Email List Campaign

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!

Connections 09: More Subscribers Rule

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Shelly Griffin

This morning I am attending Connections 09 breakout session focused on growing your email marketing subscriber base with Morgan Stewart serving as commentator. This concept is a great follow-up to my recent posts on how to grow your email marketing list.

8:30am - 50% of consumers consider non-permission email from companies that they are familiar with as Spam...that number has doubled year over year.

8:45am - what are they keys to growing your subscriber base? Asking basic questions of your subscribers...do they want to receive email from you and what kind of email do they want to receive? Then what? Make sure you have a strong follow-up after registration. Don't leave your subscribers hanging.

9:00am - Email and social networking...building stronger relationships through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. You can offer exclusive discounts through these networks to drive subscribers to your email list. Ensure that the process is a closed loop...getting subscribers to a landing page with good creative and a good call to action and then getting the data you need to be able to market to that subscriber. Knowing the source from where your subscribers some...whether from co-registration pages, social networks, referrals (forward-to-a-friend). Between the source and the data, you can drive the right message to each subscriber and stop "marketing to the masses".

9:10am - List append is "bad"...it may make you money but you just left the taste of spam in your subscribers mouth.

9:15am - the number of tactics and touch-points that can be used to grow ur subscriber list can and should be many...your subscribers are not just sitting at their computers looking through the internet. They are on the go, so you need to be where they are - mobile, Facebook, Twitter, print - everywhere.

Grow Your Email List Part 3: Have a Contest!

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by Shelly Griffin

I have mentioned before that my goal for this blog was to feature success stories from our small business customers. One of the things I love about working with this business segment is that success and change can actually have a bigger and more immediate impact. It can be the simplest of ideas and programs that pack the greatest punch. I have been talking about list growth and ideas on building your lists. A press release this week for Nytro Sports gives a great example of a simple way to grow your email marketing lists - have a contest!  This is their second big giveaway in 12 months. The first one increased their list-size by 50%! In addition, they gain some great data about their subscribers like geography and sports preferences.

This isn't rocket science. Often we get too focused on the bright new shiny object that distracts us from focusing on what we can impact now...today. Any size business can think of a contest/give-away that customers would be interested in winning to help an email marketing list. Coffee shop? Give away a free latte for a week. Auto-shop? Give away a free oil change. Catering Business? Give away free dessert. Landscape business?  Give away free mowing.

Our annual user conference is next week and one of the featured topics during Wednesday's "Optimization" track is on growing your email list. It's kismet. So come to Indianapolis to have some fun, learn alot and spend some quality time with your peers.

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.

Vegetarians Love Email Marketing Too

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Nicole Ross

I'm vegetarian. At this point, some of you will stop reading because you are baffled by people like me. No hamburgers? No hot dogs? No Beef Stroganauf (yeah I don't have any idea how to spell that)? Nope.

At first it was just because I ate like a bird anyway and it wasn't worth the extra effort to cook meat for myself. Then it was so easy that I never went back. And now, I just don't want anything to have to die so I can go to bed with a food baby.

My point is, we're more alike than you might think. For example, you love email marketing. And I love email marketing! Shocking, probably not, as I work for the industry-leading email marketing software company. But that actually makes me really picky about what email lists I sign up for.

One email newsletter I love is Vegetarian Times. It's both educational and entertaining. For example, I get great new recipes -- and learned that World Vegetarian Day is coming up October 1st! (first annual, I think, but it will undoubtedly take the world by storm).

That's enough for now - I think I'll go snack on some multi-seed mini rice crackers with soy sauce. I know you're jealous.

Nicole
Creative Developer

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!

Let’s Get Personal

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 by Beth Leleck

This year in Insight, we’ve brought you our One-to-One marketing Field Guide Set, 2009 Email List Growth Study, Email Design Checklist and much, much more. But is it what you really want?

I’m a one-to-one marketer just like you. With every email send, I’m glued to the results to see how many opens I’m getting, and what links receive the highest clicks. When open rates on a new subject line top the charts, I get excited thinking about what I can come up with to beat those results the next time around. I learn a lot from testing elements of our communications and analyzing the results. As smart marketers, we all know the value in the numbers, and proving the execution of our strategies back to a strong ROI. I could go on and on about what our newsletter metrics have told me, but I want to go beyond the numbers. That’s right…it’s time to get personal.

