I have an explanation for why people click the spam button on so-called "legitimate" email: the "Forgot I Signed Up for Email" (FISUE) Syndrome.

This often happens when people sign up for Webinars, free trials or buy something online. They either forgot they signed up or didn't realize that being added to your regular email program came with their transaction.

You must make a clear case to your subscribers that your email is in their inboxes at their invitation. If not, FISUE Syndrome will claim another victim.

Was That Email Spam? Or Just Spam-Like?
Earlier this year, I received an email from a presentation company that I was sure I had never heard of nor done business with.

I was about to send the company a nasty email but decided to sort my emails on its sender name. Presto!

Turns out I had actually received five previous emails from this company, but several had different "From" names and branding. I also never received a welcome email. (I may have signed up for a company-sponsored Webinar several months earlier and provided my email address during registration.)

In short, I didn't know who this company was or whether I knowingly opted in for email, and I still don't.

Mistakes that Cause FISUE Syndrome
This company committed some of the common mistakes that lead to FISUE Syndrome:

• From/Sender Names: Of the six emails I had received, the company used five different "From" names. Bad. Pick a simple, logical "From" name and stick with it.
• Welcome Email: It did not send a confirmation email, let alone a well-crafted welcome email. It could have thanked me for opting in, told me more about the company or service, or linked to a white paper.
• Design: The emails have an amateurish look and feel. This told me the company was not serious about email marketing practices and contributed to my sense that this latest email was unsolicited.
• Frequency: I discovered that I received the six emails in August, September and October 2008, one in April and two in July 2009. No wonder I didn't remember this company.

How to Minimize FISUE
Follow some basic rules that apply when emailing to a new address:

• Opt-in Process: Provide details on the opt-in and confirmation pages about your email program. Include frequency information, a link to a sample, your value proposition and your sender name and email address. Don't use a pre-checked box if possible.
• Welcome Email: Immediately send a welcome email (within an hour after opt-in if possible) that restates subscription details, including how it happened: "Thank you for signing up for our Webinar and for subscribing to our newsletter, 'Tuesday Tips.'"

  Remind subscribers exactly what they'll be receiving and when. More information on welcome emails can be found here:

• Welcome Email Best Practices (PPT on SlideShare)
• Using Welcome Emails to Drive Increased Engagement and ROI (Recorded Webinar)
• New Subscriber Series: Consider a short welcome series of emails for new subscribers. Sent every few days, for example, these emails familiarize new subscribers with your email value proposition and help create interest in your future emails.
• "From" Name: Brand your sender and subject lines to remind your subscriber of who you are. Generally, avoid using a person's name or cutesy newsletter title in the "From" name. Go with the name your new subscriber will most likely recognize. Also, consider additional branding in the subject line if you have multiple email streams or if your brand or company is not well known.
• Reach Out to Inactive New Subscribers: Monitor new subscribers and have a program to get them engaged. For example, send a survey, special offer or value-added content triggered when new subscribers don't open or click on any of your emails in the first few months.
• Transparency: You can reduce subscribers' concerns about whether they opted in to your email with details in the administrative footer area of every email, including:
• Date the person opted in
• Email address the subscriber used
• How the subscription originated: "You subscribed to our 'Tuesday Tips' newsletter on November 19, 2009, when you registered for our Webinar."
• Link to your preference center where they can see the information they provided you

Investing the extra effort to make your emails unforgettable is your best defense against the FISUE Syndrome.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Has email outlived its usefulness in a communications world where social networks generate the most buzz? Or, is it still a vital part of this evolving world?

The email industry has been debating those questions since a Wall Street Journal writer suggested that email is on its way out.

I agree with her initial assertion that communication patterns are shifting, especially in personal email use.

For me, Twitter direct messages (one-to-one private messages) have replaced email when I need a quick response or my primary relationship with someone is on Twitter. For other situations, email remains the most efficient means of communicating when I have to say more than will fit into a few 140-character Tweets.

However, I disagree that email's time is up. On the contrary: Email is the linchpin of a diverse network of communication channels, which users will customize to meet their unique and personal needs.

For example, some users will rely on Twitter direct messages, Facebook postings or text messages when they want instant access to friends and family.

Instead of emailed flight check-in reminders or weather advisories, they'll opt to receive them in SMS or text messaging. Organizing an event might be more efficient in Facebook than by repeated emailing to a group.

You don't lose access to your customers if they don't want emailed payment reminders anymore. You just need to offer the channel that best suits their individual needs and preferences.

The Case for Email Marketing
Too many things have to happen before commercial email will die.

First, recipients have to stop opening, acting on and converting from email.

Next, marketers have to stop sending email. Given that commercial email goes beyond the standard broadcast message to include lifecycle communications triggered by customer behavior, this is not likely to happen.

Finally, companies would have to halt their transition from print to digital communications. That's not likely, either, because the infrastructure currently supports email, not Twitter or Facebook.

Also, many companies are increasingly seeing how email can support business goals, solve problems and save money all the way through the organization, such as resolving customer issues via email instead of through a more expensive call center, or sending prospectuses or reports in email instead of spending money on paper and postage.

Social Network Limitations
Until something better comes along, no social network can replicate the positives of the email experience and eliminate the negatives.

Many network messages are ephemeral. If you aren't paying attention when a friend Tweets a message, or if you go days without checking your Facebook page, you'll miss those messages unless they are sent directly to you, you hunt them down, or you have them emailed to you. (This is another vital use for email in a social networking age.)

Assuming you have decent delivery, your email messages will sit in the inbox until your recipient opens it, deletes it or moves it to a folder for better management.

Many messages aren't suited to the public exposure of a social network. Email offers privacy, space to develop your message unhindered by a 140-character limit, and easy access.

Finally, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (three of the best-known social networks) can't match the rich experience of a well-crafted email message: images, navigation, the space to provide inviting copy, and multiple facets such as product info, promotions and articles.

