Not too long ago, I was a marketer who was a slave to a to-do list and a "get the thing out" mentality, rather than a slave to my client base.  I was trapped in a continuous loop of - "this is a great idea but how can I ever find the time or budget space to do a full-on marketing campaign?" As I listened to marketing expert after marketing expert discuss how to optimize your eMarketing program at the first stop on ExactTarget's Route1to1 City tour in Atlanta this past Tuesday, it became clear that the answer to my question was to a change my mindset and finally put off the to-do list and put on a truly integrated, engaging campaign.

Here were my wake-up call email marketing moments that made me say - "Wow, I was doing it wrong for so long."

• "Your website can no longer be a digital brochure, it has to be an engaging place where you can drive conversion," said Joel Book, ExactTarget's Director of eMarketing Education.
  
• "It's time to stop reacting and start taking a pro-active approach to your marketing campaigns," said Jeff Rohrs, ExactTarget's Vice President of Agency and Search Marketing.
  
• "If I receive an email and I don't know who it is, I immediately delete it, so why would we expect our customers to be any different?  I received an email from Continental on my phone that was mobile friendly and I was able to check-in just by replying to a text message - now that's engagement," said Jeanniey Mullen Founder of the Email Experience Council (eec) and Global Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Zinio Systems and VIV Magazine.

The highlight of the day for me was listening to Nick Godfrey, from Customer Portfolios (an email marketing agency partner with ExactTarget) discuss how his company utilized ExactTarget's email marketing software to build Dunkin' Donuts' loyalty program from the ground up.  He talked about the unique challenges of creating a 1 to 1 marketing customer loyalty program. 

A Dunkin' Donuts customer can receive rewards depending on how many times they visit a specific Dunkin' Donuts store each week.  As an example, if I go in Mondays and Wednesdays, the system is smart enough to trigger an email to that patron offering them a $1.00 credit towards the loyalty account, encouraging a third visit  This type of email marketing tool removes the time and budget burden most marketers are facing.

Shrinking budgets have led many marketers to search around for the best way to drive customers to their web site, but after attending this seminar, I realized that your marketing campaign must be engaging, and compelling, giving users a reason to come and stay on your site.  There is too much information out there for your message to get lost. 

My top four takeaways from Route 1 to 1:

• No more digital brochures - they don't work
• Give them a good reason to engage with your brand
• Truly powerful marketing will treat each customer as a unique individual, who has unique need
• Discussing Dunkin' Donuts leads to binge eating on my part

If you are a marketer like me, who knew what they wanted to do, but weren't sure how to do it, you really should think about coming to the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1: The new eMarketing essentials event.  Coming up next are Chicago and Cincinnati...its time to stop being a slave to our to-do lists. 

Gotta run, Dunkin' Donuts just opened here in Indianapolis and I want my free dollar. 

Todd McCall, PR Manager

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

There, I said it.  And I’ll say it again: triggered email is only as good as your data.  I know, I know…now I have to back that claim up.

If you’re sending triggered emails in response to one-time events (for example, welcome emails, website confirmation downloads, etc.) then chances are your data is pretty good.  Someone does “something” (subscribes, purchases, downloads, etc.) and you trigger an email in response to whatever that something may be.   

These are often the most easy-to-implement triggered messages, which is why so many marketers have started to not only use, but optimize them.  Like many of you, we here at ExactTarget have made leaps and bounds in our triggered emails over the past year, including:

• Defining what the “somethings” that result in a trigger are
• Capture those “somethings” and feeding the data into our CRM database of records
• Triggering an email out of ExactTarget using our triggered email interactions
• Tracking the holistic performance of the triggered emails
• Making adjustments on the fly (without involving our web developer, which makes him very happy) for maximum performance.

Typing the list above makes it seem easy.  Get the data, then trigger an email.  We’d like for all our email messages to be sent using the process above.  But what about the following, more complicated, scenarios? 