After all, InSight is about you! Does this communication give you everything you need to be a successful one-to-one marketer? Does it answer your questions about deliverability and design, while keeping you up-to-date on the latest features in your account? While the numbers can tell me what’s working from what’s already included in InSight, I’m looking for your input on what’s NOT there. Please take a moment to complete the survey in this month’s newsletter and give me some InSight about you! Still have more to say? Share your feedback with me on 3sixty.

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.

Be Prepared: Grow Your Email List

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 by Shelly Griffin

Last week I talked about surviving the digital communications storm and starting with the basics. When it comes to list growth essentials, it is truly amazing to see business after business without the most basic need for an email marketing program - an email sign-up form on their website's home page.

We work with one company that was definitely planning ahead when it comes to email marketing. In fact, they signed with ExactTarget a full-year before they opened their doors for business. Their focus during that time? Buildling their email list! This small Midwestern winery wanted to gather information about their clientele to build a strong and targeted email list.

Take a moment to look at your website through your subscribers' eyes. Can you find your email sign-up form in 10-seconds or less? 30-seconds or less? 5-minutes? Find some more great list growth ideas from Kevin Nuest, "5 Do’s and Don’ts To List Growth From Non-Incident Site Visitors".

Social Media Use on the Rise Among B-to-B Marketers

Friday, August 7, 2009 by Joel Book

A new report being unveiled this week at The B-to-B and ANA Conference in Chicago shows significant increases social media use by B-to-B marketers.

According to an exclusive survey of B-to-B and B-to-C marketing professionals conducted by BtoB Magazine and the Association of National Advertisers, more B-to-B marketers are getting on the social media bus. Here are some highlights:

57% of B-to-B marketers are now using social media channels, compared to just 15% in 2007.
Among newer media tactics for social networking, blogs top the list.
81% of B-to-B marketers are currently using LinkedIn compared to 25% in B-to-C.
Twitter use ranked highest among B-to-B marketers at 70%.
Facebook is still the most used social media site (74%). Among the B-to-B marketers, 60% use Facebook.

How B-to-B Marketers are Leveraging Social Media

Tactically speaking, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is primarily a public relations tool, but it is fast becoming very effective for generating new business leads, either directly or through referral. While Facebook is the dominant social networking site for B-to-C marketers, LinkedIn – as the study revealed – is the preferred watering hole among B-to-B marketers.

Another big way in which marketers are leveraging social media is for email list growth. According to the recent ExactTarget 2009 Email List Growth Study, Social Forwarding is projected to be the most frequently adopted new list growth tactic in 2009. Social Forwarding uses ShareThis to make it easy for email subscribers to share email content directly with friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many other online communities.

Are you LinkedIn?

If you want to learn how to best leverage the networking and lead generating potential of LinkedIn, my friend and social media expert extraordinaire, Jason Baer, of Convince and Convert, has a great presentation on using LinkedIn to build your reputation and generate leads.

SMS Mobile Marketing Ideas

Friday, August 7, 2009 by Megan Sabine

SMS Mobile Marketing. It’s all a buzz in the market right now, but are you having trouble thinking of ways it can help your business? Well hopefully the ideas listed below will help get the wheels turning on how your organization can benefit from SMS mobile marketing.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Grow Email Marketing Lists
Here at ExactTarget, we call this Text Capture. It allows a subscriber to opt in to your email communications via SMS. If you are a brick & mortar shop looking for a way to grow your email marketing list, why not place a promotion at your register prompting your most engaged segment – your customers – to opt-in to your email marketing programs. And once they have, reward them with a coupon on their phone that they can use on that purchase or a later one.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Reward Loyal Customers
Allow your customers to opt-in to receive outbound SMS mobile marketing messages from you. Use those messages to entice your customers to engage with products at your store or website to redeem a SMS subscriber-only coupon. Your SMS savvy customers will enjoy this new way of receiving coupons or deals.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Deliver Timely Messages
Perhaps the most recognizable SMS mobile marketing use case is to deliver alerts. It’s unrealistic to think that your customers are always in a place where they can access their email when they need to read an alert from your company. On the other hand, it’s more realistic that they will have access to their cell phones during that time.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Deliver Presentation Materials
This is one that ExactTarget has experienced success with. Historically, audience members had to wait a day or two to receive presentation materials – and possibly getting caught back up in the day-to-day grind. By allowing audience members to text in to receive the presentation materials via email while they are still watching the presentation (and the most engaged with the topic) you are continuing the engagement before it has had time to die down.

