While on vacation recently, I had one of the best hamburgers I've ever eaten: a Kobe beef Havarti cheeseburger with ripe red tomatoes, caramelized onions, wild arugula and, of course, Havarti cheese on a premium beef patty. As I stared at my freshly served gourmet burger, with a bottle of ketchup and jar of Dijon mustard in the background, I faced a critical decision:

Should I do what I and many fellow Americans do, which is to pour a liberal amount of ketchup on the burger and add some mustard on the bun, or should I bite in to the burger first to enjoy its various "natural" flavors?

It wasn't a decision on the magnitude of whether to loan $700 billion to U.S. financial institutions, but this gorgeous burger's appearance made me rethink a near life-long habit of automatically adding a dose of Heinz ketchup to my all-beef patty.

Later on, I realized, as I often do, that my dilemma paralleled a common situation in email marketing. Most marketers also automatically add "ketchup" in the form of discounts, free shipping and other common incentives to their emails, when what they really need is a better-tasting burger.

Now, marketers deploy these tactics for a reason. Incentives and sweeteners produce results, and, in most cases, still deliver a great return-on-investment. But what if you didn't need ketchup—er, incentives?

So, here's my challenge to email marketers: Rethink your $6 email burger and serve up a $15 version instead.

Remember, the success of my $15 burger (with garlic fries) rested on the quality of the ingredients: homemade (or homemade-looking) buns, fresh produce, gourmet cheese and high-quality Kobe beef.

Now, these are key ingredients that will turn your fast-food email burger into a mouth-watering gourmet burger that will generate a higher ROI and improved margins because you need fewer incentives:

• Messages tailored to individual recipients based on their demographics or behavior
• A welcome program that sets expectations and creates value for new subscribers out of the gate and confirms that their decision to opt in to your email program was a good one
• Creative subject lines that motivate people to take the action they (and you) want, not just open the email
• Emails designed to render well on multiple environments and platforms—PC, Web and mobile
• Creative and compelling copy that motivates people to want to know more and act
• A competitively positioned email program, which serves a clear need to recipients relative to your competitors’ offerings
• Emails with genuine personality that provide a reason for subscribers to anticipate your next message
• Emails designed from a user perspective, making it easy for subscribers to find the information and links they need to take the action they want, anything from changing their preferences to buying your latest widget.

I'd love to hear feedback from readers who have been able to decrease their reliance on incentives and offers simply by improving the quality of the elements in their email program.

And, if you are ever in Laguna Beach, Calif, I recommend you stop at the Sapphire Laguna restaurant and order the Kobe beef Havarti cheeseburger. But, hold the ketchup!

Posted by Loren McDonald at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A report just published by JupiterResearch found that measurement is the top challenge for online advertisers, and the top agency differentiator for advertisers looking for an agency.

Savvy marketers realize that you can only achieve solid improvement on campaign elements that you actually take the time to measure. Demonstrating returns on investment—that’s what it is all about for marketers everywhere these days as the global economy continues to tighten. Email marketers have the upper hand here.

The great thing about email marketing is its ability to be evaluated quickly and effectively. If you're not evaluating past campaign performance, you’re missing out on key insights that can improve results. You can evaluate a campaign in real-time, demonstrating exactly what is working and what is not, and then easily make adjustments as needed. That’s a very powerful and convincing point to be able to make to the CFO seeking to slash costs.

An example of a good metric to monitor is click action. Email marketers can use the kind of robust reporting capabilities available with top email marketing solutions to track link activity and determine which links get the most clicks and which under-perform.. As a result, you can reduce the number of links in emails to avoid confusing subscribers and focus on the links that provide value to recipients and drive conversions.

There's a wealth of customer data in your email reports. Use it to create campaigns that produce huge results and show the boss exactly what kind of returns you're getting.

Posted by Elaine O'Gorman at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was at Shop.org's annual conference last week, and found some retailers expressing concern about holiday sales. The economy is weighing heavily on everyone's shoulders. Not surprising. An article in Promo reports a study by TNS/Retail Forward predicting retail sales in November and December to increase by only 1.5 percent.

