Every afternoon, I receive a message with links to press releases and industry articles from our PR firm.  It's a great way to stay on top of what's happening with ExactTarget and in the email marketing industry.  All from the comfort of my uncomfortable office chair.

As I perused through today's issue, I noticed yet another article about mobile email marketing.  While reading the article, I realized that something was amiss: it's just not that simple.  There are too many factors (i.e. phone type, operating system, email client) and too many scenarios (i.e. checking on the run, reading in full, saving for later) to provide any type of blanket statements (i.e. design like this, segment like that) about mobile email marketing.

We know people use it.  And we know that as marketers we should pay attention to that.  But beyond that, we should proceed with caution. 

Last month, Morgan Stewart, our Director of Research & Strategy, wrote a great article about the complications of mobile email marketing -- and how there is no easy fix.  And last summer, our strategic services team conducted the most extensive consumer study to date on mobile email marketing.  The results may surprise you.

For example, our research shows that some recipients are actually thrown off by mobile-specific text on the messages.  And designing for "mobile-only reading" assumes that your recipient isn't going to open the message again on their computer (which many recipients report they do!)

That research is still available in ExactTarget's Email Marketing for the Third Screen Whitepaper.  Yes, I know it's a whitepaper (ugh!) and that it's lengthy (yuk!).  But if you're serious about mobile email marketing, it's well worth the time to read. 

To date, I have yet to find another resource that provides so much data to back up so many recommendations about mobile email marketing.  And no, Morgan didn't bribe me to say that.*  This article from February, also on the DMNews blog, provides some good general (and cautionary!) recommendations. 

Cheers,
Ashley
Manager, Marketing Communications

P.S. We're working hard with our strategists to finalize a brand new whitepaper this month on consumer messaging preferences.  If you liked Email Marketing for the Third Screen, you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for it!

* I accept bribe payment in the forms of celebrity gossip magazine subscriptions and gift certificates for my local spa.

Q: Do I need to be concerned about my sender reputation when sending triggered email messages?
 
A: Absolutely.  Good sender reputation is critical whether you're sending transactional emails or commercial emails, and whether you're sending messages via ExactTarget's triggered email interactions or sending a traditional campaign to a list of subscribers.
 
Regardless of whether email is triggered to an individual subscribers or sent via a marketing campaign to many subscribers, senders with a good reputation get their mail delivered to the inbox, while those with a poor reputation find their mail in the junk folder…or worse.
 
Sender reputation is typically most affected by complaint and bounce rates. It’s no surprise that if you get too many complaints or have too many bounces, and you'll damage your sender reputation. You can avoid complaints by sending mail that subscribers have asked for and are expecting to receive, as well as mail that subscribers find relevant.  Triggered emails are often the most anticipated and relevant messages you can send; however, overwhelming a recipient with unrelated promotional content or an envelope field that doesn’t represent your brand can increases the chance they may complain about your message.
 
Bounces can be mitigated by building in a method of address verification into your address capture process.  Often, asking users to enter their address twice to verify that both entries match will eliminate typos.  And, ensuring that your content is compelling will help ensure users give you a legitimate address to begin with.

Phil Schott
Sr. Deliverability Consultant

Question: What are tips for designing a triggered welcome email?

Answer: Welcome emails are a great example of a triggered marketing message. When a subscriber signs up for your communications, sending them a welcome email shortly after signup can be very beneficial.

Welcome emails often have higher open rates than your typical campaigns (due to being highly anticipated by new subscribers) so it is important to take advantage of the increased “face time” you have with your audience.

As such, you want your welcome email to make a good first impression and effectively set expectations for the future communications a subscriber will receive. Here are a few tips to get you pointed in the right direction:

Include your brand name in your subject line.
Aside from the “from name,” the subject line is the second most important factor in getting your subscriber to open your email. Seeing your brand name will help them recognize that this as a communication they’ve asked to receive.

Be honest and upfront about mailing frequency.
If you’re going to send a weekly email, make sure new subscribers know this (and that they aren’t expecting to only hear from you once a month!).  Sending to your subscribers more than they expect may cause them to unsubscribe or mark your email as spam.

Re-emphasize the benefits of being a subscriber.
Communicate your value proposition with a short paragraph of text or a bulleted list. This should be the focus of your message placed in the upper left portion of your email to optimize for preview pane viewing.

Keep it short and simple.
Your welcome email should include concise and relevant copy. Don’t include elements that detract from the primary message and make your email unnecessarily long.

Use images wisely.
Since the majority of email clients block images by default, it is important to use HTML text for your welcome email copy. You want this information to be seen by as many people as possible, so only use images for your company logo and supplemental imagery.

