A colleague read my recent post and asked me how marketers could prevent spammers from spoofing their domains. In other words, it's pretty hard to fake an IP address, but isn't it easy to fake a "from" field and domain? (For example, Outlook Express easily allows me to put "bnussey@whitehouse.gov" in the from field.)

The solution lies in some recent technology advancements that come with easy-to-remember names like DKIM and Sender ID. These solutions provide a way for receiving email servers to validate that an incoming message is REALLY from the domain it claims to be. They are pretty foolproof and ensure that only the REAL whitehouse.gov can validate messages that purport to be from that domain. As long as the receiving email server goes through the trouble to check, it can always be sure that the sender is legitimate.

For those of you curious how this would work, read on. (For everyone else, thanks for checking in <grin>.)…

The authentication techniques work on top of one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet—the domain name system (better known as DNS). You see, when Internet-connected computers talk to each other, they only do so using IP addresses—things like URLs are a convenience for we human beings. While it's invisible to users, every time you enter a Web URL or send an email to, say, whitehouse.gov, your browser quickly goes out and checks a DNS server to get the underlying IP address. DNS information is tightly controlled and is generally only updatable by the company that owns the domain. Email authentication solutions add an additional piece of information on the DNS record that can only be updated by the domain owner. When an email domain is being validated, the receiving email server simply checks out the DNS records for that domain and confirms that the authentication "key" matches the one in the email. That's it.

Posted by Bill at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently had a chance to pick the brain of my esteemed industry colleague, Deirdre Baird. Deirdre is the CEO of Pivotal Veracity, Silverpop’s email deliverability partner, and one of the most knowledgeable people in the industry when it comes to getting your email successfully delivered to the inbox.

Specifically, I wanted to get her thoughts about an important and impending shift by ISPs away from IP-based to domain-based email reputation filtering.

Under the current IP-based reputation monitoring scheme, ISPs deliver or block your email based on the reputation of each individual IP address from which you send email. Under domain-based reputation monitoring, ISPs would assign the same reputation to all authenticated email from your company or domain, regardless of IP. (You can read more about it in this recent Direct magazine article.)

Can you describe that change and tell us when it will be in place?

"Currently, ISPs and spam filtering entities "attach” reputation to a particular email campaign—as is the case with "signature type filtering"—and/or a particular IP address. If, for example, a particular email creative is associated with high spam-complaint rates or a particular IP address is the source of high unknown-user rates, the ISP will then filter all mail like that particular creative or originating from that particular IP address.

"While both these methods are useful and will continue to be used, their efficacy is declining somewhat as spammers have learned to dramatically change the content and mail from thousands of hijacked IPs. The major ISPs are now moving toward a more holistic method of holding a mailer accountable for their actions. Specifically, ISPs are now moving to authenticated, domain-based reputation, whereby core filtering metrics such as spam-complaint rates, unknown user rates, and spam-trap rates will be computed at the domain level.

"This change is being tested now at AOL and Yahoo with DKIM-authenticated domains. It exists in some degree at Hotmail with Sender ID-authenticated domains, and is being considered by a number of other ISPs.

"While domain-based reputation will initially be used in addition to IP-based reputation at ISPs such as Yahoo, it will take a front-seat at AOL and, we suspect over time will become one of the most important methods ISPs will use to identify good mailers."

What will it mean to Silverpop’s customers and other email marketers?

"The impact for mailers can be summed up this way: You will be held accountable—good or bad—for everything you do under your brand, that is, your domain.

"This is great news for legitimate companies who have consistently followed good mailing practices across their enterprise and developed meaningful relationships with their customers. It is not so great news for folks who have relied on a change in IP to escape the fall-out of an email append program that went south, or a purchased list, or a leap in spam complaints due to over-mailing."

What percentage of an average B2C email marketer’s list will be impacted by this, and how will that change through the rest of 2009 and 2010?

"Yahoo is usually the first or second largest ISP on both B2C and B2B mailers' lists. AOL typically ranks in the top 5 or 10 for B2B. Their combined market share on a typical commercial mailer’s list ranges from a low of 30 percent to a high of 70 percent.