Marketers Cautioned: The Real Enemy Is "Us"
As the cartoon character Pogo once proclaimed, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

While the explosion of mobile applications and social media outlets is clearly creating shifts in email and channel usage, bad marketing practices will likely have the biggest negative impact on our beloved channel.

These are just a few activities that will take a few years off the life expectancy of email marketing:

• Poor permission and opt-in practices. Consumers don't know or care what the CAN-SPAM Act allows. Getting permission is a must.
• Lack of relevance. The vast majority of emails sent today are one-size-fits-all, lacking any personalization or segmentation based on preferences and demographic or behavioral data. The "blast" has probably had the single biggest negative impact on email marketing's vitality.
• Overmailing. Marketers have gone crazy with frequency. The mantra at many companies seems to be "Heck, if six times a month works, let's send 12 times." This might work in direct mail, but in email, this is a strategy that generally backfires in the long run.
• Lack of differentiation. I subscribe to dozens of emails from retailers, and quite frankly, I see little difference between most of them. Every subject line is almost identical—"Free shipping and 20% off"—and the content and design of the emails do not leverage the actual differentiation among these various brands.
• Lack of personality. The more successful brands have discovered that people are turned off by faceless corporate-speak. People are attracted to communication that is real, transparent, human and full of life.
• Poor design. Messages that don't render properly across browsers, email clients and platforms (basic cellphone, smartphone, desktop or laptop computers) are simply annoying to recipients.

As a global community, the choice is ours: to change our ways and make the channel as vibrant as ever, or watch it head into a long and painful slide into irrelevance.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We all know that image blocking by ISPs and email clients can wreak havoc with your HTML emails and affect click-throughs and conversions.

This is particularly a critical issue with image-based call-to-action (CTA) buttons. But all hope is not lost.

In our recent Webinar, "Using Innovations in Email Creative to Drive Increased Engagement," Aaron Smith and Lisa Harmon of the email creative agency Smith-Harmon outlined a great technique that enables email marketers to use image-based buttons but still convey the CTA if images are blocked.

Here is Smith-Harmon's "bullet-proof" button approach:

Continue reading "The "Bulletproof" Button " »

Posted by Loren McDonald at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sharing email messages on social networks can increase your reach by exposing your messages to large audiences beyond your subscribers in ways forwarding to friends can't match.

That's one finding revealed in Silverpop's new study, "Emails Gone Viral: Measuring 'Share to Social' Performance," now available as a free report.

This new study analyzes key aspects of social sharing and uses a new series of benchmark metrics we created to report our findings. Leverage these benchmarks to assess the performance of your own social-sharing program or to forecast what you might expect before launching a campaign.

study report also presents a detailed set of best-practice recommendations and a comprehensive list of additional resources to help you maximize the benefit of your email social-sharing initiatives.

5 Key Study Findings

1. Share-to-Social significantly outperforms FTAF. Even though social sharing is still new to email marketing and consumers in general, it is already outperforming that old standard, forward to a friend. We found that organic social sharing rates (done without an incentive or reward) average 0.5 percent, compared to an estimated 0.1 percent or less when sharing via forward-to-a-friend links. Based on an average overall click-through-rate of approximately 5 percent, this means that 1 out of 10 clicks is on a social sharing link.

Continue reading "Silverpop Share-to-Social Study Establishes New Benchmarks" »

Posted by Loren McDonald at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Email done quite well
Is loved by ISPs
And subscribers too

Okay, so I'm not the Shakespeare of the haiku world yet. If you can do better, your creativity could win you a one-year membership in the Email Experience Council, a $399 value and a great way to connect with your fellow email marketers, download resources and improve your email skills.

To say nothing, of course, of the thrill of seeing your content entry displayed on the EEC site for the world to appreciate and envy (more on that later).

It all started when a group of self-described "email snobs" started talking via Twitter and blog posts/comments about the language we use to talk about email marketing. Some of the conversation was inspired in part by my latest Email Insider column, "Warning: Blasting May Be Harmful to 'Our' Health."

On an email discussion list, someone posted a response to the conversation about language in the form of a haiku, which begat more haikus and eventually drew the EEC into the fray. Now the EEC is sponsoring the (sort of) official 2009 Haiku Slam, with EEC members voting on the winners.

We're still working out the details, including the page at the EEC site where you can view other entries. In the meantime, you can track various fun and serious discussions on email marketing via the hashtag #emailsnob - or Twitter search. Follow me - @LorenMcDonald – and @Silverpop and other participants, and we'll pass on the particulars as they become available. Feel free to contribute to the discussion, too.

Once you have crafted your contest entries, send them to aswerdlow at the-dma.org. Post 'em in the comments section here, too, if you're especially proud of them.

Here is another of my planned entries that might inspire your own creativity or your competitive spirit:

Blasts are from the past
And relevance they will kill
ROI, think not

Also, in an upcoming blog post I will go into more depth about why I think the language we use to talk about email marketing is so important and where the real threat to email's future is coming from, so watch this space.

Now, put down that coffee cup and start haiku-ing!

Posted by Loren McDonald at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Saying "relevance" is the key to success in email marketing is a bit like saying something is "American as motherhood and apple pie." Whether you've heard the phrase before or not, you can probably guess the general meaning, but what does it really mean?

Similarly, "relevance" in reference to email marketing success is generally understand and agreed upon. But we don't really have a single, agreed-on definition for the term, let alone the elements that go into making an email relevant to recipients.

So, on a whim recently, I polled the Twitter community, asking people how they defined email marketing "relevance." Here's a sampling of the responses:

Continue reading "Relevance: "The Right Message" at "The Right Time?"" »

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How are email marketing practices of the top online retailers changing, for the better or worse? Find out at a free Webinar on Thursday August 20 at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, when I present results from Silverpop's latest study comparing the email practices of retailers from Internet Retailer's Top 500 list and 395 additional companies.

