Email Addresses Marketing

Require a login to opt-out?

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Al Iverson

If you're wondering if it's OK to require that recipients must log into your website before they can unsubscribe from your emails, the answer to that is no-- it's prohibited under US Federal law.

The FTC explicitly clarified this in the May 2008 CAN-SPAM Rule Update. It's on page 104, near the bottom.

Here's what it says:

Section 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out. Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page, in order to: (a) Use a return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3), to submit a request not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from a sender; or (b) Have such a request honored as required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(B) and (a)(4).

What does that mean? Read carefully: Senders are not allowed to require recipients to "provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences." That means you can't require them to login to your website before continuing on to a preference center or other page. The only thing a recipient has to give you is their email address, and the opt-out preference. (i.e. do you want to opt-out from all messages, or would you like to opt-out only from certain specific lists.) The law prohibits any requirement that the recipient "take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page" when unsubscribing -- meaning it's not OK for it to take five clicks for somebody to unsubscribe. Interact with one page means the unsubscribe link takes them to a web page, where they are either unsubscribed automatically, or push some button on that web page to complete the unsubscribe process. (That would be interacting with that single web page.)

For more information on CAN-SPAM, visit our CAN-SPAM Information Center at http://canspam.etdeliverability.com/

Do consumers hate email append?

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by Al Iverson

It sure looks like they do. Morgan Stewart breaks it down. It looks to me, as it does to Morgan, that consumers are not pleased when a company they've done business with, but not provided an email address to, suddenly start emailing you. When they put you on a mailing list without consent. When a company falsely assumes that a business relationship equates to permission.

Seriously, can somebody explain to me, why would you ever engage in a marketing practice that is going to upset a good 50% of the people who end up on your list?

It's nice to see the data on consumer expectations. It backs up the deliverability side of the equation, the elephant in the room that people have been dancing around for years: Email append grows your lists, grows them into big, dirty beasts that get you blocked and bulked. The biggest, the worst, the most significant deliverability and marketing strategy issues I've dealt with over the past years, they are all due to email append. A company, some well meaning big brand, tells me their list is all opt-in, everybody asked for this mail, and they're just plain stumped as to why the big ISPs don't want to allow it to the inbox. Many discussions and much head scratching later, it comes out that they had done some big email append and magically grew their list by a couple million addresses. And gee, if you back that append data out, suddenly their deliverability improves. (Most of the time it has been Just That Simple.)

As Morgan says, "The belief that marketers can send email to their customers based on a ‘prior existing relationship’—the premise for email appends—is dead. Customers don’t want the practice to continue."

Real vs. Perceived Threats to Email: Part 1 - Addressing Misperceptions

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

The now infamous Wall Street Journal article announcing the death of email sparked a fire in the bellies of email marketers and social media gurus alike. The overwhelming response is that social media is not posing a significant threat to email. To date, all the signs seem to indicate that these two channels will continue to evolve together.

True, there are dissenting voices. However, I have found none that are backed by credible statistical data. Since there is no statistical validity in personal anecdotes, I don’t care (except for the value they provide in forming hypotheses to be tested in future research). I care about what well-founded research tells us about the world at large.

Here is a list of the data sources I have located that reveal the truth about the current state of email use and email marketing:

Pew Internet & American Life: Online Activities Trends

79% of Americans use the Internet
90% of online Americans use email, making it the most popular online activity
57% of Americans check email daily

MarketingSherpa

78% of users email friends a link to information they wish to share with friends over the internet.
22% share through social media
MarketingSherpa’s research directly contradicts research released earlier this year from AddToAny, which suggested people share information twice as often through Facebook as they do through email. However, there were serious issues with the AddToAny research.

USC Annenberg Digital Future Report

How Many Americans Are Using E-mail? -- Almost everyone who goes online uses e-mail (97 percent of all Internet users).
Regular Contact by E-mail -- E-mail users maintain weekly personal e-mail contact with an average of seven people in the current study, down from the peak of nine in 2006. Forty-nine percent of e-mail users said they maintain personal contact by e-mail on a weekly basis with five or more people.

Participatory Marketing Network

Email (26 percent) and text messaging (26 percent) are the activities least likely to be "given up for a week," followed by TV (15 percent), talking on phone (11 percent), visiting social networks (nine percent), reading magazines (seven percent) and visiting non social network sites (six percent).

