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Email Design Tip of the Week: 3-2-1, Wait! A Checklist Before Hitting Send

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Andrea Smith
written by David Hoang
 
Question: When do email marketing professionals usually take a break or step out?

Answer:  When he or she just hit the “send” button for a mass email.

There is nothing more nerve wracking than hitting the button with no return. Unlike web publishing, there is no turning back with email.  So what’s the solution? You can say, “don’t make any mistakes” – but it’s inevitable. What you can do, however, is strategically make a checklist of what to do before hitting the send button to make sure mistakes are avoided.

Here are some quick tips on what you should run through your mind; so you don’t have to leave the building after delivering an email:
  • Is it legit? After every round of revisions, always validate the message; the simplest way to see if you have everything to get it out the door: physical address, unsubscribe link, etc.
  • Do an email test. It's practically unheard of wherein you send out a mass email campaign without testing; so don’t do it. Set up a few test email accounts (Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.) and spend some time to see how it looks in each email client.
  • Spell check. Repeat. Your email delivery is intended for 1-to-1 marketing, so write like you’re taking quality time to communicate with your subscribers. Run spell check, manually look for spelling errors and yes, read the message out loud. If this seems like too much work, make someone else do it!
As much as email marketing is mass-produced, the one-to-one messaging is its key to effectiveness. Therefore taking time to communicate a message and doing it correctly, with no spelling and grammatical errors, should be top priority. Not only will avoiding these common pitfalls save you face, it will also make your recipients feel like you have taken that extra step to make sure it's perfect. 
  • Check the details. Take a look at every aspect of your message to make sure something is not missing. Do you have a subject line? Is it the correct one? Do all of the links in the email go to the proper pages?
  • Do a final once-over. Think of this as when you were taught crossing the street. Look left, look right, then look left again. Test your email to make sure that there are no mistakes, especially if revisions were made. Scan with the mindset that you are looking for mistakes. If you don’t find them, hit the send button.
Ultimately, you want to come up with a method that's most comfortable to you. Make an actual checklist and cross off the steps as you prepare the send. With a routine checklist in mind, you can hopefully sit back and relax (a little bit more) after delivery.  
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ExactTarget 3sixty Has The Resources To Prove It

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 by Liz Farrelly
Last week, ExactTarget 3sixty and I made a comeback to the blogs by mentioning all of the cool things that we have been up to.  Now that you have had a chance to pick yourself up from the excitement of notifications (and search - don't forget how great search is now!!), I wanted to hit on another really cool milestone that we passed.

Now, many of you know (or maybe you don't, and I am making assumptions) that ExactTarget 3sixty is a really interesting combination of a private social network and a documentation/training center.  Yes, we have all the cool features of a social network (friends, groups, Q&A, etc.), but we also house all of our ExactTarget Documentation and Tutorials in the site also.

Our thoughts on that?  We want our customers to have what they need to be the best 1 to 1 marketers right at their fingertips.  We aren't into being a mass email marketing software.  We want to be the best at 1 to 1 communications!  And the best way to do that - give the people what they need to be successful.

I don't know if we ever imagined that in less than a year's time (3sixty debuted in October of last year), we would have seen our clients access over 106,000 resources in ExactTarget 3sixty.  Add that to the 22,000+ tutorials viewed and another 6,500 items stored in "backpacks" - well, obviously our thoughts of combining fun and functionality truly worked!

So do you need some ExactTarget documentation?  What are you waiting for?  Head over to ExactTarget 3sixty now!
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Strategy Tip of the Week: Think Continuous Improvement

Monday, March 9, 2009 by Brett Brewer
Without a doubt, the most common question that members of the ExactTarget strategy team are asked is a variation on the question, "How does my (open rate, clickthrough rate, etc.) compare to other people in my industry?" It is a natural question to ask--everyone wants the best email marketing program they can have, and comparing the statistics for your program to those of the best email programs is one way to do that. However, the real answer to the "How does my program compare?" question is often "It depends."

The difficulty lies in knowing exactly which programs are appropriate measures for comparison. Do other email senders in your industry invest heavily in optimizing their programs? If so, then they might be a suitable basis for comparison. Is their program the classic example of a bulk email marketing program? If so, then knowing that you're numbers are better than theirs may not tell you much.

Even averages can be deceiving. One large sender in a vertical that performs very well (or very poorly) can skew the average in a way that tells you little about how well your email program is really doing.

Ultimately, our advice is to always strive for continuous improvement regardless of whether your numbers are better, worse, or the same as "average." Assume you can always make your numbers better, and put plans in place to do so. What can you do to improve your numbers?

-Test, test, test. Test subject lines, test creative, test content and copy. You can only learn what works for you by testing.

-Ask your most engaged subscribers. Find out what it is about your program that they like, and leverage that to engage other subscribers.

-Ask your least engaged subscribers. Reach out to them and find out what you can do to make your program better.

