event connected people more to the campaign than any other method.
Early on we learned that email could not only be a useful tool but a powerful vehicle to drive action.
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