House of Email Marketing

House of Email Marketing
ExactTarget’s Chip House eats, sleeps &
breathes email marketing best practices so
you don’t have to.

It just dawned on me that it has been 15 years since I sent my first email campaign. It was 1996, the Web was no longer new, but email marketing was just beginning to emerge as a discipline. To 1996 email recipients, email still had that new car smell--promotional emails were even marveled at. In 2011 this is difficult to imagine. Though email is no longer new, getting subscribers to marvel, ooh and ah at your emails takes a bit more effort, testing, know-how and discipline. The first step is getting to the inbox, and no one knows better how to do that than our partners Return Path.

Return Path...Read More »

Life is full of tradeoffs. One that most of us face every day is during our commute to work: though we’d like to get there as soon as possible, we drive the speed limit. We trade our need to get there quickly with our need to not get arrested or die in a fiery wreck. But how fast is too fast? How slow is too slow? As far as the law goes it is clear that the speed limit is the fastest you should go. But, to stay safe the answer is less clear. In general, however, the slower you go, the safer you are. Want to get there in one piece, for sure? Then drive 5 miles per hour. Want to get there...Read More »

It’s been said that one’s greatest strength is also one’s greatest weakness. And when it comes to email, its greatest strength and weakness is its low cost. The attractive economics of email becomes a weakness because it leads to misuse. One such misuse that even legitimate mailers are guilty of?  Making the “more is better” assumption, when in reality, “less is more.”

But what happens when you have a brand and value proposition that’s so compelling you continually grow your list by millions of subscribers every few months and maintain strong deliverability despite sending daily emails to...Read More »

Reflecting on day 1 of Media Post’s Email Insider Summit in Park City, Utah I am left with the summary thought: marketers still have a lot of work to do. We all know relevance works, but very few marketers collect all of the customer preferences they should, or act on the knowledge when they have it.

Eric Kirby from Merkle kicked off the day with some of the results on their consumer preferences survey that they have been conducting for a number of years running. It echoes and confirms much of the research from our 2008 and 2009 Channel Preference Surveys. Consumers are becoming more mobile...Read More »

You're likely not surprised to hear that 90% of the email ISPs have to deal with is spam, which has driven them to constantly evolve and improve their filtering processes. Competition for users with mail accounts hasn't abated, meaning that the ISP that does the best job of keeping the inbox clean and relevant wins.

In a recent article at eM+C titled: "The Effect of Email Engagement on Inbox Delivery" I discuss the balancing act marketers need to deal with at major ISPs.  In this article I mention: "For marketers, this means that gone are the days when you can email away willy-nilly while...Read More »

The Maine legislature just recently enacted a privacy law called “the Act to Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors.” While the goal is certainly worthwhile, the law is so packed with potential pitfalls for legitimate marketers that an 8/30/09 Media Post article reported “A coalition of media organizations and Web companies including AOL, Yahoo and eBay challenged the measure in court on Wednesday.” 

Despite the uproar, the law will go into effect on September 12th, 2009. Here is the complete bill: Marketing and Data Collection Practices.

Though the law doesn’t specifically...Read More »

Each year at the ExactTarget Connections conference we give out awards to our clients that have demonstrated some of the best programs, designs, list growth and results of the year. This year is no different…but there is a new twist. This year we’re launching the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! Awards.

There are 5 key awards and 3 grand prizes that go to those programs that best honor the three main tenets of our SR! philosophy:

1. Serve the individual.
2. Honor their unique preferences for communication, content, frequency and channel.
3. Deliver them timely, relevant content that improves their lives
 

If...

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Sometimes I marvel at the fact that though email has been around for over 30 years, there is still so much confusion surrounding the basics of email delivery. Many in our industry don’t help the matter at all because they prefer to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around email delivery because they feel that obfuscation will serve them well and buy them customers. The outcome is confusion and distrust. Stephanie Miller hit this issue head on in her article: “Delivered: Does Not Mean In the Inbox.”

Email delivery is managed by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that has been...Read More »

Executive Summary: Leverage Opt-in Tactics to Grow Your Email List the Right Way.
The lesson couldn’t be clearer, or more common sense. Yet, many marketers feel they need to lead with the close. As Seth Godin says in the landmark book Permission Marketing, “ Don’t propose marriage on the first date.” So, goes the metaphor, why do you think someone you just met will want to buy what you’re selling?

A similar theme was uncovered when ExactTarget , Ball State and the Email Marketers Club collaborated for the 2009 Email List Growth Study. The study was based on a detailed survey of U.S. and...Read More »

We have worked with a number of customers on understanding which segments of their email database are most engaged and why. As I've mentioned previously, often the unengaged portion not only are a drag to your ROI, but they can cause deliverability issues. Subscriber segments that joined your opt-in database over a year ago, but haven't opened or clicked, could be especially problematic since there is a direct correlation between complaint rates and age (time since opt-in). When complaint rates go up, deliverability rates go down.