Pontifelx / Harris Interactive Survey

96% of online adults who have actually taken the step of providing brands personal information have shared their email addresses with marketers
12% of online adults have been willing to share information like their Facebook user name or their Twitter handle with a brand in exchange for information or promotional offers

SmartBreif on Social Media

While not nationally representative, this poll is interesting in that is suggests even social media professionals are not significantly curtailing their use of email.

59% of SmartBreif on Social Media readers (likely to have a heavy disposition toward social media use) report their use of email has stayed about the same despite the growth of social networks.
28% are using slightly less often
11% are using more often
2% of these readers rarely use email

ExactTarget – Is Email Marketing Endangered?

We asked a question similar to the SmartBreif poll, however, the question excludes marketers—so it is a better representation of the population at large.

Net 25% of online consumers report using social networks more often over the past 6 months (42% using more often, 17% using less often)
Net 23% of online consumers report using email more often over the past 6 months (29% using more often, 6% using less often)
Net 21% of online consumers report using text messaging more often over the past 6 months (38% using more often, 17% using less often)
71% of smartphone owners report sending more PERSONAL email on their smartphones than BUSINESS related email—it’s not all business.

ExactTarget – 2009 Channel Preferences Study

57% of online consumers use email most often to send written messages to their friends, over text messaging (24%) and social networks (10%)
75% of online consumers prefer to receive permission-based promotional messages through email—up 3.6% from 2008—followed by 17% who prefer direct mail promotions and 4% who prefer text promotions.
More than half of online consumers have made a purchase as the direct result of and email message they received, more than any other online communication channel.

Forrester Consulting – Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power

34% of marketers believe email will become more effective over the next two years, 19% believe it will be less effective
Asked why marketers believe email will be more effective:
- 74% believe their email communications are getting more relevant
- 58% see email as an integral part of their multichannel activities
- 44% believe customers prefer email as a marketing channel

That is not to say there are not threats to the future success of email. Stay tuned for part two where I share insights from a panel I moderated at Connections last week where Julie Katz from Forrester, Rebecca Lieb from eConsultancy, and Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa were asked to share their takes on the real versus perceived threats to email marketing.

Mobile Developers Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Ratul Shah is the presenter for the first part of the solution showcase. Unlike every other presenter that's talked in this room so far today, Ratul is maneuvering through the crowd with the hand-held mic. What a showman. :)

Industry Standard Terms

SMS = short message service, aka text messaging. It has a 160 character limit.
MO = mobile originated = a message sent FROM a phone
MT = mobile terminated = a message sent TO a phone
short code = a 5- or 6-digit number that you buy from a carrier to send messages to your customers. http://www.usshortcodes.com
vanity short code = a short code that spells something out, such as our, ETSMS
random short code = a short code that doesn't intentionally spell anything. These cost slightly less.
private short code = only your traffic goes through this code
shared short code = a code that you share with other SMS users. Keywords differentiate your traffic from the traffic of other people on the shared short codes.
MMA = Mobile Marketing Association http://mmaglobal.com/policies. A group that creates guidelines for United States mobile marketing.
Aggregator = a third party company that maintains connections between the carriers and the content providers. When we provisioning a short code for you, we work with an aggregator to get you approved for all carriers.

ExactTarget SMS Architecture
You create JOIN, VOTE, HELP, UNSUBSCRIBE and other kinds of actions that subscribers use to send you MO messages to get in on your mobile messages.

Unfortunately, you can't create keywords or actions in the API at this point. You can initiate SMS sends through the API, however.

System Terms

Subscriber key = unique identifier for subscribers. Allows you to identify subscribers by phone number instead of email address.
Publication list = contains subscribers who opt-in using their mobile device
Data extension = contains subscribers whom you import through the GUI or the API

Implementing Text

Keyword response - text in and receive a response
Mobile capture - captures email address for list growth
Vote and check vote count - submit your vote. poll the response
Outbound (with opt-in) - a message from ExactTarget to the mobile device
Custom campaigns

Wow, Ratul goes through a lot of content fast, and a lot of these slides are very graphics heavy and difficult to translate to blog. Thankfully, everyone at the conference is supposed to be able to get the slides.

