Making your email messages stand out from the clutter in your recipients' inboxes is going to be even more of a challenge this year, if marketers do as some predict and send more email in 2009 than in 2008.

Focusing on the three "p's" is a smart place to start. Conveying a distinctive personality via copy, images and design is one way to differentiate your messages. Also, your emails should clearly articulate your value proposition (the specific value provided to subscribers) and your positioning (how your emails are positioned relative to your competitors).

If you can't define any of these three Ps for your email program—or worse, if you ignore them—you'll end up with unfocused content that won't help you attain your business goals. You might also confuse or alienate your readers, which can lead to unsubscribes, spam complaints or inaction.

The Value Proposition

Your newsletter has to say more to your readers than just "read me" or "buy this product." Likewise, your email is competing with an inbox full of both permission email from your competitors and spam, all with something to push.

Your company surely has a value proposition for the products or services it sells. Your email program also needs one that reflects the corporate value proposition, but that clearly sets out what benefits it delivers for recipients.

Do you know what value your company's emails provide the subscriber? Following are just a few examples:

• First and Fast: The goal of your content or news is to be first to market. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times breaking news alerts are good examples.
• Insider/Rumors: Your aim is to provide information that no one else has—the old-fashioned scoop. TechCrunch, which covers start-ups and new technologies, is a good example.
• Analysis or Research: The goal is to provide analysis and insight on news or trends and is likely focused on depth and research on what it all means, rather than being first. The daily eMarketer newsletters are a prime example.
• Discovery: Very Short List is a prime example, or even the Costco newsletters, which somewhat replicate the "discovery" experience of their stores.
• Education-Oriented Ecommerce: This type of message uses education and resources to promote consumer purchases and loyalty. The REI emails are a good example.
• Aggregation: MarketingVox, an aggregator of marketing news, saves marketers time by compiling information from a variety of sources into a single email.

Although the goal of your emails may be to "sell more products," from a consumer perspective, what is it about your emails that would convince them to sign up or stay subscribed? Knowing your email value proposition will help you more accurately promote your email program and drive various decisions around copy style, length, type of offers, image versus text ratio, frequency and much more. If you don't know what you want your newsletter or email program to achieve, your readers won't, either.

Next up, the third "p"—positioning.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've become a big fan of Twitter, the short-message communication channel that lets you broadcast 140-character messages to a wide range of readers. It's one more channel for communicating with customers and prospects and for networking with peers, LinkedIn and Facebook, the social-media aggregator FriendFeed, and others.

Email provides the template for how to use new communication channels successfully. All the issues that can either help you fail spectacularly or become a messaging superstar--such as growing a list of quality followers and providing high-value content--have already been dealt with in email and can be applied to emerging channels.

You need only leverage what you've learned about successful email marketing to start out at a higher competence level than others who don't have the same background and can end up making the same mistakes that plagued emailers in the early years.

Twitter and email share many similarities, which I lay out in my latest Email Insider column, "Twitter: Email with a 140-Character Limit?" Seeing these similarities will help reinforce best communication practices, no matter whether you're emailing, Twittering, tagging links in your Delicious feed or posting material on your company's Facebook page.

Have you begun Twittering yet? Please share your experiences here or list any other similarities between Twitter and email that I might have overlooked. I also welcome you to follow my tweets; sign up for an account here if you don't already have one, then find my Twitter home here.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, we began rolling out the newest version of our Landing Pages application. Not only did we add three new social networks to our Share-to-Social capabilities&mdash:Bebo, Delicious and Reddit (that makes eight and counting)—we also added built-in A/B page testing.

What makes the new A/B test feature uniquely powerful is that our clients can now test variations of landing pages—all within the application, unlike other products that require the use of an external Web-site optimizer. (Which, by the way, will integrate nicely, should you want to use one.)

We all know that marketers need to test in order to deploy the best performers, increase conversions and drive sales. According to MarketingSherpa's 2008 "Landing Page Handbook," marketers who didn't test landing pages were equally likely to see year-over-year conversion rates increase or decrease. Yet, marketers who ran even the simplest tests were at least five times more likely to see year-over-year conversion rates increase rather than decrease.

So, if we know we should do it, then why don't we? Too complicated? Well, not anymore. This new feature was designed to be über usable. Click, click, and you're optimized.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Think about the emails that you subscribe to. Which newsletters and promotional emails do you anticipate, open as soon as they arrive and value the most? I'll bet that most of them have distinctive personalities.

This is often a tough challenge for promotional emails or corporate newsletters, where many people (the CEO, your boss, the legal department, the sales manager, etc.) might have their hands in the mix. Still, even the most conservative institutional publications can cultivate a personality.

Personality is a mix of positioning, your value proposition, your company's culture, your newsletter or email goals, and a reflection of who you understand your readers and customers to be. You express it through the offers you send or the news you report, your design and choice of images and mostly through your writing style, tone and voice.

