The Email Wars

I know that most of you are one of these “Tethered Workers”. Don’t be ashamed, as I am not better than any of you. We can form a 12 step group for internet addicted people. I bet in 10 minutes we could have a support group of hundreds of millions. 

Do you think that if 50% do work email, what is the percentage of people that are checking personal email? Now once you digest this, think about how your campaigns can be targeted to these type of workers based on time of day, day of week, and by the type of behavioral interactions they have on the weekends. 

Below is a snippet from the study found here in full.

Tethered to Email

Some 22 percent of employed email users say they are expected to read and respond to work-related emails, even when they are not at work. Blackberry and PDA owners are more than twice as likely to report that their employer expects that they will stay tuned in to email outside of the office. Fully 48 percent say they are required to read and respond to email when they are away from work.

50 percent of employed email users say they check their work-related email on the weekends.

22 percent of employed email users say they check their work email accounts “often” during weekend hours, compared with 16 percent who reported the same in 2002.

46 percent of employed email users say they check email when they have to take a sick day; 25 percent say they do so “often.”

34 percent of employed email users say they will at least occasionally check their email while on vacation; 11 percent say they do so “often.”

“Email is still the primary artery of workplace communications in many professions, and it has clearly started to spill over into personal life,” said Sydney Jones, coauthor and research assistant for the Pew Internet Project. “Over time, workers have become more likely to check their email outside of normal working hours, and many are expected to do so by their employer.”

Read the full study here.

Well not really going green, but starting a new weekly email newsletter focusing on “green” marketing and ad campaigns. It is a continuous segmentation and introduction of more email newsletters. I am not sure now how many they have but to me it is news that they could be adding into one of their existing newsletters as content instead of making an entire new newsletter. 

I share this for a few reasons. 

1. Do they have enough weekly content to justify another newsletter? From the looks of this email in this post the answer is NO. Why well look how empty the newsletter is. It looks horrible. Not really “green” to add more media vehicles to cover small news. 

2. I assume that they are just using this as many publishers do to add more ad sales inventory and drive more clicks into their site where more ads can be served and drive more page views. Fine as that is the goal, but it is not a good use of time and space for them or the subscriber. 

3. Look at the ads. Do they support the content? Are they relevant? Nope on both counts. They are just focused towards advertisers and marketers but not focused on the matching the content or possibly the subscriber base. 

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Fingerprint just finished writing their first email client market share report. It’s the biggest study of email client usage ever conducted, using a sample of almost three million email recipients.

It’s exciting for them because it’s the first time they’ve released any of the data that’s been collected through Fingerprint. It shows the top 10 email clients in use for both consumer and business mailing lists.

I have been working on deploying it for our own newsletters (have you subscribed yet?), and will share OUR results soon.

Business Email Client Use from Study: 

Read the full report

Consumer Email Client Use from Study:

There have been some studies in the past few months about how site navigation is being used in email creative. In our latest study we found that nearly 30% of marketers duplicate their site navigation in email. of those, 15% find it more effective than the main content in driving clicks, while 11% of marketers find their navigation converts better than the main content of their email.

So this being said this email from Storables stood out to me for using the site navigation in the email by using the ORANGE to make the SALE button in the navigation POP. Now I am a fan of the color Orange as it is not a standard color one sees all that often in email. The use of this pulled my eye immediately to that area and was all but pleading me to click on it. Did I need some organization systems in my life? I wasn’t really sure but the fact that it was different than the rest made me want to find out. 

I am not going to go out on a limb and say that this is a BEST PRACTICE, but I will say that it is an attention getter to me. And if you are trying to stand out in someone’s inbox, you better make it POP. So this being said I would say try some experiments with color in your nav to drive action. Who knows… it might make difference and drive some conversions. 

This story/case study in DM News caught my attention as I so often wonder how wineries do not focus more and more on email marketing as a communication, brand development and sales tool. It seems like a natural way for these business owners to build a relationship with consumers and fans when wineries are only located in 3 places. 1. The Winery 2. The Grocery Aisle 3. The Restaurant. 

If you can work to add a simple way to capture the email address at the winery or on your own site you are 99% of the way there to setting up a relationship that should drive more bottle sales at all three locations. Just knowing what wine to select when you see it can be a chore from a list and from the aisle. If you can work on your programs to get people to recognize the name and label you are winning the battle.