Tell them what to look for in the future.
New subscribers should be reminded to add your email address to their address book or safe senders list. This will help to ensure inbox delivery for future communications and in many cases by-pass image blocking.

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Marketing Designer

AOL's new Postmaster Blog reveals that the new version of the AOL webmail interface now blocks links by default.

Now, when sending to AOL.com/AIM.com users, your message will have a banner across the top that says “Enable Links (for this message) | (always for this sender),” somewhat similar to what Outlook does. Recipients can choose to enable links for that one message you've sent, or they can permanently enable links for messages you send them by clicking on the “always for this sender” link.

On another note: If you happen to poke around the AOL Postmaster Blog, you'll find this post talking about how AOL wants you to minimize your attempts to deliver mail to invalid recipients. One of the “are you a spammer?” measures that ISPs use against you, is what percentage of your attempted mail is undeliverable. If your list is chock full of bounces, it's a sign of bad list practices. You look like you've bought a list, been sitting on a list for many years, or otherwise came up with a group of email addresses that are far out of date and invalid. Good senders don't have this problem; they mail regularly, only to people who really signed up to receive mail from them. Good senders also process bounces properly; invalidating, and ceasing sending to, addresses that bounce back and aren't deliverable.

AOL doesn't lay out an exact “bounce threshold” -- they basically say “don't be on the bad end of the sending spectrum.” It highlights that AOL isn't willing to provide a bar to allow all senders to slide “just under” as needed; they're concerned about questionable senders gaming the system. Instead, they're working based on a process wherein they identify the spectrum of senders and their associated statistics. They then stack rank senders, and take those on the lower end of the ranking (the poorest senders) and those are the ones they're likely to take action against.

Working this way suggests to me that their hope is to significantly raise the quality of mail their users receive over time.

I've heard the occasional bit of grumbling here and there from various senders and other ESPs about how it's not fair and AOL should simply publish an exact threshold and make it clear what the rule is. I don't blame AOL for addressing it the way they are. I know that ISPs are deluged with mail from “edge case” senders trying to do just enough to get by under the radar and get their mail delivered, without a true commitment to permission. I certainly can't blame an ISP for changing things up in a way that hopes (I think) to trip up iffy senders.

Besides, if you're not an iffy sender, what do you have to worry about?

Default productivity level: 4
Productivity level with Jack Johnson music: 17

Exaggerate? I do not.

Recently a correlation developed between my work efficiency and Jack Johnson. For some reason, I just get more done when Sleep Through the Static is jamming through my headphones. Can't explain it.

But the point is, my love for this beach-loving guitar-star drove me to the Jack Johnson website last night to investigate. "Join the Mailing List" links don't usually grab my attention...but as The Horizon Has Been Defeated drifted through my room, I couldn't help but click.

OK, fine. Maaayyybe I clicked because the only thing I'm more obsessed with than Jack Johnson is email marketing. Shhhh.

An email verification message automatically appeared in my inbox to make sure I really wanted to hear from Kokua Hawaii Foundation -- which helped me know my subscription had gone through. Well done, Jack.

Overall, a painless process that left me looking forward to hearing from the genius behind Banana Pancakes.

Nicole
Marketing Communications Associate

ps -- The Jack Johnson Tour is coming to Indiana this summer!

pps -- Jack's record label, Brushfire Records, has gone green -- awesome idea, so definitely check this out.

If you're like me, you have as many email addresses as pairs of shoes.  Just keeping the inbox clean can be a daily challenge.  To help manage them I find myself constantly unsubscribing from email lists that at one time filled a need but now just serve as clutter. After all, I can always subscribe again . No worries, right?

So, what does letting your audience unsubscribe have to do with staying off an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) blacklist? Glad you asked! Just the other day I tried to unsubscribe from a large corporation's email list but, to my surprise and chagrin, there was no way to do so. But of course there was a nice "Subscribe" link prominently displayed in the header. So, now my choices are either A), continue receiving email I don't want or B), mark it as SPAM. Hmmm? What to do? What to do?

Just imagine if this were your email campaign and others wanted off your mailing list. Every recipient that marks your message as SPAM pushes you ever closer to dreaded blacklist. Ouch! Avoid this potential painful lesson and stay compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act by having a "visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism" present in every email. It doesn't have to be the most prominent part of your message but it does need to be accessible.

Besides, do you really want to keep members on your email lists against their will? You're now paying good money to send an email to someone who is most likely going to delete it unread. Do the right thing. Let them unsubscribe. For more info on how to stay CAN-SPAM compliant read our  free email marketing whitepaper Enterprise Email: Managing Risks and Liabilities.