• The “something” event is comprised of multiple data points
• The data lives in multiple systems
• Your data isn’t clean

Not so easy.  At least, not for us (and I’m guessing that means not for you, either).  Take, for example, a satisfaction survey we’d like to send 90 days before a customer is due to renew their contract with us, followed by a reminder email if they haven’t yet completed it, or a thank you email if they have.

In theory, this would be an easy series to trigger:  Send #1 = Renewal date – 90 days.  Send #2 = Triggered thank you upon completion OR reminder email 7 days after survey invite sent. But…

• We have multiple (sometimes hundreds) subscribers stored per account in our CRM system.  Not all contacts should receive the message.
• The data about what is due to renew / when it is due to renew is stored in a separate area of our CRM system, with no easy way to tie a subscriber to the renewal opportunity.
• Because we don’t delete data from our CRM system, the subscriber may no longer work at the company.  This information is often manually typed in to a data field (i.e. “Patricia NO LONGER THERE.”)  Look familiar?
• The extensive survey is hosted by a third-part vendor, which means there is no real-time visibility into whether someone has completed the survey within our own system.

The list goes on, but suffice it to say that there is a lot of manual data cleaning that goes into pulling a satisfaction survey list and sending the series.  So while this seems like an ideal campaign to trigger, it’s just not easy.  And I’m guessing that we’re not alone in this challenge.

While I don’t have a solution to the overall data issues that impede implementing more triggered / automated emails, I can tell you this – understanding what data is needed, where it lives, and what obstacles stand in the way of easily getting that is a huge first step in the right direction.  As the old saying goes, not knowing is half the battle.  So if you’re looking to automate or optimize your triggered email marketing and have found yourself in a similar situation, understanding your data is a good place to start.

Cheers,

Ashley Sales
Manager, Marketing Communications

The number of people using a preview pane to view their email has grown in recent years.  So considering what your readers see in that preview pane has become an increasingly important aspect of planning an email campaign.

The challenge of not knowing whether readers are using a vertical or horizontal preview pane makes the information placed in the upper left region (which will be visible in either layout) of an email vitally important. Combining the viewable area of horizontal and vertical preview panes at common sizes, we find there is a square of overlap that will be visible to most preview pane users.  That’s good news.

As a quick rule of thumb, a square of approximately 4-5 inches (288-360 pixels) is a safe size to plan for this commonly viewable area. This space should be used to quickly establish the brand and primary call to action alongside standard email strategies, such as accounting for image blocking by using HTML text and ALT tags.

Optimizing for the preview pane in this way helps ensure readers will see the most important parts of your message immediately and will engage further by opening your email.

What’s the best way to integrate multi-media and video into my email program?

While support for various HTML and CSS features varies widely across email clients, their stance on video and Flash media in email remains surprisingly unanimous – and that answer is “not supported.”

Only one email client, Mail (Mac), will even display this kind of media at all. Every other client will either strip out the video as if it was never there, or treat it as a blocked image that can never be displayed.

It is possible to introduce a small amount of motion or animation to email with animated .gifs, but even these images aren’t fully supported by some major clients, such as Outlook 2007 (which will only display the first frame of the animation).

With this information in mind, the best way to integrate multi-media content into your email program is not to embed the media in an email, but rather to link to a web-based version that’s hosted outside the email.


Chris Studabaker
Email Campaign Manager

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

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.

The difference between doing email appends right and doing them wrong involves changing one significant step… the outbound message.  Instead of the outbound message containing a link to opt-out, the outbound email marketing message should have registration as the primary call to action. This approach to email appends is called "opt-in" email append.

ExactTarget was one of the early proponents of this approach and we have now real life experience with this approach under our belts.  Opt-in email appends have been very successful in delivering highly responsive subscribers without the headaches and pitfalls associated with opt-out appends.  However, the challenge is in getting a significant number of people to convert on these outbound email invitations.

Success in converting opt-in email appends involves defining your value proposition. It involves having a compelling reason for subscribers to register--selling your program to the prospective subscriber. All of which is based in the bedrock of marketing success... a good strategy combined with strong campaign execution.

Once you have your strategy for enticing prospective registrants, follow the steps outlined in my previous post about opt-in email campaigns.