Hopefully the list above helps you get the wheels turning for how your organization can benefit from the power of SMS mobile marketing! For more ideas, be sure to check out ExactTarget's Field Guide to SMS - "Text is Next: Marketing with SMS."

Best Practices for Successful BtoB Email Marketing – Use Paid Search to Attract Email Subscribers

Friday, July 24, 2009 by Joel Book

No matter where I speak, one of the most frequently asked questions I receive is, “What tactics work best for building my email subscriber database?” In fact, in ExactTarget’s 2009 Email List Growth Study, email list growth is ranked #3 by marketers in their list of top priorities for improving email marketing performance in 2009.

Considering the fact that email list attrition averages 25% per year, BtoB marketers need to stay focused on constantly replenishing their email subscriber database. And to attract quality email subscribers, the one tactic you cannot afford to overlook is Paid Search.

Earlier this week, Chris Dawkins, founder and CEO of search engine optimization company Trace Media Marketing, had an excellent article in BtoB Online in which he discussed best practices for using PPC (Pay Per Click) or paid search in combination with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or natural search to attract visitors to your website or landing page.

One of the reasons I’m a big proponent of using paid search is because it allows you to fine-tune your SEO strategy. As Dawkins points out in his article, “testing various keywords and phrases with paid search can be beneficial to your SEO efforts. For example, you can figure out quickly which keywords convert to leads or sales. As your SEO campaign starts delivering traffic, you can back off a little from your paid campaign and focus more on SEO.”

Paid search also allows marketers to lead prospective email subscribers to the desired landing page where they can be invited to subscribe and identify their needs and interests – data that can be used to deliver email content that is relevant and timely.

Still think search is an option? Think again. Forrester Research, in their recently released “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009–2014,” says search marketing spending will total $31.5 billion by 2014 as more marketing budget shifts to interactive media.

5 Do’s and Don’ts To List Growth From Non-Incident Site Visitors

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

Non-incident site visitors are those that seek out your website and initiate the relationship. They are already engaged and motivated. You’ve got them on your site, now convert them. Since this is a delicate relationship between visitor and company, lets break it down in relationship terms. If Dr. Phil gave marketing advice:

Do…
1. Give them an easy to find place to sign-up for your newsletter. How is Prince Charming supposed to find his Cinderella if he doesn’t know to whom the glass slipper belongs?

2. Give away free stuff in exchange for visitors’ basic information. You don’t have to buy them dinner and a movie, but the equivalent of a box of chocolates for a friend would be nice.

3. Build a gradual relationship. Let the visitor dictate when you get that first kiss

4. Track the subscriber acquisition source. Measure what methods and Call To Actions are working and which ones to breakup with.

5. Honor permissions. If a visitor opts-in they expect to be able to opt-out without having to get a restraining order.

Don’t…
1. Use pop-ups asking visitors to sign-up. You don’t go into a bar and walk up to every person of the opposite sex asking them to marry you. Why would you expect to strike that kind of relationship with every visitor to your site?

2. Make the sign-up process long and detailed. Consider it a first date. You don’t reveal that your family is crazy until later down the road. Visitors aren’t going to give you all of their preferences up front.

3. Be so shallow. It may not be love at first sight for your visitor, but give them another way to stay in touch if they don’t want to sign-up for your email list right now. Visibly place social media icons at the top of your site so visitors can follow you on Facebook or Twitter.

4. Assume the visitor understands the full value to them if they sign-up for your emails. You have to show them you are willing to give more than you take before the visitor will open-up to you.

5. Smother your visitors. If you love someone, let them go. If it’s meant to be they will come back to you. The visitor may leave your site without clicking on any Call To Actions. Cheer up and work on winning them over the next time they come back.

Implement these tips and you will finally be able to take down your singles wanted ad from all those online dating websites because you will be in a happy relationship with your customers.

For more great tips and tricks to apply to your list growth strategy, check out this whitepaper to Get the Inside Scoop on Successful List Growth.