Ryan Oldfather
Internet Marketing Manager

See this example for a good example of how to keep the quality of your email list high.  The grim reality is that subscribers tend to interact with your newsletters less as time goes by. This begs the question, why would you want subscribers who signed up three, four, or five years ago on your list?  There is a good chance these subscribers are just fluff and not driving much traffic to your site.

I received this excellent example from MediaPost. Instead of waiting until their list grows old and tired to clean it up, they keep their list evergreen by maintaining an annual subscription model. As you can see, my subscription is up this month and they recently started running these renewal reminders at the top of my daily email.

By doing this, MediaPost keeps their list fresh, response rates up, and keep themselves out of trouble often associated with mailing to old names (such as hitting dead inboxes that most ISPs monitor). Many fear that by adopting this approach, they will drastically cut into the size of their list. This is not completely unwarranted, but it is short-sighted. Despite the annual subscription approach (which by the way has worked for print subscriptions for years) MediaPost is able to keep the size of their list up. According to Mediapost's media kit, circulation for the EmailInsider newsletter is 58,000... pretty impressive for a high quality B2B email list.

I was as thrilled as anyone when we decided to focus this month’s InSight on Building a Better List.  Why?  Because I want to build a better list just as much as the next guy (or gal, in my case).  After all, since we’re an email marketing company, it’s my job to set our email marketing bar high…and keep pushing it higher.  That of course includes the quality of our subscriber lists.

After an extensive re-engagement campaign in the fall of 2006, our lists “shrunk” in size.  And like most marketers, list fatigue is a common challenge for us as well.  Continually building a better, more engaged subscriber list is an important ongoing focus of our email marketing program.  So here’s the lesson I’ve learned about how to build a better list: if you want to grow your list, do it the right way.  Do it one step at a time.  Just do it.

Here’s an example: On Monday, January 28th we put a banner in our application to promote ExactTarget InSight.  This means that the first thing our customer saw when logged in to their accounts was, essentially, an opt-in button.  With thousands of users logging in every day, it seemed like a nice way to reach out specifically to our clients. 

We normally average around 200 InSight opt-ins a month.  However, we’ve already received over 200 new opt-ins in the fourteen days since the banner launched.  The best part is that these opt-ins are coming from our customers, which provides highly engaged and quality subscribers.  So while it may seem like a small thing to do, when you’re building a better subscriber list the small things add up.

Every day, week, or month that goes by is a missed opportunity to build a better list.  If you’re looking for recommendations on how to get started, check out our new case study featuring Hershey Entertainment & Resorts and learn how they achieved a 33% list growth in just ten months. It provides great tips you can use to get started.  Just do it.

Building a better list and the quality of your email address are inevitably intertwined.  A recent change at Comcast / Roadrunner may be affecting your deliverability bounce rates. 

Adelphia was a national cable broadband provider that went out of business way back in 2005. Comcast and Time Warner (Roadrunner) bought the assets and split them up between them.

Since then, Comcast and Roadrunner have been slowly transitioning users off of the adelphia.net domain, region by region.

Comcast/Roadrunner are not notifying ISPs or senders when these changes take place. They do notify end recipients whose email addresses are changing with about a month's notice, and encourage them to notify people that their email address is changing.

Comcast is now fully transitioned off of Adelphia, and the Adelphia.net domain will no longer forward mail for Comcast users. That means that you're going to see a higher than average number of bounces at adelphia.net for the few mailings, until these addresses move to undeliverable automatically and scrubbed from future mailings. The ExactTarget system will handle these bounces properly and automatically.

Road Runner, the current owner of the Adelphia.net domain, continues to support email for a large number of users in the Adelphia.net email domain. They have not announced plans to retire the Adelphia.net domain at this time.

Note that for the many email addresses that were just "retired," it's not possible to translate them into comcast.net email addresses, as their username (and therefore the left part of their email address) has likely changed.

According to two sources I trust implicitly—J.R.R. Tolkien and Drew Barrymore (okay, technically I trust her character in Donnie Darko)—the most beautiful combination of words in the English language is “cellar door.”  Now, you can debate this assertion all you want.  But to do so would be fruitless unless you’ve penned a tome as lengthy and beloved as “Lord of the Rings” or you won the hearts of millions in E.T. the Extraterrestrial.

So, rather than debate the most beautiful combination of words in the English language, I would like to propose the ugliest.  Here goes:

Email List

Hold on…let it sink in for a bit.  Do you feel the fingernails scraping down your mental chalkboard? If not, take a moment and consider what one of your subscribers hears when these words are spoken.  Do you think they feel special, unique or valuable?  Or is it more likely that they feel like a nameless, faceless number?

