The Email Wars

We are in the midst of another massive shift in the inbox. It is not the inbox itself, but where the inbox lives during the average day of business communication or consumer marketing outreach. Today, it should be known and understood that people are checking email everywhere and at all times, looking on iPhones, Blackberry, Treo, Windows Mobile and maybe even devices we don’t rank as the top mobile platforms yet. So I wanted to put the thought out to you….

Should you care?

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We are all aware how our President has used email marketing in a way that none have done before. We all know that it made a big impact on the campaign results and many of us were excited to see how he would continue to use it as a messaging/connection platform moving forward once he was in office.

So you can imagine how impressed I was to get an email from him on this past 4th of July. It was a nice touch as I am not sure that I have ever/nor expected an email on our nations birthday, but it got me thinking a little about it and was it truly a message from him OR a marketing campaign moving the ball forward on his agenda.

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I love it when I see a company do a good job with keeping their subscriber base in the loop proactively to changes in their email services. When you decide to make a change to your IP, your sending domain, your ESP (Email Service Provider) or anything else about your programs that might make an impact on your delivery you need to make sure that you are clearly communicating these changes to all.

Why you might ask? Well it matters. With whitelists, adding to your address book, and many companies and individuals setting delivery rules around emails they get why would you not tell them.

Take a look at this example of how clear and simple they make it. They let you know the what, why, and how their subscribers need to know in order to help them continue to get the emails. Not only is it clear but they also provide a list of links to each email client in order to make this as educational and easy as it can be. Something you might want to steal if you need to do this for your own campaigns.

Now as great as it is, I did notice I few things I would recommend that they (or you) change to emails like this.

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In the world of multichannel and location opt in and opt out how do you keep your lists in sync? Can you?

Let me put some scenarios on the table to give you some real world examples of challenges I have been facing in some recent work with a retailer.

1. Your customer opts in from your site. First time here and they subscribe to your newsletter. They want to simply get your newsletter about alerts and deals. Easy and done.

2. They buy some merchandise from you and at the checkout, since you had the box checked (bad idea) they opted in again to your newsletter through your store. Simple enough as I am sure you would not duplicate the opt in as you already have that record and relationship in place. Or do you. Best idea here is to flag the change in record date and location of subscription again OR at least have a data point in your subscriber record to reflect this secondary opt in. Also at risk here depending on how you have your welcome stream set up is triggering: another double opt in message, not letting them know that they are already subscribed and maybe pointing them in another direction for something else to subscribe to (hey maybe a customer communications preference center?), or making sure that you do not start your welcome or email customer lifecycle string again and quickly make yourself look foolish. Okay easy to handle.

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This seems to be an ongoing conversation that many email marketers have each day. Now you will read that so many are okay with cleaning up their lists in order to have better performing email campaigns. But then on the flip side so many of them are nervous to break up with subscribers do to inactivity, poor conversion and even bounces in some cases.

Well welcome to the couch. I will let you know that it is ok. You will be fine. Your campaigns will perform better. You will not be fired.

But is there a better way to approach this as no one really (no matter what they say) is comfortable with the cleansing of a subscriber list. Sure there is. Here is how I might suggest you approach it.

First: Build your Campaign. Focus on two segments to test. I would push you to the win back campaign to get them reengaged. While taking the other approach of letting them know clearly that they can manage their profile or preferences (if you have a preference center) to find things that are more relevant to them. Maybe they only want to hear form you less and you have been pounding them outside of their engagement cycle.

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You have the idea.

You have the copy.

You have the creative.

Everything is done and you have an email marketing program/campaign that you are ready to get out the door. Check, Check, Check. But what happens when it leaves your location and enters into email inboxes around the globe? Well you could get on your knees, pray to the gods of the WWW that all will be well, OR you can continue to go blind into battle hoping that you do not get flanked by image or HTML rendering along the way, the device or the inbox. IMHO both of those methods are not aligned to produce the best results.

So what if you had the ability to know before hand what you need to do to have your hard work pay off when it arrives? Do you know that you can see this before you send it? At eROI we always test our emails for delivery and rendering with projects that we work on. So why doesn’t everyone else?

Maybe it is costs, but there is very little cost to test an email. Maybe it is time, well if you don’t have the time then maybe you should move to HR or Building Maintenance. It is typically just not having a provider, partner or solution to use. If you work with us, you have it all.

I have added an example of our latest email newsletter to show you what we see before it goes out the door which allows us to make design or coding changes to give this campaign the best possible chance of working. Testing is the norm and if you are not testing you are fighting battles at half speed.

Let us know if you would like to run some tests to gauge inbox rendering performance and be in a position to share with your team, agency, execs what needs to be done. We will help you build a case in 24 hours or less.

It always amazes me when great retailers go the route of one massive image file for their email campaigns. Not I can attest that this example is an amazing work of graphic design, but there has to be a better way to use Web text and chopping the images to ensure that if images are blocked that you are not just getting an empty email with a footer. 

This is most likely the work or an over zealous designer with little knowledge of email marketing that is only focused on the LOOK of the email and not the purpose or function of email marketing. With so many resources on the interweb why can’t brands start to be smarter or just hire people that have their best interests at heart? 