Top Resources for Email Marketing Education

Saturday, July 4, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

In March we conducted a survey of 351 email marketers as part of the 2009 Inside Email Marketing Study (the same study that formed the basis of the 2009 Email List Growth Study). The following chart shows responses to a question on the types of resources referenced most often for education about email marketing.

This question was then followed with an open-ended question asking, “Please provide the names of the three specific resources you reference most frequently to learn about email marketing?” Since blogs and industry-focused publications topped the list, we thought we should share the feedback we received on the specific resources marketers shared with us.

Check out the results in these blog posts:

Email Marketing Publishers
Independent Email Marketing Blogs

Disclaimer: ExactTarget is an advertiser, sponsor and/or partner of many of the sites listed in these survey results. Our affiliation with these sites did not play into their rankings—rankings were based solely on the responses of 351 respondents to an open-ended question contained in the survey fielded in March 2009 by ExactTarget and the Email Marketers Club.

What's Missing from this Picture?

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by Amanda Cross

I'm a baseball fan. In fact, before I started contributing to the ExactTarget blog, I had almost four years of baseball blogging under my belt.

So it's only natural that I subscribe to the MLB email lists. Here's an email that they sent me today:

This is an attractive newsletter. Fun products. Nice photos. Not so hot if you've blocked images, but other than that, solid.

But one thing is missing. Can you spot it? I'll give you a hint. I'm a REDS fan. This email hasn't delivered any content that special to me; they've played the odds with the most popular teams.

Most brand preference isn't as passionate as baseball team fandom, but I still encourage you to take a lesson from this email: know your subscribers and send them marketing that they want.

CAN-SPAM and Bad Advice

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Al Iverson

Be careful where you get your legal advice from. As Spamtacular reports, the Attorney General for the state of South Carolina isn't quite up to speed on CAN-SPAM, inaccurately reporting that it enables private right of action. Oops.

Some of the worst legal theories I've heard on the topic of CAN-SPAM are those spouted by the permission challenged. "What I'm doing is OK! This is perfectly legal! ISPs have to accept this mail!" This adds up to a whole big old ball of incorrectness. Sure, it's legal (repeat after me: SPAM IS LEGAL IN THE US). But it's very, very stupid, and ISPs block it whenever they can (repeat after me: IT'S PERFECTLY LEGAL FOR ISPS TO BLOCK YOUR PERFECTLY LEGAL SPAM).

Stop telling people that you are CAN-SPAM compliant. Instead, ask yourself:

How do people end up on my email list? Am I asking for permission, or just assuming?
Do I provide significant disclosure and notice at the time of signup, what mail they'll be getting and when?
What's my plan for subscriber lifecycle management? At what point am I going to drop people off the list when they're not responding?

If people are blocking your mail, even if it's CAN-SPAM compliant, that's where to start. Where do you go from here? Ask your ExactTarget contact for a copy of our Reputation Equation whitepaper, which goes into detail about what things govern your online reputation (and by extension, your ability to get mail delivered).

Quality Co-Registration Drives Subscriptions Honestly

Friday, June 19, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

Following my recent post Email List Growth: Stay Away from the Dark Side, I would be remise if I didn’t highlight ways co-registration can be a respectful service offered to potential subscribers. The Free IQ Test example represents the worst practices. I spoke to some friends at Prospectiv to ask them for an example of how to do co-reg right. Take notice of how different this process is.

First, this process starts during registration on the Game Show Network’s website. This is the first big difference--this site was not created simply for the purpose of harvesting email addresses. The site has a value proposition of it’s own. In this case, the publisher (GSN) has elected to drive additional advertising revenue by partnering with a co-registration partner (Prospectiv).

Once I complete my subscription, I am lead to another page offering me the opportunity to take advantage of an offer from one of GSN’s advertisers. This is a simple question and a single form. “Do you want to get this offer from 1-800-PetMeds”. There is no punishment if I were to click, “No, Thanks” – I would still get the benefits I originally wanted from registering with GSN.

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).

There are two main approaches to co-registration:

First is 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.

The key to success in co-registration is to understand how your brands offers will be presented.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself when evaluating co-reg vendors:

Will my offer be placed before or after the value proposition is delivered?
Is the offer being placed on a site that has intrinsic value? Or is the site simply a gimmick for generating leads or subscriptions (like the IQ Test)?
How many offers will be shown along with my offer?
Will the co-reg company later sell names collected to other 3rd parties, thus devaluing the value of the email address they give me even more?