Continue reading "Email Practices of Top Online Retailers - Upcoming Webinar" »

Posted by Loren McDonald at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My most recent Email Insider column outlines the specialized knowledge email marketers need to have to run their programs successfully. It goes well beyond the basics you learned back in Marketing 101:

1. Email strategy
2. List-building/acquisition
3. Email design
4. Deliverability
5. Copywriting
6. Database marketing
7. Legal issues
8. Email trends and best practices

You can find more detail about each topic in the full column: "Email Success Requires Well-Educated Marketers."

If you're ready to start learning or take your program to the next level, following is my quick list of email resources to bookmark, download, read, buy or attend. This is not intended to be an all-encompassing list but rather a "get started list"—which I will expand and update in Silverpop's Resources center in the coming months.

1. Books: These step-by-step manuals explain the principles of effective email marketing. My shortlist:

• The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing by Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey
• Email Marketing, An Hour A Day by Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels
• The Truth about Email Marketing by Simms Jenkins

2. White Papers/Research: Dozens get published every month, most often by email service providers or consultants. The most useful ones go beyond promotion to deliver solid information on best practices, the state of the industry and more.

• Silverpop
• Email Experience Council (EEC)
• Return Path

3. Blogs: These are some blogs you should bookmark and visit often or get updates on via email or RSS reader:

• Silverpop blogs--Besides this Engagement Marketing blog, also check out Bill Nussey's "Email Marketing Strategy Blog" and "Demand Generation" for B2B marketers.
• "No Man is an Iland"--Written by independent consultant Mark Brownlow, one of email's sharpest writers and my personal favorite blog for the last several years.
• "Be Relevant"--Tamara Gielen tracks and circulates the best blog posts so you don't have to.
• Deliverability.com--Breaking news, thoughts and advice from people on the deliverability front lines.
• RetailEmail Blog--From Chad White, now with the email creative agency Smith-Harmon.

4. Email Newsletters on Email Marketing: Almost all these are examples of best practices in action, not just for content but also formatting, delivery, etc.:

• Silverpop Digital Marketer
• MarketingSherpa
• ClickZ Email Marketing Experts
• MediaPost Email Insider
• iMedia Connection
• BtoB Email Marketer Insight
• MarketingProfs

5. Webinars: Most are free, and in any given month there are probably 20 to 30 presented in the industry. Silverpop and other vendors present these email marketing Webinars either on their own or via publisher sponsorships.

6. Conferences: Rub elbows with other marketers and get tips, answers and advice from experts. Here are just a few examples:

• The DMA's Email Evolution Conference
• MediaPost Email Insider Conference
• Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association
• Direct Marketing Club of New York City
• Online Marketing Summit

7. Online Communities: Post your questions and help out fellow marketers:

• Email Marketers Club
• Email Marketing Roundtable

8. Twitter: Great forum for news, advice and commentary. Start by following these folks (don't forget @LorenMcDonald and @Silverpop):

• John Caldwell--@jacaldwell
• Chad White--@RetailEmailBlog
• Tamara Gielen--@tamaragielen
• Stephanie Miller (Return Path)--@StephanieSAM
• Mark Brownlow--@markatemr

Your Suggestions?
This list is just a start. If you have a favorite information source you'd like to share, I urge you to post it in the comments section below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Email is a marketer's dream channel, as you well know, but when done correctly, it can work wonders throughout your organization, too. However, few outside the marketing department understand this or know how to leverage email for maximum benefit.

As your company's email guru, you should look for opportunities where you can put your know-how to work, helping a department improve its efforts or begin using email to achieve its goals or solve problems. Offer your email team's expertise on technical and best-practice matters such as design, content and deliverability.

Spend some time with other department heads, finding out their pain points, learning what they hope to achieve and devising ways to incorporate your email resources into the process.

Example: Email Supports Customer Services

Email can help trim costs without sacrificing customer contact by driving subscribers to automated services and online customer support. One of our clients has calculated that outbound email costs 1/60th of an outbound call from a call center.

A few other suggestions:

• Promote surveys via email to measure customer satisfaction and use of products and services.
• Use newsletters to educate customers on how to use specific features, with links to user forums and social-media channels where users can post questions and advice.
• Send a "getting started" email series after opt-in, with links to a welcome kit and FAQs.
• Send payment reminders with links to Web-based payment centers.

In my latest Email Insider column, "Are You Using Email To Help Other Departments Achieve Their Goals?" I outline ways email can drive value and help achieve goals for finance, human resources, MIS/IT, sales, product development and merchandising programs run outside the marketing department.

Your goal is to help people rethink email's place in your organization, as not just a revenue generator, for example, but also a key driver of employee education, customer retention, cost reduction, and other corporate and departmental initiatives.

By helping other departments see the benefits email can bring them, you build respect for your own email program, which can manifest itself at budget time.

My suggestions above are just a few examples where email can play a greater role in your company. If you have any great examples of how your company or clients have used email beyond the standard marketing initiatives, please share them in the comments area.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When a company finds itself struggling for sales in a tight economy, the first response is often to start competing on prices.

Although price slashing, discounts and other costly promotions can bring short-terms gains, they could end up tarnishing your email program if you simply turn it into "the discount channel."

Frequent discount offers simply train your customers to wait for a deal before pulling the sales trigger. Your best customers, though, will likely be more interested in getting better value for their money than yet another 20 percent discount that all of your subscribers receive. When every other commercial email is pushing the same promotions, your email is fighting harder to stand out in the inbox.

How to do it? Find ways to strengthen your relationship with your brand-loyal, high-value customers. These are the people who will continue to buy from you, but you must offer something more tangible than another free-shipping promotion.

Use customer data to create targeted or lifecycle messages, such as shopping-cart reminders, cross-selling, upselling and restocking reminders, which build on preference data or previous purchases.

If big-ticket items aren't moving, feature lower-cost alternatives, such as a pair of earrings that match a previous necklace purchase, or a three-day domestic cruise instead of two weeks in Italy.