Owning and growing this relationship through email is most likely one of the best and best cost factor mediums to talk to your enthusiasts. As a wine lover myself I know that I appreciate learning more about the winery, vintages, events and in many way becoming a smarter, better educated imbiber of the tasty grape treat. 

DM News has the full story here >>

The EEC and Chad White have published their Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season. Worth a read if you are in the consumer markets or have campaigns that will touch people during the holidays.

Executive Summary:

Long before retailers hang any wreaths or tinsel in their stores, they send out emails promoting their Christmas deals to their subscribers—lots of emails! Last year the Email Experience Council tracked more than 3,300 emails from more than 100 top online retailers during the fourth quarter and released daily reports on strategies, tactics and trends via the Retail Email Blog. Based on that monitoring, the eec has produced this helpful roadmap to the email holiday season so retailers and other B2C companies can better formulate their campaigns this year.

This guide includes benchmarks and advice on when to begin your campaign, how much to increase your email volume, which days to send on, and how to stand out in the inbox during the holidays. For instance, last year 88% of major online retailers increased their email volume during the holiday season, with retailers boosting their send volumes by 45% on average.

It also discusses and provides examples of the “16 Phases of Christmas,” the 16 strategies that retailers use at different points in the holiday season. Those strategies include promoting e-gift cards and “buy online, pick up in store” services.

Check it out and get the Guide >>

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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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!

Interesting that Pizza Hut would take this approach. It is sorry we F’d up email, but they sure do alot of appologizing. Why not take that opprtunity to say sorry, and then give them the pickle (old saying about give them something that they don’t expect by a famous ice cream parlor owner) which would be order one now with an extra topping or save $1 on your next order with us. 

What is trying with this opt in process is that in order to place your order online for a pizza you HAVE to opt in to email from them. Not sure when that became the standard. It is an aggressive strategy and has been written up on blogs like The Consumerist and others. 

Try to do what you would like done to you in this situation if you ever come up against it. You only have one time to have a bad customer experience while giving people the best treatment over and over again keeps them coming back. 

Here is the email:

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When Do You Check Your E-Mail?

I might not be like you and you might not be like me. I know two people that actually wake up, roll over and the first thing that they do is scroll through the blackberry. Sick? Maybe. But it is their routine. Personally I check mine before I head out the door to work, look for breaking news or fires that might have sprung up overnight, and then drive in to work… where I will check continuously throughout the day. 

I will also be driving, yes hate me but I swear I have a 3rd eye in the middle of my forehead, and at stop lights and check emails then. I need to stop that behavior. But really where do you check email that is odd or where do you check it that is normal? Do we know best times of day when people are showing that they are ADDICTS?

Do we care? As it seems that people are checking email everywhere and at all times of day and night. Even from places like the bathroom and in locations that they might have not reported. 

Is this a sickness? Do we all need to chill out a little bit as addicts? Or should we embrace it as email marketers (aka dealers) and sling them what they want when they want it?

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That’s right boys and girls… a new Email Marketing Guide in the Resources center @eROI. And not just one… but 3 new guides. And hold tight… wait for it… wait for it… wait for it… now - Look next week for the RESULTS of our latest email study there as well. 

I know you say this is TOO good to be true, like the Flowbee or the GoateeSaver, but it is not it is 4 for the price of 1 visit. I know these guys at eROI really go above and beyond to think about what is working in email marketing and how to share this knowledge with the world. One would think that they are a 3000 strong global force of Ninjas and Revolutionaries (we are but less that 60 with 2 offices) but alas we just like to make you smarter to do your job better. 

Now if we share like this with everyone can you JUST imagine what we share with our clients and customers? I would wager that some AWESOME ideas come out of here and some campaigns that rock. 

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The other morning I was forwarded the email opt in from another ESP by a co-worker at eROI. Now I am not going to share it at this point as it got my juices flowing. I started to wonder… if all of the ESPs out there are stumping on their soap boxes about best practices, studies, and how people are not doing A-B-C of the basics of email marketing… then are they following these rules themselves. 

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If you are familiar with Twitter, then you are very close with the Fail Whale. For those of you that have yet to meet the Fail Whale (and I think that the community might have named it such, not the brand) I have placed a image of it in the wild for you below. I can tell you it is much better than a animated GIF of a monkey banging on a server with a wrench and even a better user experience than a 404 error page. But what can we learn from the Fail Whale.

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