"Mailers will begin to see the impact of domain-based reputation at AOL as early as this fall, and at Yahoo in late 2009 into early 2010. Additionally, Hotmail already considers domain-based reputation, although historically they’ve placed more weight on IP-based reputation. Comcast and Road Runner are actively researching how to execute a domain-based reputation system, but are not likely to have anything in place until late 2010 at the earliest."

From a B2B perspective, do you foresee any of the popular corporate spam filters using this new approach?

"Absolutely. The large enterprise filters such as Brightmail, Cloudmark and Postini already attach a reputation of sorts to a piece of content. It is certainly plausible that the domain will play a role in their algorithms. However, as it is now, it will be a lot more difficult to isolate the impact of a domain’s mailing history from the impact of other factors—for example, content characteristics—used by the spam filters, whereas the ISPs tend to be more transparent in what caused a filtering issue. For instance, that the mailer has high spam complaint rates."

My thanks to Deirdre for sharing her thoughts and expertise with readers of this blog. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them below.

Posted by Bill at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I recently read an interesting “Times Wire” column about a start-up company that focuses specifically on shopping cart abandonment. The company, SeeWhy, is releasing a new service that will alert subscribers when a visitor on their Web site abandons a shopping cart, and then immediately follow up with an email designed to encourage the person to go back and complete the transaction.

The writer, Randall Stross, questions whether this tactic could alienate site visitors by making them feel like they can’t even visit a Web site without being hounded to make a purchase. And indeed, to avoid seeming like they’re watching site visitors too closely, many permission marketers wait a day or more before sending an email or otherwise nudging visitors about items left in their carts. But SeeWhy says waiting is a mistake. The company says there is a way to ask nicely, and contends that immediate remarketing produces a follow-up sale three times as often as sending a reminder a day later.

But you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. To find the best timing for your list, my recommendation as always is to test. In this case, you could maintain a control group, or random sample of your list that is excluded from the change you are testing. This enables you to compare the behavior of the test group vs. the control group to determine the precise effect of your change. The control group would get your usual cart abandonment follow-up, against which you would test your new follow-up tactic. To find out whether remarketing immediately would be profitable over the long-term, or whether it ultimately damages your customer relationships, you can compare the response of your test group vs. the control group over a period of months to get your answer.

Posted by Bill at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I recently spent some time with the folks at eMarketer, who interviewed me about my thoughts on email marketing. They just published a sizable excerpt from the interview, and I think it does a nice job of capturing the state of email marketing at a high level. It also provides advice on how marketers can protect deliverability and successfully compete for recipients' limited attention in the inbox. Have a look.

Posted by Bill at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read an interesting article in eMarketer about the popularity of email among retailers during this past holiday season. Advertising agency Smith-Harmon found that retail email marketers accelerated their email campaigns beginning in October, and on average sent customers more than 14.6 emails in December alone.

"Retailers ratcheted up their email marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers' dwindling spending dollars," said Jeffrey Grau, a senior analyst for eMarketer.

Incidentally, Jeffrey interviewed me in January for a report he has just written on the continued strength of retail email marketing despite the economic downturn. He was kind enough to send me a copy recently. You’ll have to purchase the report to get the in-depth analysis, but in a nutshell, email marketing is thriving in the recession because of its comparative low cost, high ROI and focus on customer retention.

Although these factors illustrate why email is an ideal marketing channel during a recession, the other side of the coin—and one we must be ever mindful of—is that a good thing can be taken too far. If marketers aren’t careful, they risk undermining the value of the inbox.

In fact, in a recent meeting with one of our consumer-packaged-goods clients, one of its executives jokingly asked me if we could tell our retail customers to lower their volumes a bit. "The inbox is getting a little crowded these days," he said.

Posted by Bill at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

People who know me know I'm a big fan of testing. You never know for sure how people are going to respond to your emails and landing pages unless you test, and seemingly insignificant differences and simple changes can have a huge impact on response. What's really exciting is that marketers today can do more than ever, more easily than ever.

Three of the reasons I'm such a big believer and encourage marketers to pursue testing are:

1) You can test multiple variations and deploy your best performers.
Testing is growing and evolving alongside marketing. Marketing tools with built-in A/B page-testing capabilities, such as our landing pages solution, enable marketers to quickly and easily test multiple page variations, measure each page's performance relative to the next, and designate a larger percentage of display time to the best performers. Poorly performing pages can be pulled and tweaked, or swapped out for new pages. This isn't your mother’s A/B page testing; today’s testing includes capabilities that increase efficiency and begin to move us into the exciting realm of page optimization.