Design is just the start of the battle in order to win the hearts and minds of your subscribers and customers. If you have a designer on your team that continues to create your emails like this example, please walk over to their inbox, go into the settings, and turn off all images in their system. Then have them test send the email to their own inbox. Sit back and watch the look of horror on their face when their work arrives empty. That might help them to see the light in email design. Then ask them to show you what they want to buy in that email. You can then explain to them that this could be the experience that your customers will have with this email. 

As a final point, show them a blank check. Now this is not to allow them to write what they want to be paid, but help them understand that unless the emails they design work, then this is the type of payment they will be getting when you do not make a sale. 

Lesson over.

So now we have Gmail going to an offline version. I was kicking this one around trying to understand the impact it might have on email marketing. I could not find many wins for email marketers, but I could see some downside. 

Now first before I talk to the downside I cannot remember the last time that I really had to use my laptop when I did not have an internet connection. Well maybe on an airplane in mid air, but then again I am not sure why I would be using my gmail account to do business in mid air? 

But the impact is there in the realm of email marketing. What impact this could have would be that your reporting could be diluted with opens and clicks if your subscribers are reading offline and decided to click, and then they would go nowhere as they would not have a connection. So in the end maybe only read rates and click rates COULD be impacted, but I would assume that this offline idea truly only benefits those that use it as a main email client and would not really impact campaigns as they would need to wait for a connection until they could click, delete or unsubscribe from an email. 

Great idea, but not much impact to many of us.

It has been interesting to see the sprouting of services like Whspr and the Other Inbox lately, as well as mailinator and others of the like, to give people disposable email addresses that expire in a certain set time period. I can understand the idea behind these (note The Other Inbox is slightly different from these others) but if systems like this continue to multiply is this not going to kill the value of an email address and thus change the dynamics of a relationship? 

With people concerned about the opt in and giving away the information to parties that they deem important enough to want to get content, alerts, studies, beta invites, etc from why would we want them to be able to decide when to kill a relationship except by using a valid opt out system? To me this is only going to pollute the database integrity of email marketers world wide and in the end dilute the ISP/Email reputation that most of us work so hard each and everyday to move forward.

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I read this past week that MySpace is working on a new email system to give all of it’s 125 million active email users an inbox inside of the social networking site. Now this could be a game changer if they are successful with this integration and launch. Why? Well if even 20% of the user that LIVE in MySpace use this new email client it will make all of us look at feedback loops (do they exist), rendering, white listing, and how emails are forwarded inside and outside of the space. Now also to consider is what type of social media sharing tools MySpace might integrate into this new email client. 

We should all keep our eyes on this as I would assume that the main comp Facebook could be working on something to stay in the features war as well. 

Read the news at the jump >>

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Interesting news in light of all the new email clients, services and more we see each week. Seems that we could be hitting the tipping point of too many email services and not enough users to justify the free model of email. To me this is a good thing. There are simply too many email services and ISPs. We need focus on the majors while supporting the fringe. 

News follows in the rest of the post for you. But in the end looks like Feb 15th is is all over for Lycos mail in the US and EU.

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From the Deliverability.com blog today – Important Notice:

“RIP: Sprint PCS Mail

If you use Sprint PCS for inbound email, you’ve probably noticed very little traffic lately. That’s because Sprint decommissioned the PCS Mail service as of 12/31/08. You still have access to send outbound mail through theirSMTP servers (which doesn’t make any sense to me), but cannot IMAP or POP the mail down to your email device from the sprintpcs.com domain. Mail sent after 12/31/08 has been bounced back to the sender.”

Read the rest at the source

Can you guess what words are going to be the “Marketing’ leading words to avoid in 2009? 

Wth the current economic crisis consumers require straightforward, honest advertising. According to entrepreneur the number one word to avoid in advertising for 2009 is ‘free’. Ads that include messages about a free product or service promotions can work well during an economic downturn, but consumers need to see the products perform well. Other words on the top 10 list include ‘guarantee’, ‘really’ and ‘opportunity’.

But are these words that are going to cause you any issues? Well they could depending on all sorts of factors. Now I am not telling you to NOT use these words, but think about them in a larger context around your overall brand and efforts for the year ahead. A quick win can cause long term issues with trying to devaluate your offers and brand in email.

Copy is important in the subject line and in the body of your email. As Indiana Jones was told… Choose Wisely.

How many “NEW” email clients are going to be released? And do they matter? 

We have seen so many email clients launched this past year all with features that we wish were in some of the larger ISPs and standards. But will these bells and whistles really make people switch and really make an impact on email marketing? I don’t think so. 

Although I love some of these ideas, I think that none of them will get enough groundswell or uptake to make an impact on our testing and our email marketing efforts. Now I don’t want to discount the hard work and innovation that has gone into these new apps, but in the end they are not going to make a dent in our radars. 

So take this new one with a grain of salt and chalk it up to just another one to know about, but not worry about testing. Unless Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, MSN, or Thunderbird make some massive changes, your life should go on as normal. Focus on the big picture in email clients. Use your energies to start understanding mobile clients like Blackberry, iPhone and MS Mobile. That is where your efforts in NEW clients should lie.