Language matters.  And when we focus on issues concerning the “email list” instead of the needs of our “email subscribers,” we do ourselves a great disservice.  We focus on us and our needs as opposed to our subscribers—our customers—and their needs. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a marketer proclaim “we have to grow our list!”  When pressed, however, these marketers readily admit that list growth isn’t the real goal.  Their real goal is increasing the number of subscribers who respond to their email program by purchasing or responding or interacting in some measurable way.

If you share a similar objective, I’d like to suggest a simple, semantic exercise to help focus your efforts. For the next month, try substituting “subscribers” for “list” in your email marketing vocabulary.  Give up trying to “grow your list” in favor of trying to add subscribers and increase your knowledge of their unique needs. 

The exercise may be simple, but the perspective gained will help you avoid burn and churn tactics in favor of programs built to maximize subscriber value.

Subscriber-centric.  Now those are beautiful words.

Having multiple databases for subscriber information can be cumbersome when attempting to keep all your data up-to-date. Keeping lists clean and current is a common reason clients use the ExactTarget API.  Our API lets you update individual subscribers on a particular list, or you can update an entire list by using the API to kick off an import.

If it is a small set of subscribers that are being updated, the “single subscriber adds” or “subscriber edit calls” would suit you. This would allow you to update subscriber attribute values or even update subscriber’s status to unsubscribe. 

If you have a larger set of subscribers (as many of you do!) using a batch import would be the best option.  You can FTP the .csv or .txt file to the ExactTarget FTP location, and then use an API call to tell ExactTarget to import that file name into a particular list id.  You can also indicate the import type just as you can through the user interface: add and update new and existing subscribers, add only new subscribers, or update only existing subscribers.

Alternately, you can use the ExactTarget API to pull subscriber lists back in an XML format.  When pulling back a list of subscriber, the API lets you return all subscribers on that list, or to filter based on status.  For example, you can pull subscribers in an Unsubscribed, Undeliverable, Held, or Unsubscribed status, which is helpful if you have a different (or multiple) subscriber databases.  Pulling your subscriber lists out of our application means you can take advantage of ExactTarget’s powerful subscriber management tool and propagate that data across all databases for email marketing.  By automating these pushes and pulls to run daily (or weekly depending on email frequency) it will reduce the time needed to manually update your subscriber lists and help you stay Can-SPAM compliant.

No matter where your data is, the ExactTarget API can help you build, maintain and clean your subscriber lists.  And at the end of the day, that means you’re well on your way to building a better list.

Jessica Koch
Integration Consultant

If you were looking for some advice from someone who talks to companies sending email, and ISPs receiving email, all day long every day – today's your lucky day! I'm in the mood to share.

Today's advice is on what NOT to do; what NOT to say when talking to an ISP or other site that receives mail from you or your clients.

Don't say: My emails are CAN-SPAM compliant.

If you do say it: You will be scorned. You'll attract derision. At the very least, you're going to make an ISP or spam filterer roll their eyes at you.

Why? Because everybody sending any form of legitimate (or sometimes even illegitimate) mail is CAN-SPAM compliant. Citing this as a reason that an ISP should accept your emails is a lot like bragging that your email has a subject line.

“So?” The ISP employee will ask themselves. “Do they expect a gold star for doing what everybody else does?” From the ISP perspective, only bad guys (and misinformed good guys) tout their CAN-SPAM compliance.

CAN-SPAM allows you to send spam, if you follow certain rules. Right away, your announcement makes them wonder, are you a spammer? Bad guys tell them all the time, “I don't spam, because my mail is CAN-SPAM compliant.” That's practically a non-sequitur. It just doesn't make any sense. CAN-SPAM makes little reference to permission best practices. It practically allows spam. Telling the world that you shouldn't be considered a spammer because you comply is telling the world, “I am not a spammer because I comply with a law that allows me to send spam!” It's not a great message to send. It does not set you apart, and it doesn't convey the true adherence to opt-in best practices that ISPs require to ensure they'll accept your mail.

CAN-SPAM compliance is such a bare minimum as to be useless for describing your email practices. Your send practices have to be CAN-SPAM compliant, sure. But that's far from enough. It takes a lot more than just CAN-SPAM compliance to get an ISP to accept your mail.

ISPs block millions of CAN-SPAM compliant messages daily. They do not care that your messages are compliant with CAN-SPAM. They care only if your mail is desired by their customers, your recipients. That means opt-in; clear opt-in, with details. That means up front signup disclosure regarding who you are, what you'll be sending, and how often. It means proper management of bounces and unsubscribes. It means keeping your list engaged.

Even worse, when you mention CAN-SPAM to an anti-spam group, they usually stop responding to you, or refuse to remove you from a blacklist, or at the very least, they're going to laugh at you. They've heard it all before. After all, the vast majority of people who proudly announce their CAN-SPAM compliance are ... spammers! Don't sound like a spammer, and don't be a spammer.

