The Email Wars

Today the Email Experience Council announced the five finalists for its first annual Email Performance Award, which recognizes an organization that has created an email marketing campaign that demonstrates the full power of the channel. The winner of the Email Performance Award, which will be selected by the eec’s members, will be presented during the Email Evolution Conference, which will be held February 12-13 at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego.

In alphabetical order, the five finalists for the Email Performance Award are: Accor, AOL, Genentech, REI and Wacom.

For more details on each of them, including copies of their nomination forms and supporting materials, visit the eec’s Email Performance Awards page. Congratulations to the finalists.

Members of the eec can vote for the winner from among the Email Performance Award finalists (see below). Just log into your eec account and follow the instructions. Voting concludes at the end of day on Monday, Jan. 28.

i wonder sometimes how much or how often the entire copy is read in an email. People skim most emails and look for things of interest, or things that look like action. Well so often the thought and time behind the copy writing skills are missed. This is why I wanted to share this one with you. We are on the board of the Portland Advertising Federation, the oldest ad club in the US (over 100 years, yeah that is a long time) and we are getting ready for the annual Rosey Awards in November where we gather, drink, award, recognized and celebrate the creative and the WORK that drives all of us to do better work.

I love the copy that has been written for the emails promoting the Roseys this year. But I wonder how many people took the time to read it. If you read you can see that there are penalties for not reading the whole email or even thinking of deleting it or adding it to your junk box.

Should we maybe learn from this and add this type of disclaimer to all of our emails? Would be fun to try.

If you are in Portland make sure to come to the event November 7th as it is one of the parties of the year. I know from last year when I was wondering the empty streets of Portland at 4:30am trying to get back to the office to crash for a bit before everyone got in. Man that was pointless. This year I am going to just write that next day off entirely.

At eROI we deploy DomainKeys for all of our clients. We actually see better delivery for those clients that implement it right ( I say this as there are some challenges that IT teams have at times with it). If you are an eROI client using emailROI and have yet to set up DomainKeys, let us know and we can send you the technical record information to help your email delivery programs. We have been touting that it is important for about a year and we have witnessed more and more ISPs and business email accounts using it as a secondary and sometimes primary email filter/check before allowing it in to the inbox.

The below article demonstrates the importance of using it with your email marketing programs. I can tell you that I am happy to see less fake eBay emails in my inbox and I trust that we will see it used more and more against all email marketing. Be on the right side and get set up today. It only takes about 20 minutes to have your IT dept make the change in your DNS records.

Yahoo Email Encryption Software Purports to Minimize eBay, PayPal Phishing

Stopping phishermen in their tracks
Many of the phishers that deluge inboxes use PayPal and eBay as a hook to obtain user information.

Now the popular online auction house and payment service are fighting back — with the assistance of Yahoo’s anti-phishing technology.

The technology supports DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), which requires senders to confirm their identity through a digital signature, according to BBC News. Spammers typically use fake email addresses so nothing can be traced back to them.

Read more >>

I was on a panel last week in NYC at OMMA East with Ogilvy and ReturnPath and the question is email a lead generation system came up. I know it is and there are good ways to do it with refer a friend campaigns, contests and forward to a friend systems, but I am always a little leary of email list rentals. Now not for any reason of true measure, but I just have a problem with getting emails that I have not opted in to. It might just be me as many of our clients use this technnique to drive new subscribers successfully. Stephanie Miller at ReturnPath was quick to point out how well it works when you use reputable 3rd party list partners and do it right. I would agree with her, but it just isn’t my main focus with growing the email opt in. I am going to trust that she reads this and responds with her take on the way email lists rentals work and what to vet in a list rental partner. Might help all of us a bit here.

I do believe 100% in direct mail to a landing page with our PIN coding system. I know this works, has a better “feel” or trust level to me and has helped many of our clients grow their opt in databases.

What works for you? And do you like the practice of 3rd party list rentals?

It is always interesting to me when I see an email that flags a “We Screwed Up” notice at the top of the email. Everyone at some point in time has sent out a campaign that had an error OR was premature. Taking the high road to letting people know (and quickly) that you made a mistake and wanted to clarify to them what the right information is is great. But make sure, just as in this one from CES, to call out your mistakes so that people do not assume that you are sending them the same email TWICE. Makes them read the email again and not quickly trash it.

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So yesterday we were able to spend and hour in a “fun” discussion with an ISP Relations Department in a region with a 200K Cable subscriber base. The reason for this call is that they have started a policy of blocking ANY email that looks like marketing. This is what the ISPs in the old days did, unsuccessfully, but not the way they do them today.

Imagine this “scenario” that was explained.

1. You go to buy a ticket on United Airlines. You request an email confirmation of your ticket information.
2. They send it to you
3. Your ISP blocks it as it is “marketing”
4. You don’t get your ticket info, and now need to call United to see why

The ISP says that they don’t care. At least until one of thier customers calls to complain, which they are going to take a long time to do as they think that it is the fault of the Airline.

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We’ve never heard an email broadcast firm ‘fess up and say their delivery isn’t all that great. But, all industry insiders know some vendors get notoriously dreadful delivery.

So, we figured you’d be interested in an exclusive look at new study data from delivery “optimization” consultancy eDiagnostix.

How the study worked

The researchers picked six email broadcast firms at random and opted in their own seed email addresses (email accounts set up specifically for tracking incoming mail) at 15 large ISPs including AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Earthlink, and Roadrunner.

The goal was to see which vendor’s own newsletters were actually delivered to the in-box (not junk folder).

Plus the researchers also ran the newsletters through almost a dozen filters commonly used by “client-side” — ie. companies’ IT departments filtering in-coming email. These included Norton, McAfee, Brightmail and SpamAssassin.

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Although e-mail marketers say their biggest challenge is getting their messages delivered into consumers’ inboxes, more than half, or 54%, say they don’t use e-mail delivery auditing tools to proactively improve results, JupiterResearch says in a recent report.

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Commercial emailers are finding the vast brunt of their messages actually getting through, according to Internet Retailer, with retail and catalog emails seeing deliverability rates hovering around record levels in the last quarter of 2004. The figures, provided by Bigfoot Interactive, show Q4’s deliverability at 94 percent, down just a tad from Q3’s 94.6 percent. Response rates climbed to 4.8 percent in Q4, up from 3.8 percent.

Well from a Study we did with Marketing Sherpa last year, we were happy to see that ET not only tried to DEBUNK our quarterly study (while confirming it) but also went as far to credit us with creating a trend with marketers in the 4th quarter of 2004 (which… surprise… changed the target for the best day of the week.

A big thank you to the ET team for not only verifying us, but also for sharing our name with the industry and your customers in your monthly email.