Keeping email a high-value, high-return channel will help you resist the trend toward turning email into a low-value discount channel. I talk about this in more depth in my recent Email Insider column, "Strategies to Meet 5 Macro Trends Altering Email."

The other four strategies:

• Market with global sensitivity to avoid sending culturally irrelevant emails.
  
• Use a mix of channels--microblogging, social networks and email--to speed news and communications.
  
• Build engagement to break through "attention distraction" from channels that compete for your readers' eyes.
  
• Give your email messages a distinct personality through looks and "voice."

I welcome your comments about these strategies and what you're doing to help maintain your email program's value in these stressful times.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're an email marketer, you've probably learned one hard truth: Your executive management doesn't care about email as much as you do.

These C-Suite executives are more concerned about the issues that affect the company bottom line, such as revenue, customer retention, profit margins, return on budget investment, costs to deliver products and support customers, customer acquisition costs, lead flow and more.

Your email program either does or can affect these critical aspects, but you have to use the most relevant metrics to tell that story. Think outside the box of familiar metrics such as open and click rates. Work with other departments to find ways to measure how email contributes to their areas.

So your last campaign drew a company-best open rate? Yawn. Only you care. Tell management instead that since incorporating FAQs and product tips in your email program, you've reduced the number of calls to customer support by 15 percent. Now you've got their attention.

You don't have to abandon your other metric approaches, because you need them to understand how your program is performing and where you can make improvements. But many marketers spend most of their time benchmarking their email performance instead of using metrics to measure how their email program affects management's key concerns.

Email Performance and Company Goals

Email metrics fall into two general categories: "process" metrics that measure your email program's performance currently and over time, and "output" metrics, which measure how your email program contributes to your company's strategic marketing and business goals.

You employ both kinds of metrics in four basic measurement approaches:

• Analyze performance of a single message or campaign and diagnose problems.


• Gain insights into customer/subscriber behavior that can help you deliver more relevant messages.


• Benchmark your program against your peers or your own past performance.


• Measure your email program's performance against specific marketing or company goals.

(See my latest Email Insider column, "Are You Using the Right Metrics?" for a complete explanation.)

Most of these uses of metrics measure email processes, such as deliverability rate, open or click rate, or list churn. Unfortunately, this seems to be where most email marketers focus their measurement efforts.

Instead, spend more time measuring your email program against company goals. When you can show how email helps solve some of your company's most pressing concerns, you speak the language your executives understand. Your reward is increased management mindshare and resources.

For further information on key email metrics, download the new Silverpop white paper, "Beyond Opens and Clicks: 5 Email Metrics to Boost Results and Prove Your Worth."

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marketers who can reach their email subscribers when they're actively in their inboxes will gain a competitive advantage. Quite simply, having your message at the top of the inbox makes it much more likely to be seen and acted on.

However, finding that "magic moment" has been a major challenge for email marketers.

It's impractical, given your list demographics, time variables and mindshare, which I discuss in my recent Email Insider column. The key is being able to use recipient time-of-day open and click data.

Send Time Optimization Calculates Ideal Email Delivery Time

Silverpop recently unveiled Send Time Optimization (STO), which automatically calculates the optimal time to send to each recipient, based on a recipient's past mailing behavior. Your message is then distributed at the ideal day and time without requiring multiple segments or scheduled mailings.

Send Time Optimization (STO) analyzes when individual recipients interact with your messages over a rolling period of time and calculates the ideal email delivery time for each recipient on your list, no matter the time zone.

Clients See Measurable Lift

A number of Silverpop clients who have been using Send Time Optimization have reported phenomenal results. Across a sample of just a few clients, we've seen these results:

• 20 percent to 46 percent increase in open rates
• 30 percent to 50 percent increase in click rates
• 52 percent to 75 percent increase in total revenue
• 40 percent increase in net revenue (Encyclopedia Britannica)
• 30 percent increase in total number of orders per campaign
• 35 percent to 47 percent increase in value per order

These numbers are exciting, and not just because of improved performance. Like trigger and drip campaigns, Send Time Optimization leverages the power of marketing automation. In this era of tightening budgets, reduced resources and overflowing inboxes, email marketers need all the advantages they can muster.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The title of Silverpop's most recent Webinar says it all: "Transactional Emails: Loved by Recipients, Neglected by Marketers."

In this Webinar (view below), Silverpop Product Marketing Manager Whit Lanier and I showed how transactional messages, which are highly relevant to recipients, can drive engagement when you add carefully chosen marketing content to a branded design consistent with your promotional emails and newsletters.

For many marketers, though, these are an overlooked opportunity, often because the responsibility for transactional emails belongs in another department.

In my latest Email Insider column, "Transactional Emails: Make Your First Impression Count," I review the reasons why moving transactional emails into the marketing department makes sense, not just because you can create more useful and attractive messages but also because you can more easily monitor recipient actions and deliverability, as you do with your other branded email.

The following question on using HTML in transactional emails was the most asked question during and after the Webinar:

Q: There's the perception that transactional messages are text messages, and recipients have been trained for that. If you move to a more visual approach with images and HTML, doesn't that make them more suspicious-looking? Will it increase deliverability challenges?

A: Not necessarily, if you do them correctly. If you design transactional messages with the right brand, with HTML text that renders with images blocked, and if you test the message template first with a tool such as Pivotal Veracity to check for spam-filter triggers in content or design, you should minimize any deliverability issues and avoid raising trust issues.

Four tips:

• The subject line must be crystal-clear: "Confirming your purchase from XYZ Online," for example, instead of "Order Confirmation."
• Use a friendly "from" address that names the company or department that generated the transaction: "XYZ Online" instead of a vague email address.
• Always place the details of the transaction front and center in the message to comply with CAN-SPAM requirements. Place promotional content below or to the side of the transactional content.
• Always check with your legal counsel if you have any concerns.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The unsubscribe is perhaps the most misunderstood and ignored element of an email program. But given that a best practices unsubscribe process minimizes damage to your brand, aids deliverability and can help retain subscribers, it's worth a closer look.

