Email Addresses Marketing

Maine Repeals Law Restricting Data That Can Be Collected From Minors

Friday, March 12, 2010 by Al Iverson

Wendy Davis reports for MediaPost that Maine has repealed "An Act To Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices Against Minors," a 2009 law that attempted to prevent misuse of minors' medical data for marketing purposes. The law was worded in such a way to essentially apply far beyond just medical data, raising potential constitutional issues and creating a problem for some marketers advertising to individuals in Maine.

Now if they would just do something about the state's interpretation of how Maine's Freedom of Access Act applies to state-held email address data.

(Hat tip: @ddayman and @jacaldwell)

Email Address Capture at Point of Sale?

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 by Al Iverson

According to this post on Eric Goldman's blog, it sounds like requesting an email address from a consumer at the point of sale during a credit card transaction at a brick-and-mortar retailer isn't allowed in California, according to that state's Song-Beverly Act.

The court found that the law's application to email addresses is not preempted by CAN-SPAM. It did not explicitly rule on whether the law applies to email addresses, but the law's definition of "personal identification information" (PII) is quite broad, and the court's analysis seemed to suggest it, so it would be wise to assume for now that it does count email address as PII.

The net here is that the law does seem to prohibit the offline collection of email addresses in California by brick-and-mortar retailers in the course of a credit card transaction. There may be allowable ways to collect email addresses or other information outside of the credit card transaction, but I'm not clear on what the options might be.

We're continuing to research the issue through various channels, and will be sure to share further information as it becomes available.

(Note that the Act does NOT apply to online transactions.)

Email Domain Alamedanet.net Retired

Monday, March 1, 2010 by Al Iverson

Residents of Alameda, California-based AlamedaNet, Alameda Power & Telecom's internet service have been transitioned from alamedanet.net email addresses over to comcast.net addresses, as the alamedanet.net email domain has been retired as of December 15, 2009.

It isn't possible to convert email addresses in a blanket manner from one domain to the other, as there are certain to be username collisions between the new domains. Meaning, somebody could be bob@domain1 and he can't become bob@domain2, because somebody else already has the username "bob." Also, anti-spam groups regularly point out that consent to send email is tied to specific email addresses -- meaning, it is not kosher to change someone's email address in your database without their explicit consent.

As this domain has been retired, we'll be adding it to our "List Detective" filter shortly, preventing any further email messages to any address at that domain.

B2B Contact Databases Are Poor List Growth Sources

Friday, February 26, 2010 by Al Iverson

This morning, I took one of the numerous bits of B2B spam that I received, and I replied to the sender. This time around, it was a staffing services company, looking to help me with all of my staffing needs. He's ready and willing to help me with all of my staffing needs in the aerospace, transportation, and defense verticals, just to name a few.

In my reply, I asked him where he got my email address. "Through the company website," he replied. That's odd, I thought. My email address isn't published on our website. So I replied, saying exactly that. He replied with, "Have you ever heard of Zoominfo?" Sure, I've heard of Zoominfo. I've previously blogged here that it's a bad idea to grow your list by working with companies like Zoominfo, Jigsaw and Netprospex.

Why? Let's use me as an example. If this guy really did get my email address from Zoominfo, he bought a useless record. I'm not a hiring manager, I don't buy from spam, and I spend a lot of time tracking spam and spammers. I can't be the only one in that Zoominfo contact database who has no interest in receiving exciting, valuable unsolicited offers for help with my staffing needs.

After I informed the guy that if he bought my address from Zoominfo, he ought to try to get his money back, he changed his story. Now he's quoting my online bio at me as if this is somehow proof of an opt-in (buh?), and saying he's going to report me for harassment.

So, it's hard to say if this data really came from Zoominfo or not, as this guy keeps changing his story. But I get an awful lot of B2B spam, and people have to be getting my email address from somewhere. What do you think, dear reader?

Maine AG: State email lists are public data

Thursday, February 4, 2010 by Al Iverson

As mentioned on MediaPost's Email Insider and elsewhere, the Maine Attorney General's office recently ruled that email addresses of people who contacted various state departments are fair game, that they must be supplied to anybody who submits an inquiry via Maine's Freedom of Access Act.