People who aren't spammers instead say other, better things: My mail is opt-in. People sign up for my mailings directly here at this website (and include a link). I don't buy or sell lists. I don't bury the opt-in notice in a privacy policy. I clearly tell people what they're signing up for and how often I'm going to send it to them.

That's what you need to say, and that's what you need to do.

If my inbox is any indication, list growth was a common goal set for this year.  In the past week, I have been asked for information on email appends and other list growth tactics by several clients a day.

Most email append providers offer what we call an "opt-out" email append service.  The process looks something like this:

1) Client provides a file containing street addresses of customers or prospects that is matched against a database. Where a match to the client's list is found, the email address is appended to the record.

2) An email is then sent to the individuals on the newly created list with the option to opt out. (Interestingly, many email append companies advertise the low number of opt-outs that are received... but more on that in a minute)

3) After allowing some time for people to opt-out (typically a week), two files are returned to the customer. The first file is a list of successfully appended and delivered emails. The second is a list of opt-out emails to be used for suppression.

Cost

We have worked with several third parties on email append projects with clients. Pricing is competitive in this industry with rates from reputable email append providers starting around $0.50 per appended email address with significant discounts based on volume. Pay attention, since there are hundreds of companies that advertise significantly lower rates. If someone quotes you rates starting at $0.05, or even $0.10, per email append... RUN!

Issues with Opt-out Append

1) Those low opt-out rates are not a good thing.

One prominent player in the email append space advertises, "Less than one-fourth of one percent choose to opt out." No one should be impressed by this since opt-out rates are always low.  The industry wide average opt-out rate is about one-tenth of one percent. So, quoting one-fourth of one percent suggests that their average opt-out rate is 2.5 times higher than the industry averages.  Not good!

2) Quantity, not quality.

The opt-out approach to email appends provides no incentives for the email append provider to ensure that the names will be responsive. They get paid by the address they provide back to you, regardless of whether or not the address is responsive. While reputable providers do have an interest in repeat business and referrals, which is some incentive, the fact still remains that you pay for the email addresses you receive back at the end of this process. The only requirements are that the email address is deliverable and they did not opt-out to a single email sent to them as part of the process.  These are embarassingly low thresholds. In my experience, addresses acquired through opt-out append are less responsive than new registrants from other sources. At least part of this can be attributed to “recipient dilution”, which you can read more about in Al’s recent post. At the end of the day, you just end up paying for a lot of deadweight.

3) "Opt-out" is not permission.

Why is this important? Because lists that are not permission-based result in higher unsubscribe rates, higher percentage of people clicking this "This is SPAM" button, and lower open, click-through, and conversion rates. These factors lead to problems with your online reputation, and thus, your ability to get your email delivered. Just because someone does not unsubscribe or report you as SPAM the first time you send an email to them (as part of the opt-out append process) is no indication that they will not do so later. The best predictor of someone reporting you as SPAM is the level of permission you obtained when they were added to your list. "Opt-out" lists, while legal under CAN-SPAM, do not meet the demands of most ISPs receiving your email, significantly increase the likelihood that your email will be blocked, and make it much more difficult to get your email unblocked.

"But all the email addresses are 'double opt-in'!" is a common protest when we bring up this point. Well, yes... maybe at some time they double opted-in for something. But, they never opted-in to anything for you! Permission in marketing is non-transferable.

For that reason, ExactTarget is a permission-based ESP. All ExactTarget clients sign an agreement agreeing that the lists they provide are permission-based and are not permitted to send to opt-out lists using our system.

4) Opt-out append leaves a negative impression with some recipients. 

I have yet to find a way to measure the financial impact of the negative impression that is left in the minds of unwilling recipients of appended emails, but there is no question that there is a dark side. Forrester provides excellent insights based on a survey they conducted in August 2004. "Nearly 50% of likely email subscribers wouldn't mind and would read appended emails from a cataloger. However, appended email blatantly offends between 25% to 39% of consumers, depending on the type of business sending it. And it has hidden risks. About 20% of consumers say that even though they read appended emails, they find them annoying. Another 12% say that although they don't unsubscribe, appended emails annoy them."

5) Results are spotty at best.

MarketingShepra's 2007 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide indicates that of marketers who have tried email appends, more than half said it either didn't work or it wasn't worth the effort.

Part II coming soon... email appends done right!

There’s still a lot of education to be done on the topic of buying lists, why it’s a bad idea, and why it should be avoided.

Setting aside the emotional and ethical question of whether it’s right or wrong to buy lists, there are some very practical reasons that bought lists will damage your ability to deliver mail successfully. Here are the top three.