2) Optimization can yield tremendous incremental returns.
By tuning the elements of your landing pages to the variation(s) that will generate the greatest audience response, you'll achieve optimization that can yield tremendous incremental returns. Even a 5 percent to 10 percent lift—relatively small by comparison to some of the anecdotes I’ve heard from people using page optimization—can be substantial. For example, you could equate that kind of improvement on your email opt-in page to spending 10 percent less on your search ads, or increasing the size of your opt-in database by 10 percent. A seemingly modest lift can be significant in terms of real downstream revenue and loyalty impact.

3) Computers are taking over the heavy lifting.
The great news is that thanks to technology, these capabilities aren't as difficult to implement as they might sound. Sophisticated marketing applications have taken over what used to be a time-consuming and manual process, leaving marketers free to exercise their creativity, art and judgment. When your landing pages tool does all the work you used to have to do by hand—rapidly cycling through page iterations and providing real-time results on which pages and elements are working and which aren’t—you can focus on interpreting the numbers and making the appropriate changes to enhance the results of your marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation technology has taken A/B page testing to a whole new level by introducing page-optimization capabilities to the engagement marketer’s tool kit. And the best news of all is that it's wonderfully easy. With very little extra time and effort beyond creating an initial landing page, marketers can engage more fully with page visitors by providing a more measurably relevant experience that increases conversions and drives additional sales.

Posted by Bill at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For an entertaining and enlightening review of how the world of marketing got to where it is today, this video by a German ad agency tells it all in three minutes.

Posted by Bill at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission just came out with an important new report outlining its recommendations on how advertisers who use behavioral targeting—the tracking of individual consumers’ online activities in order to deliver targeted advertising tailored to each person’s interests—should regulate their own activities so that the government doesn’t step in and do it for them.

The 48-page report, "Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising," published Feb. 12, expands on a previous report published in December 2007 in response to privacy concerns raised by online behavioral advertising.

After following this story and reading the report, my non-legal read is that it does not target email marketers directly or by intent. (I am not a lawyer, so be sure to confirm my impressions for yourself and/or with your own counsel.) In a nutshell, the FTC doesn't appear to be taking aim at email marketers because:

• The FTC's guidelines don’t apply to "first-party" behavioral targeting. Most email marketers use first-party behavioral targeting—in which a Web site collects consumer information to deliver targeted advertising at its site, but does not share any of that information with third parties. The agency concluded that fewer privacy concerns are associated with first-party targeting than with other behavioral advertising, and that as a result, it is not necessary to include such advertising within the scope of its principles.
• The FTC is more focused on providing privacy protections to people surfing the Web with a reasonable expectation of privacy. Advertisers contended that it is unnecessary to provide privacy protections for data that is not personally identifiable. But the FTC disagreed, stating that privacy protections should cover any data that reasonably can be associated with a particular consumer or computer or other device.

In the world of relationship email, marketers gather relevant details within the context of a specific marketing relationship so that they can provide the kinds of messages a person will find the most engaging and useful. Subscribers generally understand what a marketer knows about them, and trust that the information will be used appropriately. In many cases, they can update their personal profile or email preferences, or ask to be removed from all marketing going forward. People are much more apt to feel comfortable about sharing details when they know they are in control, and they are explicitly choosing to trust the site/brand they are providing their information to.

The FTC's report offers four guidelines for industry self-regulation. Again, be sure to check out the report for yourself, or with your own counsel, but paraphrased, they are:

• Transparency and consumer control. Web sites that collect data for behavioral advertising need to provide a clear, concise, consumer-friendly and prominent statement that behavioral data is being collected and that consumers can choose whether or not to have their information collected.
• Reasonable security and limited data retention for consumer data. Companies that collect and / or store consumer data for behavioral advertising should provide reasonable security for that data, and retain data only as long as it is necessary to fulfill a legitimate business or law enforcement need.
• Affirmative express consent for material changes to privacy promises. A company needs to keep its promises with respect to how it will handle or protect consumer data, even if it decides to change its policies at a later date. This means that before a company can use previously collected data in a manner that is different from the promises it made when it collected the data, it should obtain affirmative express consent from the affected consumers.
• Affirmative express consent to (or prohibition against) using sensitive data for behavioral advertising. Companies should collect sensitive data for behavioral advertising only after they obtain affirmative express consent from the consumer to receive such advertising.