Thoughts on the value of comparing your program to other email programs? Post them in the comments section.
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All Email’s Social, Some Email’s Spam, but SCALABLE Permission-Based Mass Email is Possible in the Cloud

Friday, February 20, 2009 by Bryan Wade
I will be one of the keynotes at the Cloud Computing Expo coming up in New York City March 30 - April 1st 2009.  

http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/

Here is the abstract that describes the presenation:

How can you effectively send mass permission-based email at scale? That’s the question Bryan Wade, Director, Embedded Channel Partnerships for ExactTarget, tackles head-on in this session. Sending and tracking the impact of messages sent at massive scale can be a daunting task – tracking each individual open, click, and bounce can easily become too intensive for back-end systems to handle. Come learn how to effectively send mass email at scale by integrating ExactTarget into your cloud platform, and find out why so many ISVs, Social Networks, and large-scale senders are using ExactTarget Embedded to manage mass commercial and transactional messaging. If you’re thinking about adding an “MTA or SMTP in the Clouds,” or just want to learn more about sending mass messages at scale, this session’s a must.
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Strategy Tip of the Week: Start With a Foundation

Monday, January 26, 2009 by Brett Brewer

When it comes to email marketing strategy, I'm a firm believer that "simpler is better." With non-stop advancements in subscriber segmentation, web analytics integration, and other sophisticated capabilities, today's best email programs are worlds away from the days of "bulk email marketing." However, as your email capabilities become more sophisticated, it is essential that you understand the basics of how each of your programs contributes to the performance of your business, and what subscribers find valuable about them. If these fundamentals aren't as clear as they should be, your most sophisticated programs will never achieve their full potential.

So, if you've never taken the time to do it before, spend an hour or two this week documenting the fundamental strategy for each of your email programs. Write it down and share it with everyone that touches your email programs, from sales professionals and executives in your organization to the email marketing agency that helps you launch your campaigns. You can do this quickly and easily by answering two questions for each email program you manage:

1. How does this email program contribute to the success of my organization?

The answer should be a clear and simple one--for example, my clients at Adorama Camera have done a great job of summarizing the direction of their email program. Three words: "Increase Purchase Frequency." Knowing that the work we're doing in the email channel is aiming towards this primary business goal helps keep us all focused and on-track, and has helped us build an email strategy that is both focused and viable over the long term.

2. What is it about this email program that subscribers value--what makes them sign up and stay signed up? 

Again, a clear and simple answer is essential. Your subscribers get lots of emails other than yours. What makes yours valuable enough to stand out from the crowd? What keeps your email from becoming the dreaded "bulk email" that nobody wants to send OR receive?

Adorama Camera has also done a great job on this front. Their value proposition is clear and customer-centric: "Adorama Camera's emails help make me a better photographer." What photographer wouldn't welcome an email program that makes them better, no matter what their skill level?

Does your brand or company have a great direction statement and/or value proposition for your email program? Share it with ExactTarget in the comments section of this post.

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Strategy Tip of the Week: Simple Segmentation

Monday, January 19, 2009 by Brett Brewer

The best way to keep your email program for falling into the dreaded "bulk email marketing" category is by segmenting your subscribers into groups and sending targeted email messages to each. In a perfect world, everyone would have lots of subscriber data to segment on--purchase data, demographics, online behavioral information and more. In reality, many organizations don't have this kind of data, can't link it to their email marketing database, or don't have the resources available to analyze the data and create meaningful segments.

If your organization doesn't have robust subscriber data for segmentation, start with a straightforward segmentation approach. Look at your subscriber list and determine which subscribers are engaged and which are unengaged. In other words, determine who is still opening your email and clicking on links, and who isn't. Most email marketing software has the ability to show you who is opening and clicking on your email, and who isn't, and this is a great place to start experimenting with segmentation.

So what defines engaged and unengaged? Our general recommendation is to consider anyone who hasn't opened or clicked on an email of yours in 90 days to be unengaged (assuming you send weekly or more often) but your specific list may require you to change that definition to meet your needs. Experiment with different time intervals and click and open rates until you have two subscriber groups you're comfortable using.

When you've defined your two groups, you can begin testing different approaches to improve performance--especially with the unengaged subscriber groups. Do they open more regularly if you reduce frequency? Do they respond to different subject lines or special offers? Can you re-engage them with a survey or re-engagement campaign? Track and measure the performance of each segment, and keep improving the tactics that work the best.

Targeted email marketing isn't always easy, but leveraging the data you have at hand--like subscriber engagement--can yield great results.

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ExactTarget and Stopping Spam

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 by Al Iverson

Sometimes, we get letters. Jared writes, “Its great to see your helping people get away with spamming. You should throw my email into your mass email spam lists. Get in line with the others.”