1. Purchased lists are filled with bounces and invalid addresses. If you don’t mail a list for a long time, then you mail it, it has a very high bounce percentage. High bounce percentages are one of the measures ISPs use to determine who’s doing something bad and should be blocked. If a lot of your attempted mail bounces, you look like a spammer.

Whoever you’re buying the list from will claim everything is cool and great and assure you it’s all opt-in. That might have been true at one time (but probably wasn’t). Ultimately, though, they’re looking to sell you as much list data as possible. They’re probably not mailing the list themselves, just selling it to a lot of different people. If they’re not mailing, they’re not processing and removing addresses who bounce. You buy the list, you buy it, and boom, you have huge bounces and delivery problems.

2. Don’t forget spam traps. Spam traps are email addresses that feed straight into spam filters. Hit just a few (or often just one) of these, and your mail goes to the spam folder or gets blocked. ISPs take addresses that should never be on their lists (usually common typos and forgeries) and long dead addresses (things that have been bouncing and would not have on your list if you handled bounces properly) and turn them into spam traps.

Even if the person you buy the list from was mailing it first, there could be (and probably still are) spam trap addresses on those lists. The only way to remove them is to re-engage your list. Dump inactive subscribers. Ask everyone on the list to click on a link to re opt-in. See, spam trap addresses accept the mail just fine; they don’t return a bounce. But they don’t open and click. So you don’t know which addresses are spam trap addresses. And whoever you’re buying that list from probably is not re-engaging their list – because it could dump 90% or more of the addresses on that list as being invalid or uninterested. That reduces the amount of data they’re able to sell you, which is likely at odds with the list seller’s financial motivation.

3. And finally, consider recipient dilution. What is recipient dilution? That’s where you and 900 other senders mail the same list. There have been a few cases, with clients we’ve terminated, where I test somebody’s signup process, and find that after about a day, they get a hundred emails from 90 different senders. A hundred emails!

Think of how overwhelming that would be in your inbox. Do you want a hundred emails all at once? Regular users are going to be overwhelmed and report all those messages as spam. Your message is not going to stand out, as everybody that list probably has a very low tolerance for messages they don’t recognize. You’ll be just another one of the big pile of unfriendly spammers pounding the heck out of their email account.

Or, let’s assume a different scenario. Perhaps the list owner is compiling the list over time, and will end up sending it to different people at different times. The recipients on this list are going to keep getting mail they don’t recognize that people they don’t know –forever! The list will be sold and sold and sold and sold, and if you buy it, and send to it, you’re just one of the people making the people on that list miserable.

Can you imagine ending up on one of these lists? Even if you meant to sign up for a list that is going to be sold 500 times – after a short while you are going to start getting very upset. You’re getting more and more mail from people you don’t recognize and you didn’t expect that mail and a lot of it is mail you didn’t want. And it keeps coming and coming and coming. You know what I call that? Spam.

ISP users will report that mail as spam. ISPs will listen to those reports, and you’ll be branded a spammer (and rightly so). You’ve got no hope of making it to the inbox when that happens.

My team and I have great relationships with ISPs. But no ISP will ever knowingly want to help a sender doing things this way. If you want to get to the inbox, or not get booted out of the inbox (often permanently), then you need to avoid these practices at all costs.

There are lots of legitimate ways you can build your list. But buying a list isn’t one of them.

The number one thing a marketer can do to ensure maximum email deliverability is maintain a good reputation. The vast majority of ISPs decide which mail to accept based on the reputation of your sending IP address. If you are sending mail to names outside of permission; if those recipients don’t expect to hear from you; if you’re continually mailing the same, tired old list for years; these and many other factors can drag down the email reputation of your IP address, increasing the chances of your mail going to the bulk folder (or being blocked outright).

What you’ll find new on this front in 2008 is that ISPs are clamping down more than they’ve ever done before. They’re automating their spam filtering and becoming faster on the trigger. They’re now blocking more quickly, and declining to unblock more often. They’re outsourcing more of their mail delivery choices to third parties. For example, comcast is working with Return Path.  And Yahoo now uses the Spamhaus blacklists.

That’s why it’s becoming more important than ever to proactively ensure maximum deliverability through adherence to permission. If you don’t, you could easily find yourself trapped in a deliverability quagmire that you can’t easily resolve – even though it’s a practice that you received no negative feedback about previously!

ExactTarget has excellent technical tools to help you maximize your deliverability. Our automated feedback loop processing, bounce mail management, and mail server fine-tuning all work together to get as much as your mail to the inbox as possible. Our dedicated deliverability services staff stands ready and waiting to reach out to ISPs as needed to help resolve issues. But, even with all of those steps, reputation and permission remain the true, primary governors of email deliverability success.