This means that any sort of advocacy group can petition the state government to provide a list of all the email addresses of people who contacted them on a given topic; and then they would be able to spam those people, to further the advocacy group's goals. BAD NEWS.

Spamhaus blogged about this; click here to read their take on why this is a bad idea. We couldn't agree more with Spamhaus's take on this issue. For our part, we sent a letter to the Maine legislature, looking to explain why we prohibit third-party lists-- any list compiled via this method would clearly NOT be a permission-based email list and we'd clamp down hard on anybody who tried to use a list like that via ExactTarget.

As Morgan Stewart and I explained in our letter, "Allowing advocacy or other groups to obtain email addresses from the Maine state government via a Freedom of Access request allows these groups to build spam lists that will cause harm to internet service providers and end consumers. The owners of those email addresses did not consent to have their email addresses shared with third parties or added to other email lists. Further, recipients of such emails will have to take an affirmative step to unsubscribe from those lists, which adds to the burden of those recipients.

"There is no known legitimate use for email address data in this context other than to compile a non-permission email list and send spam to it. Whether or not the topic of the spam is related to advocacy of something under Maine law is irrelevant; spam is still spam. It is our opinion that there are ample alternate methodologies under which advocacy or other groups may identify and contact Maine residents, without resorting to the most unwanted of email scourges; spam. Please don't enable the sending of spam to Maine residents by allowing their email addresses to be obtained from government agencies."

How about it, dear readers? When you contact somebody in government to provide feedback on an issue or apply for some sort of permit, do you think it's fair that groups can query the government for your email address and be able to add you to a list? And if you're an email marketer, do you really think this is a winning email strategy? Blasting people who didn't sign up for your emails? I sure don't.

How do I reactivate an address?

Thursday, January 7, 2010 by Al Iverson

Way back in late 2007, I mentioned a change at Earthlink regarding bouncing addresses and how they measure subscriber inactivity. Like a lot of other ISPs nowadays, they shut off mailboxes after a period of inactivity. In this case, 90 days.

This week, a commenter asked, “How do you reactivate an account?”

If you're an Earthlink user, and you're wondering how to re-activate your mailbox, I'm not sure. I assume you would just log into it like normal, and that would re-enable it. But, I'm not 100% sure about that; you should contact Earthlink support for assistance.

If you mean that you're a list manager and you're wondering how you re-enable that address so that you can send mail to it again … you cannot. This isn't a situation you can impact. Whether or not this subscriber's address becomes valid again is up to the ISP and/or up to the end user. (See my note above to any end user wondering about this.) The chances of an address re-activating is probably pretty slim; if somebody hasn't checked their email in months, they've probably moved on to greener pastures (i.e., they've changed email addresses).

What you can do is decide if you want to keep emailing those people. It's going to be a lot better for your sending reputation if you stop mailing users whose addresses are no longer valid. The ET system handles this automatically.

It's a bit similar to engagement, in that, if your contact or campaign strategy involves weeding out recipients who are no longer responsive to your mailings, then you're already way ahead of the game. Weeding people out of your list who never read your emails (and whose addresses are invalid) means you're much more likely to enjoy successful inbox delivery.

Domains by Proxy: A good idea?

Monday, December 28, 2009 by Al Iverson

Is it a good idea to mask ownership of your domain?

Services like Domains by Proxy allow you to mask (hide) the true owner of a domain name. In my opinion, the legitimate business case for doing so is questionable. Wikipedia suggests that it's a good way to block “unsolicited contacts from third parties.” I don't think that's true-- I think a legitimate business is going to have contact info on their website, making it possible to contact them with postal advertising or regarding legal issues, regardless of uses of a domain masking service. And if you're worried about spam, use a unique email address that is well spam filtered, and isn't your primary email address.

I guess if you're a one man shop, working from home, and you register a domain for your business, maybe you're concerned about people knowing your home address. But domain masking isn't the only method of addressing this. The UPS Store (and the USPS) runs a brisk business in PO boxes and/or PMB postal addresses for exactly this kind of use.

And what's the down side to using a domain masking service?

You look like a spammer. Wow, really? Yes, really. It's that simple. A lot of the people that use these services seem to be spammers. I don't have data on this; only anecdotes. But I can tell you that, unfortunately, that based on my personal experience, there is a strong correlation between “likely to send unwanted or unsolicited mail” and “who owns their domain is hidden behind Domains by Proxy.” Sad, but true. Thank spammers for ruining another part of the internet for the rest of us.