In short, do they respect permission and privacy?

Unfortunately, I must say add this last piece. Don’t take the vendors word for it. There are a few honest vendors out there, but there are just as many (if not more) dishonest vendors. Check the processes yourself. Look at every site that your offers will be displayed on and walk through the process yourself. Ask for references from other brands that you would like to emulate. If the only references are from companies you have never heard of or think do a poor job, then ask for more. Don't sign big upfront contracts, instead, start with a trial at a small fixed budget and then expand the scope if the trial is successful.

If the co-registration or lead gen company can’t, or won't, provide these things… then RUN, you are about to get burned.

Email List Growth: Stay Away from the Dark Side

Thursday, June 18, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

Building your email list can be a real challenge. In our recent List Growth Study we evaluated 18 different tactics for building email lists. Among the tactics evaluated was co-registration. Among non-organic list growth tactics (tactics that involve the marketer going out to find subscribers as opposed to organic tactics which capture information from consumers who have initiated contact with your site, call center, store, etc) co-registration faired well.

Unfortunately, co-registration is a catch all phrase for anything that involves soliciting potential subscribers on a website other than your own. As such, it may be one of the more loaded terms in email marketing.

I recently came across this great example of how NOT to do co-registration. From this example believe you will agree that the process only benefits one party—the vendor running the program (in this case a company called JoeTec Networks Inc.) Everyone else loses. Customers lose and brands lose.

It all started with a free IQ Test.

They are up front about being an advertising supported site. In fact, in the fine print of the site states “To get your IQ Results you will be required to sign up to our site and view some of our advertisers promotions. You are not required to signup for or buy any of our advertiser's products.”

They are even more transparent in their privacy policy. Here are a couple selections from that page:

Solicited Email:
Company only sends email to individuals who have agreed on the Websites to receive email from Company or to individuals who have agreed on third party websites to receive email from third parties such as Company. Company does not send unsolicited email messages. As a result, statutes requiring certain formatting for unsolicited email are not applicable to Company's email messages.

Third Party Email:
When you fill out one of our forms, you are consenting to receive e-mail that informs you about new merchandise, sales, special discounts and promotions from us and our trusted 3rd party partners. If you wish to discontinue receiving these emails you will need to click the opt-out hyperlink at the bottom of the email.

JoeTec MAY sell or transfer individual information to trusted third parties for any legaly permissible purpose at its sole discretion.

In essence, once you give them your email on any form, you’re inbox is toast. This is the perfect example of where visitors would do well to read the privacy policy. Assuming they understand what they are actually signing up for, I cannot imagine many would continue at this point. Fortunately, I have an unlimited number of junk mail addresses that I can use for this type of research on email marketing. And so I continued to take the test.

Once complete, the forms started. Remember the promise on the first page “You are not required to signup for or buy any of our advertiser's products.” Well it is not true if you actually want to get the results. As you can see, I tried to select no to all of the offers presented to me and I was informed this was not allowed.

So, I completed it and got this form…

Many of these are notable brands. Worse still, some of those brands had their own forms requiring me to sign up for their deals or else the process would terminate and I wouldn’t get my test scores.

After no less than 15 pages with multiple offers and another 15 or so forms from specific companies, I finally got my IQ Test score. Apparently my willingness to submit myself to this abuse made me dumber. The score I got was a full 40 points lower than any other score I have ever received on an IQ or similar test.

But now for the consequences. In the two months that have passed since I ran this little experiment, that mailbox has received over 400 email messages. That is 200 a month, or an average of about 7 email messages per day.

A few smart brands have only sent one email to that address asking me to confirm my subscription. I received approximately 20 of these in the first week and I did not respond to any of them. Why? Not because I wasn’t interested, but because I was overwhelmed.

A few other brands continue to send email to that address. They are now on my “do not do business with” list. If companies can’t pay attention to the company they keep, then I don’t want to do business with them.

Don’t play with your companies reputation. If you are going to try co-registration (or any other non-organic list growth tactic), you need to work with experienced and reputable providers that understand the principles of true permission.

The ExactTarget Blog

Follow Us On...

Recent Entries

Authors

Categories