FanMail Solution

Dave DeVore - CEO FanMail marketing
Josiah Kaiser - Senior Operations and Solutions Consultant
Tim Kauble - ExactTarget product specialist and world-class AMPscript guru

FanMail Marketing is using SMS to capture email addresses. Initially they were asking subscriber to text their email addresses in this format:

krohn email@example.com to 88769

but they found that customers found this confusing and made errors that prevented the system from capturing their information. So for the next phase, they made it into a 2-stage process to make it more like a conversation. In the new setup, subscribers text in in this format:

stubbs to 88769

then the system sends back an text saying something to the effect of, "Thanks for your interest. Reply to this message with your email address to join our mailing list." When the subscriber responds with the email address, it is added to the email list. The customer gets an email immediately welcoming them to the list, and then any future mailings to that list.

The SMS message that was sent back after the first message included AMPscript to trigger the welcome email.

The first use case resulted in more errors than the second, and people weren't willing to try to sign up more than once. A limitation of both use cases is that it only captures people's email addresses, omitting other important subscriber information that would be useful for relevant messaging .

In the third phase of FanMail's SMS evolution, they integrated their SMS with landing pages to allow the capture of more subscriber information. People text in:

butter to 88769

The system responds with a message saying to respond with an email address. When the subscriber replies with the email address, the system sends them an email with a link to a landing page built with the Smart Capture feature. People complete the Smart Capture form and now the system has information to send really personalized information. For example, this band (Hot Buttered Rum) uses the subscriber's ZIP code to let the subscriber know about upcoming concerts in their area.

What FanMail discovered was that going through this process aggregated higher quality subscribers who were more likely to be engaged with the marketing campaigns and therefore higher ROI on their marketing efforts.

The future phases of this SMS evolution may allow subscriber to provide attribute information via SMS, such as ZIP code to empower the functionality above.

Another thing that FanMail has discovered is that subscribers are willing to send you SMS messages if they're interested in what you have to offer, but they don't like for you to begin the SMS conversation.

Custom Use Case
Tim Kauble took the stage for the final portion of this presentation. Poor Tim--his phone junked out on him this morning and his data connection didn't work, so we're seeing a modified version of his presentation. Typical of technology!

Tim talked about designing a system to allow him to manage his own tasks using text messages. He wanted to accomplish the following:

Accept tasks
Assign those tasks
Assign priority, including deadlines
Expose the tasks to landing pages so that he could see them all
Support multiple methods of input, such a forwarding emails to an endpoint that generates a task with the content of the email.

Tim demonstrated texting in to the system to find out how many tasks he had. He had 30, by the way, plus the system also sent him a message to stop messing around with text messages and get back to work. :)

Tim also brought up the landing page where we could see his lengthy task list--such is the life of the ExactTarget employee!

The Success of Behavioral Targeting: Earning Consumer Trust

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Caitilin Landrigan

A recent study performed by the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center reports that Americans believe marketers should not advertise to them based on preferences and behavioral data…But why? In a marketplace of abundant information and almost innumerable and varied products, why don’t consumers desire some assistance to narrow down their selection? Why don’t people appreciate that marketers want to provide them with relevant advertising? If I am going to see advertisements on a website…and there is no question that I will…I would much rather see advertisements that pertain to my interests. Wouldn’t you?

The Annenberg/Berkeley study reports that 66% of Americans do not want to see website ads that are tailored to their interests. This sounds discouraging, but I believe the information provided by this study offers valuable insight for marketers seeking to capitalize on relevant, 1 to 1 marketing efforts. This study’s stats highlight consumers’ desire for control and trust—observations that can inform behavioral web and email marketing strategy.

Advertising preference is not the only metric this study provides, as eMarketer’s article “Behavioral Targeting Misses Mark” points-out. There are several other, seemingly contradictory metrics this study reports that can help us solve this puzzle. For example, close to 50% of Americans would like websites to give them discounts specific to their interests. Hmmm…So you don’t want to see the ads, but you do want the coupons presented in those ads? Puzzling…let’s dig deeper.

eMarketer highlights another Annenberg/Berkeley metric: 67% of all Americans feel that they have “lost control over how their personal information is collected and used by companies,” and at the same time 54% of Americans believe that “existing laws and organizational practices provide a reasonable level of protection for consumer privacy.”