Why do spammers do this? Lots of spammers register large numbers of domains. From dozens to hundreds (or even more). If they made their ownership of these domains publicly, easily found via the internet's WHOIS databases, anti-spam groups like Spamhaus would be able to track them much easier. It's not much of a deterrent, but it's enough of one to be very common in spammer circles.

And there might be legal risk as well. Read about this 9th Circuit opinion in USA v. Kilbride, (9th Cir., 2009) as reported by Mickey Chandler over on Spamtacular. The court found that use of a service that masks who owns a domain (like, in my opinion, Domains by Proxy) counts as material falsification under the US Federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM.

The jury is out on whether or not this is likely to be used against other bad actors in the email space, but why risk it? If you're a legitimate business, show the world that you are one by having your domain registration accurately reflect that you own every domain you use.

Political Lists and Confirmed Opt-in

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 by Al Iverson

Here's why political lists should always be double opt-in (confirmed opt-in): To prevent stuff like this.

Blogger Danny Sullivan points out that he has ended up on the email list of a councilmember from a city 400 miles away. What good does that do for the councilmember? Danny's not a constituent; not even a potential constituent.

How did the councilmember obtain his email address? Bought list? Unconfirmed signup process? Hard to say; lots of political senders seem to do a lot of crazy, unethical stuff to build their email lists. They often horse trade list data with others in the same party. And the net effect is that once you end up on one list, your address is going to end up on many more lists.

Reminds me of the good old (bad) days, where my friend Mickey Chandler and I both got signed up for mailings lists relating to political persuasions the opposite of our own. At my last employer, it was a coworker who signed me up for a list because he thought it would be "funny." Then the volume started growing, as the entity that handled the original forged subscription request shared their lists far and wide. I bet that address is still getting political spam to this day, even though I left that company in 2006.

Project Honey Pot Receives their 1 Billionth Spam Message

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 by Phil Schott

Project Honey Pot describes themselves as, "...the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website."

Basically they're one of the good guys trying to rid the world of spammers by detecting and exposing them through the use of spamtraps.

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009, they received their billionth spam email message. To mark this momentous occasion they reviewed five years worth of data and shared some of their findings, including:

Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the quietest
12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the quietest
Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 378% since Project Honey Pot started
Over the last five years, you'd have been 9 times more likely to get a phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is rapidly becoming the most phished organization online
Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some of the worst
It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, but that's twice as fast as they were five years ago
Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect to receive more than 850 spam messages
Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year's Day

For more info, check out their post at:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

4 Ways to Use Analytics to Improve Your Email Campaigns

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

This post was guest written by Lary Stucker of FreshClicks.net, a blog about Marketing and Analytics Strategies.

If you're anything like me, one of the big draws of online marketing is the ability to use analytics to track, report, and improve your marketing campaigns. Not only can you use this data to demonstrate the value of your marketing efforts, you can also gain greater customer insight by studying how they respond. So lets look at 4 practical ways you can improve your email campaigns by using your basic reporting tools.

1. Improving Delivery Rates:

Low delivery rates make ISPs nervous. When ISPs get nervous about your emails they label you as SPAM first and ask questions later. Your email campaigns' delivery rates should be in the high 90%. If they are not it means that you need to:

• Filter out those bad and old email address: When you send email to bad addresses, ISPs take notice. Often ISPs will flag a known bad address and if you are sending email to that address they are going to think you are sending spam.

• Improve your collection methods: Make sure potential subscribers clearly understand what they are signing up for, and use a double opt-in method. You can even write the confirmation email so that it reminds them why they signed up for your list in the first place.

2. Improving Open Rates:

You got the email in their inbox, but now what? When someone receives an email they usually open it in the first 24-48 hours. After that, it has been pushed so far down by new emails and other priorities that it will most likely get deleted. So every minute that goes by decreases the possibility that they are actually going to open your email. There are two things that you can measure and test to improve your open rates:

• Time of Day/ Week: Your subscribers are busy people, and depending on the type of campaigns you are running they might not want to read your newsletter or "special offer" first thing Monday morning. I use our existing web analytics to see which days are the most busy on our website. Then I'll look at which hours are the busiest on those days. Once I have that data I'll create random samples from my subscriber list and send on those busy days/hours and see which ones have the best open rates.