It's time for online retailers to get their programs in order to maximize their results. There was certainly a lot of interest (standing room only) at the Shop.org event when I presented the findings of a study Silverpop conducted in conjunction with Internet Retailer magazine.

We found that the most successful email marketing programs—those run by online retailers ranked as among the Top 500 in America—offer consumers who sign up to receive emails options concerning the types of messages they want to receive. In fact, 56 percent of the Top 500 retailers offered subscription options, compared to only 26 percent of retailers who failed to make the top list. For example, Zales links its opt-in to a preference center offering subscribers choices of messages—wedding, anniversary, men's jewelry, clearance, etc.

Linking opt-in requests to a preference center can be a win-win situation. You gather information that allows you to send offers of interest to customers and prospects, and they enjoy receiving promotional messages likely to be of interest. It can make the difference between developing a relationship with a customer and having an email recipient ignore your messages or worse, hit the spam button.

Posted by Elaine O'Gorman at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I heard that the Virginia Supreme Court had overturned notorious AOL spammer Jeremy Jaynes' 2003 conviction for violating the state's spam law, my first reaction was, "What were those judges thinking?" But I also knew I needed to dig deeper to find out why they had a change of heart.

It turns out Jaynes was convicted under Virginia law before the federal CAN-SPAM law went into effect nationwide in January 2004. The court found that the Virginia anti-spam law was too broad—it applied to both commercial and non-commercial speech, unlike CAN-SPAM, and it also covered anonymous speech, which is protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

CNET columnist Declan McCullagh has an excellent analysis of the reasons behind the reversal here in his article, Why Virginia is right to overturn spam conviction.

The Virginia ruling shouldn't have any effect on email marketers who are subject to CAN-SPAM. If anything, it emphasizes why a uniform federal law like CAN-SPAM, despite its imperfections and detractors, is still a better legal weapon in the war on spam than a state-by-state patchwork of conflicting and contradictory laws.

The CAN-SPAM Act doesn't have the same broad reach and First Amendment issues that the Virginia law has, so enforcement across state lines is more uniform. States can still have their own anti-spam laws, but they can't be more restrictive than the U.S. law.

Fighting spam is a complicated and messy business but needs to be done without creating additional challenges for legitimate marketers.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My Email Insider column last week reviewed three major disagreements over basic email practices within the marketing community, but the one that sparked the most conversation was the debate over whether to remove or retain nonresponders—subscribers who haven't opened or clicked on your emails in a set time.

I’ll discuss the other disagreements that I outlined: single vs. double opt-in and using checked vs. unchecked boxes in subscription forms, in future blog posts.

In the column, I lined up with the crowd that believes removing “inactives” enables marketers to focus greater energy on actives so they can allocate more time and resources on retaining subscribers and minimize ISP filtering or blocking of messages sent to known inactive addresses.

A few commenters agreed with me, but others said that the “remove” position disregards the brand value of email. Others said they believe the deliverability argument might be overstated.

I was glad to see the dissenting opinions because they expanded the conversation about dealing with inactives beyond the simple, "I'm going to send my email to them until they bounce, unsubscribe or complain," vs. the, "Six or 12 months without clicking and they're gone!" debate.

Here's my take on those viewpoints:

First, we at Silverpop are big believers in email as a brand-awareness vehicle and a vital ingredient in multi-channel marketing. Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey wrote an entire chapter on Email Brand Value in his book “The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing.”

Second, I emphasized a gradual approach to removing people, and then only after putting them through a strategic reactivation program. Also, you have to know your own sales cycle. For some marketers, it might make sense to keep nonresponders on their lists if the typical customer purchases only every few years.

However, just keeping old and inactive email addresses on your list ignores the realities in the modern deliverability ecosystem. As ISPs increasingly incorporate response rates and level of individual activity into their filtering algorithms, retaining too many truly inactive addresses has a good chance of hurting delivery rates.

Where do you stand? If you’ve had any interesting results from either retaining or removing old and inactive email addresses, we’d love to hear about it below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)