"Industry needs to do a better job of meaningful, rigorous self-regulation, or it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our Commission," said FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz in a Feb. 12 statement.

"Put simply, this could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can—and will—effectively protect consumers’ privacy in a dynamic online marketplace."

Posted by Bill at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We just completed a fantastic benchmark study (maybe the first) on BtoB lead metrics. One of the findings that really stood out to me reveals an interesting detail about how people fill out Web forms. It turns out that it’s not the number of questions marketers require, but how long it takes the responder to answer them that matters most. Forms that were able to be completed within one to two minutes or less were most likely to be completed, while longer forms were more likely to be abandoned mid-way through. Forms populated with previously collected data were completed at a rate 20 – 25 percent higher than new-lead forms. So, people are willing to answer a lot of questions—as long as they can do it quickly.

If you want to learn more about this and the other findings, you can get the full study from the Vtrenz.com Web site.

Posted by Bill at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Silverpop uncovered some interesting results when it recently joined with Internet Retailer magazine to conduct research for the “Top 500 Guide” profiling the largest 500 U.S. retail Web sites ranked by annual sales.

To evaluate the email programs of the top online retailers, our research team logged on to the Web sites of 820 top retailers identified by Internet Retailer and registered to receive emails from each that had an email marketing program (94 percent of Top 500 companies vs. 83 percent of other companies studied). Then we compared the practices of Top 500 retailers to the other 320 retailers.

Among the findings:

• Not surprisingly, nearly six out of 10 retailers in the Top 500 offered a preference center at opt-in, while only one out of four other retailers studied did so.
• However, nearly three-quarters of the companies in the Top 500 with email programs didn’t offer customers any alternatives to unsubscribing, such as choosing different subscriptions or altering message frequency. And even more interesting, three out of four companies that had offered choices at opt-in didn’t offer to let recipients change those choices when they went to opt out.
• And the most surprising finding: one out of five companies that didn’t offer recipients any choices when they opted in to receive emails did give recipients choices when they tried to opt out. As a last ditch effort to keep subscribers on board, these companies offered to send less often or send different types of content.

While the study underscores that leading retail companies do optimize their programs for best results. It also reveals that even the best programs can improve and take results to new levels of success.

Posted by Bill at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm very excited to announce that one of the most respected email marketing executives has joined Silverpop. Loren McDonald has come onboard with us, serving as vice president of industry relations.

Loren is well known throughout the industry for his keen understanding of email marketing and insights into methods to maximize the benefits and returns the channel offers. His development of white papers, studies and articles over the years has helped move the industry forward. His leadership and deep experience will benefit not only Silverpop and its clients, but all marketers eager to maximize customer relationships in ways that build lifetime value.

Loren will be a regular blogger and contributor to Silverpop's e-newsletters, as well as help drive thought capital through the development of white papers and original research for both Silverpop and Vtrenz audiences.

To read the announcement about Loren, click here.

Posted by Bill at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I always like simple but insightful models, so I made a note to share one of the better examples I've seen recently. Skip Fidura, who manages OgilvyOne Worldwide's email marketing department in London, presented at Silverpop's customer conference in London last week. One of his many good slides included a pyramid with the six levels of relevance. You'll have to imagine the graphic, but here are the six levels from the bottom up: Offer, Profile, Affinity, Collaborative, Expressed and Behavioral.

Skip pointed out that many marketers debate whether expressed preferences or behavioral targeting are a more accurate way to drive relevance. I happen to agree with his ranking, but it is a good point.

Another interesting note from his presentation was based on what I believe to be Ogilvy research: Who you market to is 50 percent more important than Where, When and What you market. Noodle on that for a while...

Posted by Bill at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a recent conversation with an anti-spam advocate over the best way to stop unwanted messages, he suggested to me that all the challenges in his industry and mine would go away if emailers would only double opt-in all their recipients.

It has been a while since I've heard this argument, but it's not surprising that it came up again. It's a very logical point of view, and it would seem almost foolproof. The problem is that it doesn't always work.