Personality, however, is first and foremost embodied and conveyed through people. Think of the financial newsletters from The Motley Fool, with its tagline "To Educate, Amuse & Enrich." This is embodied in the irreverent and humorous personality of the two co-founders and expressed via company logo and approach to stock investing tips. The Magilla Marketing newsletter is a direct reflection of Ken Magill's personality, even though he works for a large corporate publisher.

Give your emails a personal voice, using an editor or executive from your company or even a fictitious character or amalgamation. Remember that email is a conversation between you and your subscribers. Conversations are more interesting than lectures.

So, cultivate a personal, reader-oriented approach (use "you" far more often than "I" or "we") and a tone that reflects natural speech. Read your copy out loud as you proof it. The ear often picks up awkward construction better than the eye.

One concern I often hear about using personality is this: What happens when the "human personality" leaves the company? This is why it is important that the person who embodies the essence of the personality needs to be consistent with the company's personality. The successor probably will inject a different individual personality into the emails, but the core tone and style can still move seamlessly from one human personality to the next.

What are your favorite emails and newsletters? Do they incorporate a distinctive personality? List your favorites below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's smart marketers want to engage their customers in new ways, and that means avoiding deliverability issues that stop your communication efforts dead in their tracks. Finding the right email service provider to help you improve deliverability and build long-term relationships with customers is forefront on many marketers' minds, but how can you differentiate one ESP from another? Here are five key questions to ask when comparing ESPs:

1) Do you support all authentication methods?
A lack of authentication subjects companies to increased scrutiny from anti-spam technologies. Look for an ESP that supports Sender Policy Framework, Sender ID, DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail.

2) How do you handle and report bounces?
All bounces are not created equal. You want an ESP that reacts to hard bounces and soft bounces differently and allows you to set parameters on how they're handled. For example, you may want to allow three delivery attempts for soft bounces over a certain period of time, but remove hard bounces from your list immediately.

3) Do you provide inbox monitoring?
Look for an ESP that can tell you if your message wound up in the recipient's inbox or went to their spam or bulk folder instead.

4) Do you give your clients a unique IP address?
Some ESPs will lump you in with other clients, making you vulnerable to their mistakes and putting your deliverability at risk through no fault of your own. Generally, choose an ESP that gives you your own IP address, which also has the benefit of allowing for quicker resolution if there's an ISP block.

5) How do you check for blacklisting?
You don't want to be the last one to know you're being blocked from communicating with your customers. Make sure your ESP casts a wide net when monitoring blacklists, including checking for blacklisted domains and URLs in addition to IP addresses.

For more tips on deliverability, visit our White Papers page to download the Silverpop white paper, "Email Delivery Rates Above 95%: 16 'Must Dos' to Make it Happen."

Posted by Ted Roberts at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark Brownlow of the blog "Email Marketing Reports" had a great post recently ("What you say ... what you communicate") about companies that use justification language in their emails.

Examples Mark cites include:

"You have received this email because you expressed interest in our products in the past."

"This is NOT SPAM."

"This email is sent in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003."

I couldn't agree more with Mark that many marketers who use "justification" sentences like these are in a way saying that, in fact, their emails probably are spam.

If your emails are truly permission-based and the opt-in process is completely transparent, why do you need to make the case that your emails are not spam or are wanted?

However, I also see this topic a bit differently than Mark. Like many people, I sign up for a lot of emails. They can look like spam when they finally show up—weeks later—from a brand or email address I no longer remember. In cases like this, reminding recipients why you're communicating with them is a best practice and will help to minimize spam complaints and lost subscribers.

Here are some quick tips to ensure your emails aren’t mistaken as spam by new subscribers:

• Deploy a welcome email or, better yet, a welcome email program. One that starts within minutes after a subscriber opts in is probably your best means to ensure that new subscribers will remember they signed up for your emails.
• Send your first email soon after a subscriber opts in. Make sure that new subscribers receive an email from you within a week, but preferably no later than a few days from opt-in. Consider that if you’re only sending a monthly newsletter, a number of your subscribers will not receive their first email from you for two, three or four weeks. Guaranteed, many will forget they subscribed—another reason why welcome emails are critical.
• Include subscription information in your email administrative footer. Because people may still forget they opted in, I like to see the following included:

• The email address used to subscribe
• Date they opted in or were added to your list
• The reason/circumstance of their opt-in: downloaded a white paper, signed up for news alerts, made a purchase, etc.

For example, the subscription information portion of the footer might read as follows: "You signed up on January 5, 2009, using emailaddress@xyz.com when you registered for our Webinar." Personalizing this sentence should be fairly easy, as the opt-in date and email address are usually captured automatically. The subscription "circumstance" will take a bit more work, but it’s fairly easy for your Webmaster to add a hidden field on your forms that describes the nature of the opt-in.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)