This issue is one of trust, not necessarily the failure of behavioral marketing. Consumers like discounts, but people feel as if they have lost control over their personal information, and no one likes to feel like they have lost control. As a Catapult at ExactTarget, I spent two days in Chicago with fellow Catapults, interviewing people on their marketing preferences. Overwhelmingly, people expressed that they felt their personal information was abused by spammers and companies they had no relationship with. Yes, there are “reasonable” laws regarding consumer privacy, but consumers ask, “Why do I get so much spam?!” “How did they get my email address? My phone number?”

When asked how they felt about tracking on “websites in general,” people stated that they felt behavioral tracking was creepy and “Big Brother-like.” On the flipside, when given a concrete example, like Amazon.com’s personalized product recommendations that appear when browsing the website, interviewees’ tone changed: “Yes, I find that helpful, but they don’t send me a million emails after I buy something and pester me all the time. And, I have a relationship with them.”

Lesson learned: people want to feel safe, respected, and protected. Amazon.com is not scary, because they have a trustworthy reputation. As marketers, we cannot neglect that relationships are the foundation for business. Leverage your landing pages, emails, voicemails, and SMS organically to build trust with clients, at point of sale, for example. In your emails, provide a reminder of how clients signed-up. Provide a link in your emails to a page on your website that explains how you use subscriber information. Perhaps you should only advertise on trusted websites. Finally, don’t be abusive: be cognizant of email frequency and content.

I encourage you to check out our whitepapers on building quality lists direct marketing channel preferences. Use our List Growth Advisor for custom recommendations on how to responsibly grow your subscriber lists so that you can leverage subscriber data respectfully and effectively. Behavioral tracking does not have to "miss the mark."

The Rise of Emperor Engagement

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Al Iverson

If Permission is King, then Engagement is the Emperor, my esteemed coworker Karen Balle explained to me this morning. And she's right.

Engagement (or lack of engagement) seems to be causing a lot of bulk foldering issues lately. If your mail is going to the bulk folder at a top ISP, it's probably going to be because recipients don't care about your email. They're not engaged.

What is engagement? I could break it down, but why re-invent the wheel? George Bilbrey provided a nicely detailed breakdown of engagement metrics, how they work, and what ISPs do with them.

To me, this highlights yet again that an email address isn't forever. Keep mailing somebody forever, or send them irrelevant messaging, and they're going to get bored with you. (Even if they had opted in!) Your open and click rates drop off significantly, and ISPs pick up on that. They will denote that most of the subscribers don't care, that recipients never read the email you send. And that means that the ISP isn't going to feel compelled to ensure that mail goes to the inbox. If the recipients don't care, the ISP isn't going to care either.

George points out that engagement isn't a new thing, but I would counter that engagement is now a much bigger deal than it was, say, two years ago. Or go back even further, to the days where a single spam complaint would get you blocked. You'd protect against it with double opt-in, and the ISP would keep the gates open for you. Now, permission isn't enough; you have to make sure what you're sending is wanted by recipients.

Of course, reputation still matters significantly, as do all the things that have historically gone into reputation metrics, most importantly, permission. Chip House and I will touch on reputation and engagement, along with a panel of experts, next week at our Connections '09 Conference.

Grow Your Email List - Part 2

Monday, September 21, 2009 by Shelly Griffin

A few weeks ago I talked about starting with the basics as it relates to email marketing. The most basic of which is building and growing your email list. A great message or product doesn't do any good if you have no one to send it to.

To help you even further, ExactTarget recently announce our Email List Growth Advisor. This is a great way to get started - answering a few baseline questions about your business, your email marketing program and your current methods of gathering email addresses. In just five simple steps, we provide high-level guidance on some immediate changes/improvements that you can make to help build your list. It even provides an evaluation against your marketing peers.

I also encourage you to take a moment to download our 2009 Email List Growth Study released earlier this year. The data from the Email List Growth Advisor is based on this study.

I would love to hear about your success stories in building and growing email marketing lists - from the mundane to the unique - send them my way.

It Pays to Be Like Mike

Friday, September 4, 2009 by Joel Book

Mike’s Express Carwash is a chain of 37 carwashes located across Indiana and Ohio. They recently announced that their email marketing program had enabled the company to boost online sales in June by more than 60 percent over June 2008 totals.

Email gives us a way to reward our loyal customers,” said Sally Grant, marketing director of Mike’s Express Carwash. “We’ve also been able to build a great list of highly-engaged customers and send them special offers and discounts to thank them for their loyalty and drive increased sales.”