In my book, "The Quiet Revolution In Email Marketing," I cited a ClickZ article that suggested double opt-in failure rates upward of 50 percent. In other words, for every 10 people who sign up for a double opt-in based permission email newsletter (or promotion), only five will actually complete the process. This kind of drop-off can undermine even the most successful email programs and begs the question: Why do so many people fail to complete the process? Here are some possibilities:

• The actual confirmation email isn't sent out immediately. By the time someone receives a confirmation, the person has forgotten all about signing up or has decided he or she no longer wants to be on the newsletter list.

• The recipient doesn't recognize the "From" field. In the past especially, a lot of double opt-ins would come from auto-responder systems that didn't allow the brand of the actual marketer to be displayed. So recipients would get a strange message and be unsure of what to do with it.

• Recipients have been trained never to click on anything in a message. I've spoken to people who are so concerned about phishing and Internet security that they won't click on anything in an email--not even a link to verify their permission.

Posted by Bill at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In its usual great job of uncovering interesting facts and sharing them with marketers, MarketingSherpa has just released its latest information about how online consumers are viewing their email.

To find out whether BtoC email marketers should be designing for preview panes and image blocking like their BtoB counterparts, the research firm recently surveyed more than 1,300 email users age 18 and over. It discovered a couple interesting things.

One is that preview pane usage is on the rise. As the major ISPs and email clients upgrade to newer versions offering preview panes, nearly 40 percent of consumers have now been exposed to them, and nearly 27 percent say they have begun using them by default. I think this growing availability and adoption across demographics probably stems from the fact that active content, such as ActiveX, is always disabled, making preview panes much safer to use.

Somewhat surprising to me, MarketingSherpa also found that fewer than half of online consumers surveyed routinely block all images. Based on how many ISPs and email clients now block images by default, I would have guessed this number to be higher.

So what does this all mean? In a nutshell: Creative really does matter, particularly for BtoB marketers (where an estimated 70 percent of recipients use preview panes). Great design and layout are essential to the effectiveness of a message because it must be able to function whether seen in its entirety, or confined to a preview pane and/or with images disabled.

As Silverpop's 2006 "Email Creative That Works Study" revealed, response rates go clearly higher when message elements like logos and links are easily viewable and actionable by recipients.

MarketingSherpa's report is filled with interesting and actionable information, and I encourage you to check it out here. But hurry. Free access only lasts until Feb. 26.

Posted by Bill at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Silverpop released its study, "Email Creative That Works," I was excited see creative best practices that were truly measured rather than subjectively recommended. At the Email Insider Summit earlier this month, Greg Edwards, the CTO of EyeTracker, took measuring creative success to an entirely new level.

Greg's company is pioneering the use of eye-tracking technology to help marketers design better creative. EyeTracker's tools watch a panel of users to see what they actually look at. From this data, gathered across countless clients and email campaigns, Greg was able to share some great insights on creative best practices:

• People don't read full sentences, so don't force them into your copy.

• "Front load" your first few bullets or words with the most important information you need to share. You may not get them to read any more if you can't grab their interest.

• Use graphics and layout to guide recipients' eyes. You don't need to be blatant about it, but apply the same thinking a merchandiser might use when laying out a retail store. What will people read first, and where will they go next?

• The design needs to support a clear call to action. Don't just tell them they can have 15 percent off--make sure to show them exactly what they need to do to get that savings.

• Recipients absolutely will scroll "below the fold" if the layout is properly designed.

• Design your content with two levels of readers in mind. The first level is the five-to-10-second quick reader. The second is the reader who wants to dig in and really understand your message. Many marketers intermix these two sets of recipients in their layout and copy, and Greg strongly recommends thinking of them distinctly.

Posted by Bill at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are not familiar with the Email Insider Summit, it's pretty much as its name describes. A group of 100 or so of the top email folks in the country get together to share ideas, network and have some fun. Attendees include marketers from big companies, executives from vendors and the occasional media person. This is the second Email Insider Summit, and the folks at MediaPost are already planning another two for 2007.

I will be posting several entries over the next several days from the notes I took, but let me start by telling you about the number 49.

A recent study by ReturnPath presented by Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services, found that the maximum number of characters in a subject field should be 49. She said that lines consisting of 49 characters (presumably give or take a few) performed 75-percent better than longer subject lines and much shorter subject lines. Stephanie, who also organized the summit, pointed out that your actual numbers may vary a lot, and that testing is always called for when determining what works best for each marketer.