If you’re like me, maybe your resolution this year was to not have a resolution.  I swore off resolutions a few years ago – the year after I resolved to run a marathon (accomplished!) but realized in doing so that my resolutions were in fact things that should be an integral part of my life:  Keep active.  Keep learning.  Maintain a work / life balance.  Together, those things comprise the big picture “life foundation.” And I’ve found that if I focus on living it, all the little things fall into place – sometimes effortlessly, and sometimes with a lot of work.

Email marketing is no different.  Last year, when I started working with our email program, I set out resolutions like “get a 15% click-through rate” and “implement a testing schedule” and “lower our unsubscribe rate.”  Sound familiar?  While we were able to achieve them, we were missing the big picture.  The why we needed to accomplish those goals is just as important as the goals themselves.  Our own email program “big picture” is:

• Customer Retention
• Lead Conversion
• Brand Awareness

From here, it’s easy to identify the areas we can improve on (and relate them back to our broader vision).  For 2008, our goals are:

• Analytics and Metrics
• Building Better Lists
• Automation

These may seem basic – but that’s exactly the point.  By boiling it down into the key areas to improve, we can prioritize where to put our efforts.  The critical part is knowing what we’re working for, and then establishing actionable milestones that will be steps in the right direction.

You might notice something missing from the goals above.  Specifics.  Yep, I know they’re gone, too.  But things like “run reports on email performance” and “implement web analytics tracking” and “add 20% more subscribers to our list” aren’t goals – they’re actions.  They should be recorded and executed on appropriately…but to me, they set the bar too low.  If we know one of our goals is building a better list, for example, then adding more subscribers becomes just one piece of a bigger puzzle. 

So this year, you’ll notice a renewed focus on the foundations of email marketing – planning, design, deliverability, list quality, etc.  To help you strengthen each area of your own program, we’re adding a new section to your InSight Newsletter called “Back to Basics.”  Each month, we’ll focus on one area for you to improve – and deliver a brand new type of resource to help you take action. 

It’s no coincidence that next month’s focus is “Building a Better List,” so stay tuned!  In the meantime, I’d encourage you to register for a new webinar offered by our extremely talented Account Management team, and to sound off on what your 2008 email marketing “big picture” is.

Cheers,
Ashley Sales
Manager, Marketing Communications

Thanks to the Writers’ Guild strike, my TV remote has been wandering into uncharted cable territory of late.  I can’t say that it has made for great viewing, but it did reintroduce me to the 1997 sci-fi/horror film “Event Horizon” and the seemingly unassailable notion that black holes are bad and to be avoided at all costs.
 
A black hole, as you might recall from Physics class or Jeopardy reruns, is an area in space with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape once inside—not even light. 
 
The marketing equivalent that continues to be used by too many reputable marketers is the black hole email subscriber center — a place where subscribers get in, but they can’t get out (i.e., unsubscribe) without a great deal of frustration. 
 
The best practice, of course, is to make it just as easy for visitors to subscribe as it is to unsubscribe.  Too often, though, the unsubscribe process is given short shrift.  Think about your own email subscription center.  When’s the last time that you audited it—actually going through step-by-step to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change your preferences in all of the various ways it permits?  My guess is that it’s been a while…if ever.
 
If that’s the case, I encourage you to dig into your email subscriber center with fresh eyes: enlist new or non-marketing resources if you have to, and walk-through every page, instruction, and process documenting those opportunities to:

• Clarify on-screen instructions
• Verify that all subscription-related links (via website or email) work as intended and land on the desired page
• Simplify the effort needed to subscribe, unsubscribe or change personal information
• Give subscribers the ability to offer & edit more personal data
• Capture other means of contact that may be used in the future (secondary email address, home phone, cell phone for SMS)
• Optimize both subscription and unsubscribe confirmation email content
• Make everything faster & easier

With fresh eyes and a little bit of effort, you can not only rid your email subscription center of any black holes that are damaging subscriber relations, you can also build trust with your subscribers—trust that will be imperative if you plan to expand into SMS and other forms of one-to-one messaging in the future.

We've recently learned that the following domains have been retired by RoadRunner: jam.rr.com, midsouth.rr.com, mn.rr.com, se.rr.com, sport.rr.com, swfla.rr.com, ucwphilly.rr.com and houston.rr.com

Users at these domains have been transitioned to Comcast. In the transition process, users were able to choose a new email address. Meaning, it's not possible to simply convert an email address in your list from the old domain to the new domain – the username part of their email address has likely changed.