What I really like about Mike’s is how they invite the customer to become an email subscriber.

Customers are invited to participate in the email campaign when they purchase a car wash. Every receipt includes a unique offer code and provides a link to the survey site (www.talktomikes.com). Customers log on to the Website, enter the unique receipt code and their email address and then complete a two-question survey. Once the survey is submitted, the data is immediately sent to ExactTarget’s Application Program Interface (API) which automatically triggers an email to the customer that includes a bar-coded coupon for a free car wash. To prevent multiple uses of the same coupon, the company uses ExactTarget’s Live Content feature to automatically generate a new bar-code for every coupon. Data from each coupon barcode is automatically uploaded to Mike’s Express’ point of sale system to ensure the code is only recognized once.

Does this email opt-in strategy work? You bet it does!

In August, Mike’s Car Wash ran a “Back To School” campaign that offered customers a free carwash in exchange for completing an online customer satisfaction survey and subscribing to its email marketing program. The 10-day campaign added more than 40,000 new customers to the company’s email subscriber list!

You Can Be Like Mike

Whether it’s implementing Triggered Email Promotions based on POS Customer Data Capture, or using SMS text messaging to capture new email subscribers, marketers like Mike’s Car Wash are proving that email marketing is smart. And successful email marketing begins with a well-planned subscriber acquisition strategy.

If you want to be like Mike, gives us a call. We'll be happy to help.

New Maine Privacy Law May Impact Email Marketers

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 by Chip House

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 identify email marketing, it does cover the collection and use of all personal information (also called PII) for minors under 18 without parental consent. An email address is PII by most accounts. The legislations also prohibits marketing based on this personal information. The act reads: “… A person may not use any health-related information or personal information regarding a minor for the purpose of marketing a product or service to that minor or promoting any course of action for the minor relating to a product.”

An article in the Portland Press Herald reported, “The law makes it illegal for anyone (or a Web site) to collect health or other personal information from anyone under 18 for marketing purposes without getting parental consent. The penalty for companies that break the law is up to $20,000.” Looking at the act I noticed that the second violation mandates the $20K fine, "No less than $20,000 for a 2nd or subsequent violation."

It is possible that federal laws such as COPPA could preempt this new law if it comes to that. However, in the meantime email marketers should work with their own legal counsel to determine how to take action to protect their company from running afoul of the law. Complying will be burdensome for most. It could mean excluding teens from promotions, and prevent them from accessing your online sign-up forms. Also, since the law allows for private right of action, even individuals who feel they’ve been wronged under the law can file a civil complaint.

The silver lining here is the Maine State Attorney General has also mentioned her concern. Media Post reports, “'The Attorney General's position is that she's not enforcing the law,' Maine Deputy Attorney General Paul Stern said Friday.”

Virtual Voice Tour: Using Voice Marketing to Sell Your Home

Thursday, August 27, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

My wife and I are currently beginning the process of buying a house. Right now it consists of driving very slowly past any house that has a For Sale sign in the yard.

As we were creepily driving past a house last night, I notice that the For Sale sign for this property was different. At the top of the sign it said “Virtual Voice Tour. Code #302” and it had a number to call. Of course I called it immediately as we sat parked outside of the house. We listened to the listing agent tell us all about this home via an automated voice message. I could picture the home in my head: the fireplace, three bedrooms, two bathrooms. Then the listing agent dropped the bomb of the price of the home and I hung up the phone.

Even though we were in a neighborhood that was a little too expensive for us, the Virtual Voice Tour was awesome. Why don’t more realtor agents do this? With ExactTarget’s Voice Messaging functionality it only takes a moment to record and setup these virtual voice tour messages. With just a little more work, a realtor could ask a potential buyer to text their email address to a short code before they listen to the virtual voice tour. The best part, all this can be done on the same One to One Marketing Platform.

Just like that, a realtor has captured a potential buyers phone number and email address. Check out our One-to-One Marketing Field Guild to learn more about Voice Message Marketing or use our Text is Next: Marketing with SMS whitepaper to get a SMS Marketing Campaign going today!

Cost Per Lead Advertising: The New Era of Online Marketing

Thursday, August 20, 2009 by Joel Book

Online advertising has shifted from a “blast” and “broadcast” approach to an engagement focused strategy. And the emphasis has switched from CPM to Cost Per Lead to generate higher ROI.