Good Practice: Make It Easy to Unsubscribe
Unsubscribing is a normal part of the email relationship, and using tricks to make it difficult to opt out will backfire with an increase in spam complaints. Alternately, a trustworthy unsubscribe process can help your deliverability by leading more people to use it instead of clicking the spam button, deleting your emails unopened or leaving you when they migrate to a new email address.

Start by labeling your unsubscribe link clearly and in the same size type as you use in your email's main message, and use a text link instead of an image-based link so readers can see it even with blocked images. Locate the link in the same place in every message, preferably in an email administrative footer. In certain situations, such as when sending to segments that are completely inactive or have high spam-complaint rates, consider including an unsubscribe link near the top of your message.

Find more thoughts about where to locate the unsubscribe link in my Email Insider column, "The Unsubscribe Link Location: Top, Bottom or Both?"

Better Practice: Make It Easy for Subscribers to Do What They Really Want

Yes, you should keep the express lane open for subscribers who really want off your list. But some just want to change an aspect of their subscription, like their email address, format, interests or frequency.

Suggest alternatives along with the unsubscribe, and let them know in your newsletter that they can either unsubscribe or change preferences easily. You'll end up retaining more subscribers, even if they move to another communication channel.

Best Practice: Make Your Email Program Irresistible

Think about the reasons people unsubscribe:

• Emails come too frequently
• Lack of relevance
• Email content isn't what they expected
• Their interests changed
• Never really wanted your emails to begin with

Look at every aspect of your email program for ways to improve it. Consider these:

• Be explicit at opt-in about what you send and when
• Add a welcome program
• Use subscriber data to segment your list and send targeted, personalized messages
• Move to a lifecycle program or triggered messages instead of bath-and-blast broadcasts
• Design attractive messages that render well with or without images, regardless of platform, and tell your story with well-written copy.

Unsubscribes are generally a sign that you've failed with some aspect of your email program. Embrace this and work to improve those areas that aren't meeting subscriber expectations. However, don't fear the unsubscribe, because by making this option easier, you'll minimize more-damaging spam complaints.

If you still have questions or doubts, post them below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To answer my own question from my recent blog post "Have Social Networks Killed the Birthday Email?" I say no, they haven't. In fact, the birthday email, the anniversary reminder and similar email messages could help keep email relevant and alive as a marketing channel.

What has to change, however, is the way email marketers approach their own email programs.

Why has social networking taken off like a rocket over the last two to three years? Because people are hungry to connect and share information with each other in any way they can.

Social networks let them do that easily and in exciting new ways. They can meet up with people from their past (think Classmates.com), with people they'd like to meet (think LinkedIn or Twitter) or with friends and family in new ways (think Facebook).

Social Media Is Changing the Email Landscape

Email has been a connecting point, too, even though spam and overzealous companies started to pollute the channel. Today, more email users are savvy and sophisticated about how they manage their email. Their expectations and use of email are evolving, both from years of experience and from their involvement with social networking.

Marketers who don't understand or respond to this rapid and radical change in expectations will likely see their email programs decline in performance and engagement. In short, email needs to become even more "social" in its tone, personality, conversational style and relevance.

Work Harder to Stand Out in the Inbox

In my Email Insider column, "Will Social Media Kill the Email Star?" I urge marketers to think about how the inbox has evolved over the years, to find ways to make their messages stand out, and to get management buy-in for the resources you need to take your email program to the higher level you need to maintain your program's ROI.

This isn't a new plea. However, social-network notifications, which are triggered emails that speak directly to the recipient instead of a broadcast audience, up the ante even more.

This doesn't mean you necessarily have to throw out your entire email program and start over. However, you do need to rethink how your emails are positioned relative to this influx of social network emails and increased volume of commercial messages--and what your subscribers want and expect from you in this environment.

These changes go beyond adding share-to-social links in your emails and are really about creating an email experience for your subscribers that reflects what you know about them and when, what and how they want to be communicated to from your company.

It also isn't simply about turning your emails into 140-character Tweets. It is, however, about recognizing that many email subscribers now expect less selling and more education, less corporate speak and more personality, content and recommendations from their peers. And they likely expect all of those to be done in a manner that is short, sweet and scannable on a mobile device.

Are your personal expectations with email changing? Are you making changes in your email program to reflect this new social environment? Let us know your observations in the comments section.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We all know how the Web and email have changed the way we communicate with each other and with companies, but the light bulb really went on for me when I looked at the ways friends, co-workers and peers sent me greetings before, on and after my recent birthday.

First, here's the tally of how and from whom I received happy birthday wishes:

1 - direct mail (Southwest Airlines)
1 - personal phone call from our Lexus dealer
1 - work email (a savvy co-worker who thought an email would be more special and different)
2 – emails from companies (Olympus, Pasta Pomodoro)
2 - Twitter direct message (this is a one-to-one private message)
7 - Twitter @replies (these are public messages)
7 - in person (wife, two daughters and four members of The Cheesecake Factory waitstaff)
33 - Facebook messages via Facebook's new home page feed and email notifications

The first time I viewed many of the Facebook wishes was via email notifications that let me know someone had posted a note on my Facebook wall.

They really stood out in my inbox, whereas on the marketing side, the commercial interactions were the same old thing: "Free shipping!" "XX percent off!" "Buy now!"

Only two marketers used the personal data I have willingly shared with them--in this case, my birth date--to send me unique, personal and relevant messages.

On top of this comes the Nielsen Online survey claiming that social networks and blogs have become more popular online activities than email.

I'll be exploring what this all means for email marketing in future blog posts and my Email Insider column, but for now this insight stands out:

The evolution in digital communication channels and the ways people are using them mean marketers have to work harder on building relevance, using the customer data they have to send more relevant, targeted messages.

Just mail-merging someone's name into the subject line doesn't make this happen. Nor is this another plea for segmentation. Rather, it means creating emails that are more personal, sound more like a dialogue than a TV pitch and reflect some personality other than "sell, sell, sell!"