• Subject lines: make sure that your subject lines are interesting, enticing, and actually re-enforce the body of the email. The great thing is you can test subject lines and see what kinds of messages entice your subscribers to open. You'd be surprised how the smallest changes can make a big difference. We had a campaign with a decent open rate, (16.8%) after adding the word "Tips" to the subject line our open rate jumped to 25.4%! Suddenly the email went from looking like a marketing piece, to a useful resource our subscribers could actually use. By the way, the body of the email didn't change, but the subject line changed the expectation of the subscriber.

3. Improving Conversion/ Click-Through Rates:

One of the best things to improve conversion and click-through rates is to make it clear what the subscriber is going to find when they click on any link. We recently ran an "upgrade" campaign and decide to run A/B testing on a random portion of our list. The email to group A contained a link with a "Upgrade Now" button, while group B received an email message with a "buy now" button. What we found out was that group A expected the link to give them information about obtaining a free upgrade while group B clearly understood that the "buy now" link would take them to our store to purchase the upgrade. The results, 9.2% conversion rate on the "Upgrade Now" group and a 19.4% conversion rate on the "buy now" group. A difference of 210%!

4. Decreasing Unsubscribes

Lets be totally honest for a second. There are two reasons your company is putting resources into email campaigns. The reason you state on your signup form, to inform, educate or entertain your subscribers, and the reasons you discuss back at the office. Whether it’s to drive direct sales, nurture leads or increase brand awareness, email marketing is a valuable tool for your company. You know it and guess what, your subscribers know it too, and their okay with it. What they want is to not feel like you are trying to trick them into anything. Make sure that your email campaigns add value, have a consistent send schedule, and don't surprise them. After sending a campaign I always check our unsubscribe rates. Our average unsubscribe rate is 0.01%-0.02%. Anytime I see it above those rates I know something went wrong. Usually it has to do with the perceived value of the message or the time between campaigns. When you have analytical evidence like an increase in unsubscribe rates it is a lot easier to convince your copywriter and others in the company of needed changes.

What do you think?

By studying the analytical of your email campaigns you can greatly improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and gain greater insight into your customers. What kinds of insights have you been able to gain from your analytics? How were you able to use that to improve your email campaigns and marketing to your customers? I'd love to hear from you on twitter @LaryStucker or on my blog, www.FreshClicks.net!

Is Dead Really Dead?

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 by Al Iverson

I ran across this blog post on the DMA UK's Email Marketing Blog today. In it, Simone Barratt talks about what you should do about inactive recipients on your list. (Apologies; I've lost track of which other blog linked to this post.) She capably covers a lot of the marketing concerns around inactive subscribers - what constitutes engagement, what to consider when trying to decide whether or not to write off a list segment.

Go back one blog post on that very blog, and author Guy Hanson explains how he was "gob smacked" by the thought that deliverability is a subject that "most companies are just waking up to," and that nobody touched on the topic of sender reputation. Simone, Guy, maybe you should chat. Here's why: Simone's article leaves out a very important consideration: Deliverability, and how mailing to inactive email segments can negatively impede your ability to deliver mail successfully.

My point is, make sure you take deliverability into consideration. Sometimes, the best strategy for dealing with inactive list segments is to jettison them. Yeah, I know, what an anti-list growth point of view. But consider that one of the most recent big changes in deliverability and reputaton metrics is the inclusion of engagement as a reputaton measure by ISPs. Meaning if you have a big old list and very few people ever interact with your emails, you're going to end up with a low sending reputation, and your deliverability will suffer as a result.

Sure, when exactly to define somebody as dead is going to vary, and maybe there are instances in which a different contact strategy or message frequency can save the day. But if hanging on to every single email address on your list forever is likely to cause you problems, it becomes quite the catch 22. It doesn't matter if everybody opted-in to your list; it matters what percentage of recipients show life on the other end of that email message. The hope that someday they might wake up and buy another product for you, in a lot of cases, is going to be overtaken by the disappointment that you can't get messages through to them anymore, because the ISP decided to block or bulk your mail. What's more important? Having the biggest list possible, or having solid inbox deliverability? Sometimes you can't have both.

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.”

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