If you’re serious about improving the quality of the leads you are generating from online advertising, plan to join me and my special guest, Evan Adlman, Vice President of Strategic Development at Pontiflex, for a very eye-opening and educational webinar on Cost Per Lead Advertising titled Solving the Online Marketing Puzzle.

In today’s webinar, we will demonstrate how you can acquire the email addresses of qualified consumers that are most likely to be responsive to your products, services and communications. Then we will discuss how you can effectively engage these consumers through email communications. Finally we will show how you can extend and amplify your communications to attract more consumers using social media.

Pontiflex is the industry’s first open and transparent Cost-per-Lead or CPL market. Through Pontiflex, advertisers can connect to the entire performance advertising market from a single point of connection. They can run ads on premium publishers and acquire leads – the contact information of people that are interested in their products or services. What’s more, they pay only for qualified leads – not for wasted clicks or impressions that might never convert. Using transparent CPL advertising, advertisers can grow their email lists with qualified subscribers in a cost-effective way.

Register now to attend today’s webinar at 2:00PM Eastern!

Email Strategy Tip: Focus on Quality, not Quantity

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by Lisa White

Just last week I unsubscribed from emails for a retail store I liked and had previously opted into receive email communications from. Why did I do this? Because they were sending me emails every single day, often with the same information, and I was frustrated that they were clogging my inbox.

The article Protect Your List: How to Fight 3 Internal Battles over Email Strategy explains that sending emails to subscribers too frequently could hurt your relationship with them. My relationship with the retail store was damaged and I will no longer find out about their sales via email since I didn't want to get emails about the same sale several times in one week. This certainly doesn't mean that daily emails are never appropriate. Some people enjoy daily emails as long as the information is relevant to them. To learn more about when daily emails are appropriate for an email marketing strategy, read the blog post When Daily Email Frequency Makes Sense.

Along the same lines, the quality of subscriber lists is also more important than the quantity of email addresses. Poor list quality can hurt your reputation, both with people receiving the emails and with ISPs. If a company wrongly got my email address and started sending me information I may or may not be interested in, I would be upset and would think less of that company. Furthermore, sending emails to people that did not necessarily ask to receive may result in more people hitting the 'Spam' button and ISPs or company firewalls blocking emails from that sender. Thus, it is important that measures are taken to ensure a high quality permission based email marketing list. To find out how to grow a list while maintaining quality, check out the whitepaper Get the Scoop on Successful List Growth.

Permission-Based Email Marketing: SMS eNewsletter Sign-ups

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by Kyle Schroeder

I was eating dinner this week in a local fast food restaurant in Anderson, IN and they had a giant box sitting on the counter that encouraged customers to sign-up for their email list.

Since I work for an email marketing company: they got me.

I signed up.

What was good about this?

1. Subscribers are opting-in to the communication.

2. The database is going to be subscribers who want regular communication.

How could this be improved?

1. Convert from paper to SMS. Instead of having me fill out a slip of paper with my contact information, have me opt in by text message.

2. Follow-up and engage immediately. I still have yet to receive any communication and it has been 3 days later. By the time I receive their first “welcome email”, will I still want communication?

This type of SMS campaign can be developed through the email marketing software powered by ExactTarget. SMS campaigns can instantly capture and engage subscribers by simply texting a keyword to a short code. The system replies with a confirmation text and then can ask for an email address in step 2.

You have now grabbed my cell phone number and my email address, two valuable pieces of information that can build a bigger and stronger email marketing program.

Have you considered ExactTarget?

Kyle Schroeder

Slingshot Summer Intern

Honest Email Opt-In and List Growth

Friday, August 14, 2009 by Beth Leleck

I had myself a little chuckle this week with the uproar around the White House asking people to email 'fishy' information regarding health care reform to a designated White House email address. The biggest question mark in this controversy circles around what the White House is going to do with the information they collect from this exercise -- which could potentially result in a list of email addresses or IP addresses of Americans expressing their opinion or providing information.

This was a nice reminder from our Nation's leaders that collecting email data under false pretenses is no laughing matter. Many companies struggle with the best way to build an email marketing opt-in list. I like to think it is as simple as following our Subscriber's Rule philosophy to Serve, Honor, and Deliver. But ExactTarget's 2009 Email List Growth Study goes a step further to show you how to create a successful, compliant, ROI-producing email list growth strategy -- so you'll never make the nightly news with subscribers wondering why you're collecting their information, and how you're going to use it.