Otherwise, they'll fade into insignificance next to the emails that speak to a subscriber's personal interests and relationships.

If you have thoughts about how social networking is intersecting with email and the implications for marketers, I'd love to see them. Post them in the comments below, and stay tuned for more on the changing use of digital communications.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s one thing there's no shortage of in the email industry: Opinions on the best way (meaning "the only way") to do email marketing.

Three examples of hot debates: Does single opt-in rule or double opt-in? Check the permission box in advance or leave it unchecked? Retain inactives or remove them?

If you're a marketer, you've probably gone looking for the definitive answer to these and other issues in many places, such as industry blogs, columns like Email Insider or ClickZ, Webinars featuring industry leaders, workshops, etc. And if you have, you know there are as many opinions on the "best" way as there are "experts" expressing them in blog posts, columns or white papers.

The trouble is, the “right” answer is often “It depends,” not “Never do this or that.” In fact, the right answer for you and your email program and company could be all wrong for another company that runs its email marketing program differently.

In my recent Email Insider column, "Everything I Tell You Is Wrong," I suggest that the best way to sort through all this conflicting advice is to focus on the logical aspects in the debates over best-practice recommendations instead of the black-and-white insistence on one approach over another. Then, test, test and retest to find what works for your company.

Read the column to see why "It depends" is sometimes the best answer in the three current best-practice debates: whether single or double opt-in works best, prechecked versus unchecked permission boxes, and whether to remove or retain inactives.

I do believe there are "generally accepted best practices"—such as using welcome emails, gaining permission, and optimizing for blocked images—but implementing them has no single "right" way.

Have a favorite email practice for which the right answer is "It depends"? Let us know in the comments below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even though sharing email content with social networks and sites is still a new concept for most people, enlisting your subscribers to spread your message to their networks is rapidly becoming a standard email marketing practice.

My previous Engagement Marketing blog post explained why people share content with family, friends and peers and revealed the general qualities that make one email shareworthy and another one not.

This time I'll outline six design and content ideas that can help increase the shareworthiness of your emails:

1. Target the right social networks and media. The hottest social site on the Internet might not be the right fit for your subscribers or market niche.

2. Explain how to use your social-sharing feature in your welcome email and in regular program emails. Include instructions in both the welcome email and the first few email messages you send that include a sharing function. Then, either link to an explanation page on your Web site, or put instructions in your email footer and link to it using inline navigation.

3. Test the share function design, location and copy. Use text links and the social networks' logos to be sure people see them with or without images enabled. Also, test which locations of the share links within your emails deliver the most clicks and shares.

4. Highlight shareworthy content. Make your content actionable and easy to read. A European airline saw strong sharing results with a compelling and simple free-travel offer: "100% Discount for Your Beloved One."

5. Track how readers use your social-sharing features, and then use that information to refine your content. Over time, consider segmenting out your high-value or frequent sharers from the rest of the pack, and send them special offers or content.

6. Test, refine and test again. Like everything in email marketing, what works for one company might fall flat at yours; so, test everything.

I go into more detail about these tactics in my latest Email Insider column, "More On Making Your Emails Shareworthy."

Posted by Loren McDonald at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently returned from the second annual Email Evolution Conference (EEC), where presentations, panel discussions and personal conversations showed that marketers are beginning to understand how email and social networking can work together to better engage with customers and prospects.

Many sessions touched on the growing importance of social media—going where your customers are—and integrating email into a company's social marketing efforts. To underscore this, many attendees were posting live Tweets (updates on Twitter) under their employers’ Twitter brands.

Social media is clearly exploding like nothing the marketing world has seen in years, probably since the Internet explosion itself. Email will not disappear anytime soon, but the growth in social media adoption does provide both challenges and opportunities for email marketers.

Are Your Emails 'Shareworthy'?

So, what does it all mean for you? To start with, you should look at the emails you send in a new light: Are they "shareworthy”?

In other words, does your email content encourage your subscribers to share your emails with their tribes (friends, family or peers) on their social networks?

Ever since Silverpop went live in 2008 with its "Share-to-Social" function, which lets email subscribers post email content on their social networks, I've been thinking about what actually motivates someone to share content.

My latest Email Insider column, "Are Your Emails 'Shareworthy'?" outlines six reasons that people share:

• They want to contribute to the conversation.
• Sharing serves their self-interest.
• They want to help others.
• Sharing validates their self-worth.
• Sharing with likeminded people makes them feel part of a community.
• Sharing prurient or shocking material makes them feel less guilt at gawking.

Once you understand why people share, you can tailor your content around the attributes you think would prompt people to post your emails to their networks.

Factors That Contribute to 'Shareworthiness'

However, you can't just count on appealing to your subscribers' altruistic or ego-feeding natures to have your emails shared. Your emails must also address these key factors:

• Trustworthiness that makes a subscriber willing to attach his or her personal brand to your content
• Tribal interests, e.g. what "tribes," or interest groups, comprise your list and what motivates them
• Simplicity of message
• Ease of sharing
• Social adoption and acumen of your subscribers
• Obvious value for the sharer and shares
• Rewards or incentives that tap into reasons why people share
• Well-written, timely and relevant content

I go into more detail in my current Email Insider column, "Are Your Emails 'Shareworthy'?" Watch for a follow-up post with advice on creating emails that your subscribers will want to forward, post and tweet. In the meantime, feel free to post your comments below or mention emails that had truly "shareworthy" content.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As customers become increasingly inundated with more and more messages from more and more communications channels, marketers will have to tighten up their messages to ensure they connect with recipients.

As discussed in my recent blog on value proposition, focusing on the three "p's" can help ensure that you engage your customers. 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). Otherwise, you risk developing unfocused content that can frustrate readers.

Positioning

Once you know your value proposition, you have to make sure your newsletter expresses it through positioning, which helps you distinguish your email program from your competition.