Posted by Bill at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As my regular readers know, I avoid using my blog as an advertising tool and only to talk about things that interest me. So I hope you all will forgive me if this entry happens to do both.

You've seen a few blogs from me recently about individually timed email messages and just how powerfully they can affect responses rates. Well, it happens to be an area we've been talking about a lot over the last few months here at Silverpop.

The big news is that the newest release of our email application, Silverpop Marketer, contains an individually timed sending system -- messages in a single mailing can be sent individually over the course of a week based on each recipient's past behavior. For example, Recipient A opened a message at 11:37 a.m. on a Wednesday and Recipient B opened the same message at 6:32 p.m. on a Friday. Accordingly, Recipient A's next message would be sent Wednesday at 11:37 a.m. and Recipient B's next message would be sent Friday at 6:32 p.m. And, of course, you can also create your own timing and ask the system to send based on some external calculations you've done.

Have a one-day sale and don't want to wait a week for delivery? You can tell the system to ignore day of week and just send at the best time of day over a 24-hour period.

And, did I mention that the system will automatically update things like timing of last click if you want it to?

This is some seriously cool technology and I am excited to see what kind of lift in response rates our clients will be seeing as they roll this out.

Posted by Bill at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the most commonly studied topics in our space is the best time of day, or best day of the week to send an email. Clearly, if you can increase response rates simply by changing the timing of your campaign, then doing so becomes a no-brainer. (Silverpop's clients, for example, tend to send more on Tuesday morning than any other time of the week.) Figuring out the best time for your product and your list can only come about with testing, but that doesn't stop the industry from continuing to speak in generalities.

The problem with sending all your messages at the same time is that it's a one-size-fits-all strategy. Like a restaurant that only serves one dish, it will do fine as long as every other restaurant serves only one dish. But one day, somebody is going to invent a menu.

A few years ago, eBags did just that. Rather than finding the best time to send to its list, the company found the best time to send to each individual recipient. I wrote a case study about it in my book, and the results were stunning. Using past mailings as a baseline, eBags found that with individually-timed messages:

• Click-through rates grew 20 percent.
• Conversion rates grew 65 percent.
• Average value per order grew 45 percent.
• Overall average revenue per receipient GREW 187 percent.

I've shared this case study many times, and it's remarkable how excited marketers get over the idea. With no more effort than any other blast mailing, they can generate lifts in response of 20-200 percent.

Posted by Bill at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I received an email from reader Lisa Harmon with some kind words about my blog, and telling me about an email marketing contest she and her Seattle-based agency sponsor each quarter.

The "Best EDM" Contest is part of a series of ongoing quarterly reviews designed to highlight outstanding examples of email marketing creative design, strategy and implementation. She and her panel evaluate hundreds of candidates and narrow it down to four before opening the contest up to voting.

You can take a look at the current four top contenders, and vote for your favorite here. And, to see tons of great examples of email creative in all categories, be sure to check out her firm's Email Direct Marketing Creative Review Blog here.

Thanks, Lisa!

Posted by Bill at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just read a great article by David Baker, vice president of email marketing at Agency.com. In his July 10 column for MediaPost's Email Insider, David asks the age-old question: how much email is too much? On one hand, marketers say they want to better understand the email channel and its ability to foster online customer relationships. On the other, they continue to shower recipients with urgent promotional messages that become less and less meaningful over time.

But if marketers know that implementing best practices, strategy and testing are the way to inspire loyalty and ROI, and they have the capability to do those things, why do they do they keep falling back on marketer-driven messaging? The answer seems to lie in basic human nature: it's simply more gratifying in the short-term.

David shares the story of a "more is better" client that has started mailing the same message, only with differing subject lines, to recipients as many as three times a week. The company, which has set ambitious email sales goals with no additional budget to achieve them, is getting good results and sees no reason to stop. David questions whether this short-term success is sustainable. But like so many things in life, it seems that these marketers will have to find out for themselves.

As I mention in my book, "The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing," the problem with over-mailing is that it can actually work for short periods of time, all the while silently ravaging your brand and any future return. Never forget that recipients will give you the benefit of the doubt right up until the moment they decide to ignore you completely.

Posted by Bill at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)