How Can ExactTarget Help Me Capture Leads More Easily?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 by Dawn DeVirgilio

By: Lisa Laughery

If you need more leads, consider embracing the full range of ExactTarget’s one-to-one communication platform. Starting with SMS, you can reach out to potential customers—anytime, anywhere. Post signs at your events (e.g. art shows, music concerts, conferences, workshops, vendor events, etc.), and ask your potential customers to text their email addresses for additional event information. Your SMS information can be posted in a variety of locations, including billboards, newspapers, signs, flyers, and social networks. Setting up an SMS campaign in your ExactTarget application is simple—and a great way to begin your engagement.

Next, consider a Voice campaign with a message thanking customers for their participation. The message could be from the event speaker or the star of the concert. (Wouldn't that thrill your customer?) Then you can create and send a welcome email to the newly obtained email address and include a link to a landing page that requests additional customer information. Increase their engagement by enticing them with a special offer.

Did I mention that all of this can be completely automated? You can set it, sit back, and relax while the application does the work.

Need more ideas? Take a look at our One-to-One Marketing Field Guide series:

Field Guide on ExactTarget.com
or
Field Guid on 3Sixty

More Permission Failure - Friend Requests

Wednesday, July 29, 2009 by Dawn DeVirgilio

Being an avid participant in the social media sphere - I’ve found myself subscribing to more and more email. (So much for email being dead!) I generally keep a separate email for these opt-in’s and check in once a week to see what cool things other companies are doing with their email marketing.

Randomly a B2B opt in email started coming in to my personal account from a company who I had NOT opted in to. I started doing some sleuthing on how they acquired my email address.

We had two things in common:

The company was in Fort Wayne, Indiana - my hometown
They were in the communication/advertising industry

Then one of the emails advertised an event. Since I don’t live in Fort Wayne anymore – it wasn’t relevant to me. But as I was making my daily social media check-ins - Twitter, Facebook, LinkenIn - I noticed someone’s status promoted the event. This was a person I had accepted into my network, not because we were actual “friends” but because we had similar things in common. The SAME two things in common from the list above.

I had solved the case. This company received my email because I had added one of their employees to my social network.

But did that constitute opting into their email campaign? Just as my colleague (and true social media friend) Al Iverson has said, giving someone your business card does not imply permission. The same should be said for all your friends, connections, and followers in your social network. By adding you into my social network, the only one to one communication I’ve opt-in to is that you communicate to me personally, thru that network.

I'd be interested in your thoughts. Does adding someone to your social network equate to opt-in permission? Does it matter what network you’ve accepted them on (LinkedIn vs. Facebook)?

Dynamic Content for Dummies (I mean everyone)

Monday, July 27, 2009 by Shelly Griffin

Do you think that dynamic content for email marketing is only for companies with piles of data on their subscribers? Dynamic Content is for any company with any amount of data - and I mean any. If you have name, email address and state or gender- you can leverage dynamic content for your email marketing messages. In fact, having content dynamically change within an email is so easy that we have created a "10-Minute Takeways" video. Take 10 minutes to watch it now and learn how you can create personal emails that drive relevancy and ROI.

Social Media is a Real Marketing Strategy

Friday, July 17, 2009 by Kristeen Hudson

Many companies are starting to use Social Forwarding and for good reason. Social forwarding allows messages and email campaigns to expand in reach and exposure. Social forwarding can really help to create list growth and to create a viral marketing campaign. With the growth of social networks, social forwarding is a great way for companies to create vial messages.

One of the best examples of a successful Social Forwarding campaign is Papa John’s. Papa John’s test-drove ExactTarget’s Social Forward technology earlier this year though the innovations lab on 3sixty. Within 24 hours of launching social forwarding messages Papa John’s Facebook fan page had close to 130,000 fans. Most of which also gave Papa John’s their emails address. Papa John’s provided its customers with valuable customized content (in this case it was a discount for pizza) and in return Papa John’s customers shared this information with others. This creates a beneficial situation for both the customer and Papa John’s!