I find this type of email really frustrating. I don’t hear stuff like this all that often, thankfully. But when I do hear it, I wonder, what? Get away with spamming? You really think that’s what ExactTarget does? Help people spam? Yuck.

Jared also sent along a link to some old blog post that shows how long subject lines can be in different email clients. So, he might not be all that knowledgeable about email or have a clear picture as to what he’s mad about.

Regardless, that got me thinking. If somebody out there does think that about us, maybe I should take the time to answer the implied question. Do we spam? Allow spam? Help spammers? The answer is a loud and clear NO. NO, we are not spammers. NO, we don’t allow spam. NO, we don’t support spam.

ExactTarget is not a list broker. Don’t call us to buy a list. We don’t sell them. We don’t buy them, either, so spammers should feel free to stop trying to get me interested in their “guaranteed opt-in leads.”

We don’t allow clients to buy lists. This isn’t a lead generation system, and permission-based email doesn’t work with lead generation lists. It’s just not compatible.

ExactTarget is a tool. A really powerful and useful tool, one that allows our clients to mail their own customers. People who have signed up to receive email from them directly, not to mail random people that some company *thinks* might want to hear from them.

The six of us here on the core deliverability services team act as the spam police. We enforce our anti-spam policy, sending guidelines and thresholds, and the opt-in provisions of our contracts. We suspend, reform or terminate spammers regularly.

We look at what clients are doing constantly.

  • If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import,  
  • If too much of their mail bounces,  
  • If they receive too many spam complaints from a large ISP,  
  • If they get blacklisted by a reputable blacklist like Spamhaus or Spamcop,  
  • Or if they do something that shows me that they’re not complying with the opt-in consent requirements contained in our contract,  
  • Then the client is funneled through our policy enforcement/best practices process to help address the issue, reform the process, remove the bad list, educate the client, and, if those steps all fail, terminate that client.  

Over the past month or so, we’ve worked with over twenty-five clients, guiding them on how to shore up their opt-in practices; giving them a clear understanding that only opt-in is allowed. For a few of those, we told them we’re not going to be able reach out to an ISP for assistance until a problem is resolved. In some of those past instances, our requirement has been that the client must reconfirm their existing email list.

We end up terminating an average of one client a month, and this month was no different. Of course, we like our clients a lot, and ones that can be reformed, we’d much rather reform them than terminate them. A reformed client means no more spam, and a client we keep means they keep paying us. Everybody wins. But, they don’t always want to work with us, or don’t always agree with our policies. And in those cases, it’s in our best interest to move on. So we do.

That’s what me and my team here at ExactTarget have done to stop spam lately. What have you done to stop spam lately?

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Labeling your Email Message?

Thursday, July 24, 2008 by Al Iverson
I received this question today: "We interpret CAN-SPAM to mean that we must include a statement that says, 'This is a promotional email.' Is that correct?"

Since I spend so much time training clients on how to do the right thing (including how to comply with CAN-SPAM), I felt that it was a pretty basic question. But, clearly, not everybody is knowledgeable about CAN-SPAM. Not everybody has the experience of dealing with it to the degree that I have had. So, I though it would be good to make this into a quick blog post, with the hope that it will help others who may be wondering the same thing.

IF you're sending spam, then YES, you need to label your email as a promotional message (advertisement).

BUT: If you're sending email to people who didn't sign up to receive emails from you, then you're sending spam. You should never import an address into ExactTarget if the owner of that email address didn't choose to hand you their email address, didn't choose to sign up for your list. That's not the only definition of spam, but it's a very common one, and it's something that you must avoid, if you want your email to get delivered.

If you're NOT sending spam, then NO, you don't have to label your email as a promotional message (advertisement).

If you're sending email only to people who signed up to receive emails from you, then you're not spamming. What you need is "affirmative consent," meaning that "the recipient expressly consented to receive the message, either in response to a clear and conspicuous request for such consent or at the recipient's own initiative."

If you have that affirmative consent, then under CAN-SPAM, you are exempt from the labeling requirement, and you don't have to include a notice about your email message being an advertisement.

That's just one of the many reasons why it is important that you do not send spam, and it's a very practical one. If you are forced to label your messages as advertising, ISPs are more likely to filter out the messages, because the people who label their messages that way tend to be spammers.

This goes without saying, but I figured it best to include it explicitly: ExactTarget doesn't allow spam. ISPs don't want it, and neither do we want to allow clients to send it. If a client tries to use our service to send spam, we have a number of ways we pick up on that fact, and suspend the accounts of the offenders. Spammers tend to have short, unhappy tenures on the ExactTarget platform.

(Josh Fruchter raises a good point: He reminds us that "certain professional service providers such as law firms may be subject to additional restrictions imposed by regulatory bodies. For instance, some bar associations require law firms to add disclaimers to their mass emails such as 'This is an Advertisement.' So law firms also need to check their local bar rules for any further labeling requirements." Thanks, Josh!)
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