However, the solution is not as simple as cutting or...Read More »

Most marketers put little thought into what “from address” they should use for their email campaigns. Crazy isn’t it? That would be like a direct mail marketer sending a catalog with no visible brand or address on the outside of the catalog.
 

Whereas much thought has been put into the “right side” of the from address (the part after the @ sign), not enough thought seems to go into the “left side” of the @ sign. This isn’t surprising, however, since the right side of the email is the domain name, which is the focus of email authentication. Maybe the whole issue here is that the “from address”...

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Today we're proud to host a client-only webinar titled "Landing Page Optimization Clinic: Rx for your ROI." The webinar is done in concert with MarketingExperiments, experts in online testing and optimization.

Our guest speaker is Jimmy Ellis, Director of Optimization Research at MarketingExperiments. Jimmy has conducted and analyzed more than 300 experiments and specializes in optimization research, search engine marketing and email marketing strategies.

Together we'll address how marketers can get the most out of their email campaigns by no longer just linking to their home page. Landing...Read More »

Given that social networks like MySpace rely on email to connect with users and pull then back to the network, it wouldn’t surprise me if reports are true that MySpace is in the process of launching a branded webmail product. The article in TechCrunch today mentioned that “The company has been reassigning internal email addresses (employeename@myspace.com) to a new domain name (@myspace-inc.com), which is exactly what Yahoo and others did when launching webmail services.”

The article went on to say, “It doesn’t seem like much, but this is as good as confirmation that we’ll be seeing MySpace...

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In December of '08 I posted a blog called "When Daily Email Frequency Makes Sense."  In it I argued that daily frequency makes sense only if you either set the expectation up front that you will email someone daily (if they opt-in), and that you can truly add value daily.

I wrote: "When does daily email make sense? It makes sense when it is what the user asks for and when it meets their needs. When doesn’t it make sense? Daily frequency without a subscriber’s specific opt-in to this frequency makes no sense at all. I’ve seen retailers kill their open and click metrics by...Read More »

eMarketer listed a story today titled “Social Nets and Blogs More Popular than Email.” If that is true, it still misses the point. First, social networks rely on email to update users, when changes happen, and when a user writes on a wall. Therefore, nearly 100% of social network users are also email users. Second, for most people, their messaging and marketing preferences are different. Our 2008 Channel Preference Survey showed that though users are engaged in social networks, blogs, and texting, they hold those media to be the most personal of all and say they don’t want to be bothered by...Read More »

Visibility magazine runs an article of mine this month titled "5 Ways to Kill Your Email Deliverability." In it I touch on my take of the 5 main missteps a company can make that can just kill their email program.

These include:
Misstep #1: Cheating on Permission
Misstep #2: Opt-out Email Appending
Misstep #3: Buying a List
Misstep #4: Assuming More is Better
Misstep #5: Abusing a Subscriber’s Trust

Read the article and do what George Costanza did to change his success. Since spamming isn't working, do the exact opposite.

Chip

I received an email from Amazon this week touting women’s shoes by Marc Jacobs. The subject line of the email was: “Marc by Marc Jacobs: Have the New Spring Collection Tomorrow with Overnight Shipping” This would have been great to get free shipping, with the exception of the fact that I don’t wear pumps, or “Ballerina Flats.”

Hold your wise cracks please. ;-)

I often think of Amazon’s email as one of the more targeted, accurate and restrained program out there. Since I buy marketing books, they often offer me more marketing books. That’s a great example of using my purchase behavior and their...Read More »

The recent privacy uproar regarding Facebook’s privacy policy changes are yet another example of the increasing power of the subscriber. Subscribers rule not only the world of email, but also social networks. Their ability connect with each other and band together via social networks is something the world hasn’t seen since a band of villagers hunted Frankenstein wielding torches and pitchforks.

After realizing they stepped in it, and that the mob had realized it, Mark Zuckerberg blogged on the privacy misstep, and their efforts to change it.   I think he handled it quite well, and in his blog...Read More »

The Enterprise Email Marketing whitepaper that ExactTarget first produced back in early 2004, soon after the United States CAN-SPAM Act became law focused on enterprise compliance and control of email. It armed marketers with information on best practices regarding CAN-SPAM as well as brand protection and deliverability effectiveness…not just for marketing emails, but division by division, subsidiary by subsidiary across an entire company.

CAN-SPAM made us all sit up in our seats and take notice of the array of different silos from which our organizations send email. Some questions many...Read More »