Papa John’s is just one example of the potential impact that Social Forwarding can have on a 1 to 1 marketing campaign. Today, ExactTarget will release its social forwarding technologies to all of its customers at no additional charge. This is an exciting time, as ExactTarget customers will be able to easily expand their marketing efforts into the social networking world.

If you would like to learn more about Social Forwarding check out the webinar Social Forward: Email Meets Social Networking by Emily Riley, Senior Analyst for Forrester Research.

Verizon "Wireless"?

Thursday, July 2, 2009 by Al Iverson

Here's a topic that comes up quite a bit: What constitutes a wireless domain?

As instructed by the FTC and per CAN-SPAM, the US federal anti-spam law, the FCC publishes a list of wireless domains. Your ability to send commercial mail to those domains is restricted; the legal requirements reference digital signatures; require a higher standard of affirmative consent (compared to CAN-SPAM). The intent is that "wireless domains", meaning devices like pagers and cell phones, should be spared certain types of messaging sans explicit consent.

This whole thing strikes me as odd. If the US standard were simply explicit consent across the board, there wouldn't have to be any weird exceptions or tighter rules only for certain email domains. But, I digress.

Ask yourself the following: What if a domain ends up on the FCC wireless list when it's not really a wireless domain? Is there anything to be done about that? Not really, unfortunately. The domain owners (typically telcos and ISPs) submit their domains to the FCC for inclusion in this list. Whether or not something qualifies for inclusion is something for the ISP and the FCC to work out; an ESP, or an ESP's client, doesn't really have any standing to make a judgment call that a domain is not validly found on the FCC wireless list.

A lot of people ask us about Verizon. "I thought Verizon was filtered," they ask, "but I see that I was able to send mail to somebody at a Verizon domain." Why? Because there are three different, common Verizon domains:

Verizon.net. This is the Verizon consumer ISP. If you have home internet service from Verizon, you probably have a Verizon.net email address. This domain is NOT filtered. It is NOT on the FCC wireless domains list, and as long as you are following normal permission best practices, it's okay for you to send mail to your subscribers at this domain.
Verizonwireless.com. This domain has "wireless" right in the name, but it isn't in the FCC wireless domains list. It used to be listed, but it was removed very recently, within the last couple weeks of June. As this domain has been removed from the FCC wireless domains list, we've removed it from our List Detective filter. How is this domain not a wireless domain? Don't ask me, nobody's ever explained it to me, and it doesn't make sense. But, I don't go by what the domain name is; I have to go by what is in the list or not in the list. (Coincidentally, I used to have a Verizon Wireless USB modem up until a couple of years ago. Back then I called Verizon and asked them if that means I have a verizonwireless.com email address. They told me no, Verizon Wireless users do not receive a mailbox at this domain. So perhaps this domain is corporate mailboxes for the wireless division of Verizon.)
Verizon.com. this domain IS in the FCC wireless list, meaning that sending to this domain is restricted. I think this might actually be Verizon's corporate email domain, and I don't understand why it's on the FCC wireless domains list. Perhaps Verizon will see this note and offer up some details. (I emailed them about this a while back, but received no reply.) But, as I say above, I have to go by what's actually on the list, not what my common sense tells me.

Clear as mud, right? Be sure to check out our FCC Wireless Domains website for more information, and doesn't hesitate to contact the deliverability team if you have any questions.

Morgan Stewart Explains Co-Reg

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by Al Iverson

I can't believe I missed this the first time around! Back on June 19th, esteemed colleague Morgan Stewart posted an excellent review of how to do co-registration the right way. The key, he says, is clear notice and consent. No tricking or forcing potential recipients to opt-in.

"After this form, guess what happens? I get a thank you page! No trap, no gimmicks. No requirement to register in order to get the thing I really wanted in the first place. (Remember in the Free IQ Test example, I had already invested 20 minutes in taking the test. In order to get my score I was compelled to register for things I was not interest).

[...] Co-registration that makes subscription a requirement to get something. These vendors put your add before delivering the value proposition promised by the site. This is a trap for consumers and it will only deliver you bad email addresses from angry consumers.

Second is co-registration that offers the opportunity to take advantage of additional deals after the main value proposition has already been delivered. True, some consumers may be annoyed by that, but it is still the consumers choice to take advantage of the offer or to say, “No, thanks”. The subscribers you get through this process are much more likely to stay engaged with your program over the long haul."

Read all about it here.

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