All the elements you use in your email program will support your position: email name, promotion efforts, design and content, even frequency.

Suppose your email promotes one great travel deal a day from across the Internet. Do the email name, design, length and copy reinforce that positioning?

A bland "Travel News" says nothing, but "Your Daily Getaway Deal" tells readers how often the emails comes (daily), your market (travel) and your value prop (bargain hunting). Even "Your" makes the email slightly more personal if you don't personalize your emails.

Other elements that promote positioning:

• Value proposition: As discussed above, the core value proposition of your email program should drive how it's positioned uniquely from competing offerings.
• Email design: A short daily newsletter should package key content on one screen. A comprehensive or in-depth newsletter with a mix of editorial content should include navigation to various points in the message, including destinations "below the fold" or in the bottom half of the message.

  Ideally, this all flows from your Web design, because you don't want readers to see a big disconnect between your Web site's look and feel and that of your email.

• Frequency: Are your competitors sending out a detailed and monthly newsletter? Perhaps there's an opportunity for your company to stand apart with a short, easier-to-read weekly approach?
• Personality and voice: Your emails, including ecommerce and promotional emails, should have a distinctive voice, attitude or a point of view to help you stand out. (See earlier post on Personality.)

Posted by Loren McDonald at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

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)

Is email marketing all about tactics? No, of course not. But you might think so if you looked at the inventory of speeches, articles and blog posts from throughout the industry. Tactics are worthless unless they are based on a solid strategy, but poor execution of a solid strategy is just as problematic.

Successful email marketing doesn't have an "easy" button. Dozens of elements come together to deploy a world-class email program. Ignoring or not optimizing one aspect can sabotage other aspects of your program that you've done well.

The single most important way you can improve your email performance is to increase relevance through greater use of segmentation and dynamic content. So put this at the top of your "2009 To-Do List."

Following that, as you look ahead to 2009, consider tackling some of the following tactics to take your program to the next level. To view more detail behind these tactics and find links to earlier columns, read my recent Email Insider column, "Your 2009 To-Do List: There Is No 'Easy Button.'"

1. Focus on business metrics.

14. Enable subscriber choice with preference centers.

I've obviously left off many other email tactics, so let me know what's on your To-Do List for the coming year.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're an email marketer, you're probably wondering how you're going to make your budget numbers this year, what with financial-market turbulence, credit crunches and gloomy holiday spending predictions.

If you think the answer is just to shoot out more email to your list and hope something sticks, you probably should see some data from Silverpop's new survey measuring consumer attitudes toward spam:

• When asked how they define spam, over half said it meant email they didn't sign up for, while 40 percent said it was any email they didn't want to get, and 35 percent said it was email from any commercial entity, presumably even from companies whose brands they otherwise trusted.
• More than 75 percent said they limit the number of emails they subscribe to, even from companies they trust, in order not to get more spam.
• Three in 10 clicked the "report spam" button on email they didn't want because they didn't trust the unsubscribe link.

In a recent Email Insider column, I talk about why building trust is so important for email marketers no matter what condition the economy is in, but especially now, when email users are likely to become more particular about which sender they choose to do business with.

I also list five touchpoints in your program where you can build trust with your recipients or make them more distrustful of you and your messages, along with seven questions that test your trustworthiness. How well can you answer them?

Did I leave out any trust-building opportunities or trust-measuring questions? Post your comments below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of email marketing, particularly in an environment of growing customer control, emerging communication channels and the current global economic environment. I come to only one conclusion: Marketers' "batch-and-blast" approach and mentality must evolve to one that endeavors to speak as directly as possible to each recipient in a voice that resonates with each individual on their lists.

This means replacing, or at least supplementing, the usual deal-of-the-week email with messages that recognize the relationships and interactions you have with your customers, moving beyond the usual selling mentality to incorporate a healthy focus on communications and retention.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels that companies are falling short in their communications. A recent Opinion Research Corp. poll found 46 percent of bank customers and 42 percent of mutual-fund investors don't believe their financial services companies are communicating enough with them in these turbulent days.

We are in a period where customers are more sensitive to price and value for their dollar and more likely to shop around and compare features and benefits, looking for the best deal. So, it becomes critical that marketers communicate trust and value with every message.

One way to increase relevance and loyalty is to create messages that provide additional value, including emails that:

• Update
• Remind
• Educate
• Simplify
• Listen

Have you recast your email program to align with your customers' needs, or do you have other functions that email can provide aside from the ones I listed here? I would love to hear about them.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During the last few years, many pundits have written articles and blog posts about the death of email. Yet, starting earlier this year we’ve had a plethora of industry folks (including yours truly) declaring that email is, in fact, alive and well.

In a small but poignant example of why I continue to be bullish on email's future, I look no further than the October 2008 issue of the AARP Bulletin. (Okay, you 20- and 30-somethings please refrain from any jokes—and if you didn’t know, AARP stands for American Association of Retired Persons, and you only need to be age 50 to be a member.)

On the cover of AARP's most recent monthly paper bulletin, it prominently promoted the option to read the bulletin online and receive notices via email.

The headline on the bulletin and landing page was "THINK GREEN," but my hunch is this: In addition to the "green" benefits, AARP wants to seize an opportunity to reduce printing and mailing costs and to provide channel options for their members.

But, it is also a recognition that a large percentage of the Baby Boomer generation and beyond is extremely comfortable in a digital world, and, in many cases, prefers to receive communications in an electronic format.

I know what you are thinking. My 14-year-old daughter, who seemingly spends half of her waking hours texting her friends, will not adopt email the way we no-hair/gray-hair types have. For personal communications, I couldn't agree more. Texting, social networks and IM are replacing email. But, various studies still show that email is the number-one preferred method to receive communications from businesses, even for the Facebook generation.

Check back in 10 years, when my daughter hits the workforce, and we'll see if this remains true.

Now, I need to check my email and then take a nap <grin>. Oh yes, and anybody who snickered at me for belonging to AARP, trust me on this… your invitation to join is a lot closer than you think.