If your lists contain users at these domains, you'll see mail to them start to bounce as of January 7th, 2008. The ExactTarget system is handling these bounces properly and you should notice addresses at these domains being turned to “undeliverable” status. We're marking these domains as “dead” in our system, and very soon you will find them automatically removed at import time, via our List Detective.

Additionally, the domain adelphia.net belongs to a defunct ISP. Assets of the defunct cable provider Adelphia were purchased by and split between Comcast and RoadRunner, way back in 2005. Some users transitioned to <something>.rr.com email addresses, and some transitioned to comcast.net email addresses. For a long time, adelphia.net addresses were forwarding on to the recipient's new email address, but it appears as though mail to this domain is starting to bounce. The system is handling these bounces properly. We'll wait a short while, to confirm our suspicion that this transition is permanent. If so, we'll also mark this domain as “dead” in the system.

I am seeing more and more examples of how smart marketers are using email for customer service. And with today’s generation of APIs (Application Program Interfaces), it’s easier than ever to integrate email technology with database technology to deliver fully automated customer service messages – that are personal and timely – and require no human intervention.

Why more companies do not use email to deliver subscription renewal, billing reminders and other “alerts” is beyond me. It’s just good customer service. And for those companies that do, it is becoming a huge competitive advantage. I don’t have the metrics to support my opinion, but I believe we are getting closer to seeing just how important email is in building relationship equity which in turn builds brand equity.

Here’s a good example.

Last week, I received an email from my 23 year old son, Chris, who is typical of today’s “digital media” consumer who prefers the speed and ease of email. His recent experience with an insurance company serves as a good example of what can go wrong when email is not used to alert customers when their policy is about to expire. Here’s his story:

“I came into the office this morning and realized that my car insurance expired on December 23rd. No email was sent to me from (my auto insurance company) alerting me to the fact that my policy was due to expire and inviting me to renew. This caused me to think about how great it would have been to receive an email with anything in the subject line alerting me to my policy's impending expiration.

This leads to two conclusions about email, one fairly obvious.

1. Subject lines are more important in 2008 than ever. We are inundated with email, and subject lines are being skimmed more and more. There's no longer the necessity to entice the recipient with subject lines, you now must communicate the gist of the message in the subject line.

2. This leads me to my second and slightly less obvious point. No longer is it a perk for us to receive emails alerting us to special offers or information that is timely (like policy expiration alerts)…we now expect it. I have paperless billing for everything. I now expect that when I need to be alerted about something -- of interest or importance -- that I will be informed of via email. In fact, I have come to expect this.

Those of us who work in the field of online marketing understand that today, it’s all about ROI. Is there a better way to generate positive ROI than by retaining an existing customer? For two cents - or whatever the going rate is for email - (my auto insurance company) could have made $960 (I can't wait until I'm 25 for cheap insurance!). I'm not a math wiz, but spending two cents to generate a $960 insurance renewal seems like a pretty good ROI!”

Lots of thought has been given to triggered email marketing in recent articles. What I’m referring to is primarily triggering based on a customer activity (purchase, site visit, cart abandonment, email open, click, etc.), or a subscription or time event (birthday, subscription end date, card expiration, etc.). Why the buzz? These emails are effective.

 

One of the main reasons these emails are so compelling to customers, often achieving opens and click rates far above average, is that these communications by their very nature are relevant. In David Baker’s article, "Triggered Messaging 101," he points out that “Customers do appreciate good messaging, creative thought and timing that is appropriate.” Why is that? It is because we’re responding to customer behavior and information we have to drive the best possible message, the most valuable message, to a customer at any one time. Why, then, are so many marketers ignoring customer events and behavior when sending messages?  This holiday season seems to be the worst on record for email promotion uber-frequency.

 

Retailers are especially guilty of driving emails far too frequently, often far above the expectations expected by their subscribers—leading to higher unsubscribe and complaint rates, as well as a higher "ignore rate." The ignore rate, a stat I just made up, may be the most important driver to email campaign success. It means a large percentage of subscribers begin to ignore you, treating your email like BACN (email they wanted at one time, but don’t have time for any longer). The ignore rate can be detected by the declining open and click rates these retailers are likely seeing as they begin to pummel their once loyal subscribers with a thrice weekly email during the holiday season. It hurts me to watch the carnage they are unknowingly inflicting upon their response rates.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an idealist. I have been the marketing guy on the hook to meet quarterly sales numbers. I know there is immense pressure to make sales numbers, especially during the holiday season. Unwittingly, however, by focusing on only short-term sales these marketers are actively reducing the value of their biggest asset…their subscriber list.

 

That’s why we’ve developed reports enabling our clients to more easily analyze customer engagement. Engaged customers open and click on your emails. Non-engaged customers don’t do anything. They just ignore you.

Happy Holidays!