Until next time…

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Email Experience Council (eec), an email-industry trade and education organization, has a great series of blog entries called "Double Dog Dares" that challenge marketers to break away from business as usual and try something fresh and new.

I dared marketers recently to blow up their email programs and start over from scratch. Okay, not to throw out the whole program, but to write down what they would stop doing out of habit or because everybody else is doing it, and what they would start doing if they had the budget, resources and support from management.

Want to take my challenge? Think how you would change the way you work on these issues:

• List growth
• List churn and inactivity
• Design and format
• Welcome program
• Message type
• Batch-and-blast vs. targeted emails
• Metrics
• Incentives
• Preference centers

Even if you can't throw out your whole email program and start over, is there one change you could make right now in your email program? Tell me what it is in the comments section below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

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)

I recently opened a promotional email from my favorite business publication (I subscribe to the offline version). This email was promoting one of the publication's sister brands. Since I've been subscribing for years, I don't recall specifically that I agreed to receive promotional emails from this company, but I presume I did.

Okay, so far. But this major brand failed on some of the most basic email administrative tactics. Let me show you how:

Below is the unsubscribe and contact information located at the bottom of the email (I've removed the company name):

If you would prefer not to receive further commercial messages about "Sister Publication,"
please click here and confirm your request.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
This message is being sent to you by Parent Business Publication.

If you would prefer not to receive further messages from Big Business Publication, please click on the following Internet link and confirm your request.

I clicked the "click here" link to unsubscribe, but the page didn't load despite several attempts. Either it was a bad link, they were having server issues, or some other technical issue had arisen.

Then, I clicked the second hyperlinked "global" unsubscribe link. This link worked but took me to an "email privacy preferences" form. The form pre-populated my account number but asked for my email address and first and last name. It included two pre-checked boxes: one asking if I wanted to renew my subscription and another asking if I wanted to receive promotional emails from the parent company.

I replied to the email telling the company that its unsubscribe page did not load. I got an automated response: "… emails are normally answered within one business day."

Here's how this household name failed four email administrative basics:

• The unsubscribe link didn't work. It happens, but testing the unsubscribe link and process frequently can uncover and prevent it most of the time. It is working now, but took several days before the unsubscribe process was operating.
• No phone number or email address was provided in the email to let me send questions or comments or to request a manual unsubscribe.
• The reply-to address worked and had a reasonably well-written auto-response message, but after one week and counting, still no response. I assume that this company has not staffed appropriately for email-related issues. My guess is my email went to a general Web site or customer-support department, rather than a specific email address that someone on the marketing or production team was monitoring and could have answered quickly.
• The two links—one to unsubscribe from the parent company list and one from the sister publication—were well intended, but the copy and format was poorly executed, and neither process actually worked. The second unsubscribe/preferences page did not appear to enable either process. This company did not comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

The mistakes this company has made are simply unacceptable and, frankly, easily avoided.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Greetings! I'm Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations here at Silverpop. Some of you may have read my articles in the Silverpop newsletters, Email Insider column or various contributions to DM News, iMedia Connections, MarketingProfs and other industry publications.

I now look forward to contributing regular posts to this newly launched Silverpop blog. My posts will be on a variety of email and marketing topics ranging from trends, best practices and metrics to industry observations. I'll be serious sometimes and occasionally even attempt some humor or to raise something controversial. But goals for my writing and presentations are always the same: to educate, to make marketers think or rethink their views and to do it in a practical and entertaining manner.

I hope you enjoy.

Last week, I spoke on a panel at ad:tech Chicago with four other industry experts on email's role in a Web 3.0 world.

"Wait!" you might be thinking. "What is Web 3.0, and what happened to Web 2.0?"

Relax … Web 3.0 isn't here yet, but it's coming on the heels of Web 2.0. Futurists envision it combining Web 1.0's one-way informational reach and Web 2.0's collaborative tools to create the "intelligent Web" to make information gathering and sharing even easier.

Four Rules for Email in a Web 2.0/3.0 World

1. Email users are in control now.


2. Email users have lots of options for gathering information but have less time to deal with them.


3. Email consumers are changing.


4. The inbox is changing.

1. Users will decide if, when and where they'll read your email and on which platform. It won't always be on their PC or sitting at their desk, but, for example, while sitting at a stoplight and viewed on their iPhones, for example.
2. Users have many choices for receiving messages. They'll prefer some via email, others via SMS (text), some via blogs or RSS feeds and others via direct or voice mail. They might sign up for an airline's promotional emails but prefer SMS for flight alerts. So, you need to give them more than a single option.
3. Email consumer demographics are changing, but email is not dying. Yes, teens and college students live on texting, IMing and Facebook walls, but they're going to grow up eventually and join the adult world, where email still rules. When was the last time you rode your skateboard to work?

   Yes, the texting generation (18- to 24-year-olds) will change how businesses interact with consumers, but this age group only comprises 10 percent of the U.S. population, while the 20+ age group will make up 72 percent in 2010. The newspaper generation still rules.

   Email use is shifting. Text messages, IM and social networks such as MySpace and Facebook are clearly replacing consumer-to- consumer emails for many people. But email still rocks for business communications. A Habeas survey found 67 percent of North American adult users prefer it when dealing with business, compared to 34 percent for the Web, the next-highest channel.

4. The inbox is changing. As smartphone sales go through the roof, the inbox and message view are shrinking. Your email will not look the same way on a smartphone as it does on the PC. And your subscribers will often look at the same email on different platforms. It's critical to design messages both to render well on multiple platforms and support each other's business goals.

   The wireless market is small now, about 6 percent to 10 percent of users, but you can probably expect that as much as 25 percent of some email subscriber lists will interact with your email on a mobile device and PC in the next few years.

   Email goes viral in the social network. Email subscribers will be able to post their messages on their social-network pages, which is like forward-to-a-friend on steroids.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)