The thing that clients like about this approach is that they only pay for emails that are likely to perform. It can take a while to get past the reality that this is not going to add a million email addresses to your list, but that shouldn’t be the point. There are only two business models that can drive revenue from an unresponsive email address—list brokers and email append vendors. By working with these providers on opt-in programs, you eliminate waste and ensure that you will get email addresses of real, live people that are likely to respond.

Yes, this puts a premium on the associated costs and makes pricing more complicated.  Don't expect to pay $0.50 per email address acquired through an opt-in append.  Things like the loyalty of people on your house file, the strength of the call to action, the size of the input file, and anticipated conversion rates may be considered in determining costs. But at the end of the day, this is in the best interest of the client as it avoids the issues typically associated with opt-out email appends and the overall quality is much, much higher.

The Silver Bullet?

Companies looking at email appends are typically looking for a fast and efficient way to grow their lists.  Don’t buy into the promises of a quick and easy solution to grow your list. To be completely cliché “If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.”

Done right, email appends can be effective—but they still take time, careful planning, good execution, and financial resources.  It is not the silver bullet that most people imagine when they latch on to email append as the solution to their list growth woes.

• Done wrong, as is the case with opt-out email appends, we have found that these initiatives are more time and cost intensive as other list growth tactics.
• Done right, in the case of opt-in email appends, we have found these initiatives to be at least as time and cost intensive as any other list growth tactics.

Given this reality, 9 out of 10 times, I prefer to invest the same time and resources into other proven list growth methods.  A couple consistent winners are:

1. Make sure that there are compelling opportunities to register for email throughout your website. This is basic, basic stuff… START HERE.
2. Integrate search campaigns with email registration. Search campaigns should be integrated with email registration efforts. Capturing email addresses on landing pages is the first step. Aligning the call to action on your landing pages with specific search campaigns is the second step. For example, visitors from brand keywords should get a different call to action than visitors from direct in-category keywords or competitive keywords.
3. Integrate with offline efforts. Provide an incentive as part of your existing direct mail or print advertising efforts to register with your company online.
4. Partner co-registration. Find like minded companies that you can cross promote. You include a signup space on their page and vice versa.
5. Tradeshows are huge for B2B marketers. This is no secret, but there is often a significant effort involved in collecting all those business cards and then getting those contacts to opt-in to your program. Do the due diligence and get these systems in place.

The only thing I love more than puppies is marketing channel synergy.

Call me crazy, but I just love when companies use their websites, emails, advertising, PR, blogs and other marketing channels to deliver a coherent message. But, it's easier said than done. The guy who runs your website probably isn’t the same guy that handles your email program. And neither one designs your print ads or writes your corporate blog.

It’s hard to keep everyone on the same page, but it’s worth it. Talk to each other. Share messaging calendars. Coordinate product and website promotions. Your customers will notice if you show a little synergy. Take, for example, a recent email I got from the ASPCA. The message included a pitch for their online kids community – Animaland. (I know I’m not a kid anymore. But there were cartoon puppies involved, and they had me at hello.) The site offers fun information on top animal issues, newsworthy young advocates, and quick tips for our “four-legged, finned and feathered friends.” I clicked-through, and the first thing that caught my eye was the opening Flash piece. ADOR-able.

Animaland is also featured in multiple places on the ASPCA homepage – like under the program tab and in a cute call-out in the right-hand column. There are also several relevant press releases in the media archives from the Animaland launch in 2001 and its Gold Award announcement from the Parents’ Choice Foundation in 2004. Talk about synergy – website, PR, email, and more!

How convinced would you be if you got an email saying “HEY this is important!” but couldn’t find anything about the same topic when you looked at the company’s website? In press releases? Or corporate blogs? You might begin to question whether a) the message really IS important, and b) whether the company’s marketing team ever talks to each other. Send a consistent message across marketing channels, and you’ll look like rock-stars next to promotionally disjointed competitors.

But wait a minute, you say. Why would the ASPCA promote an online tool they launched six years ago – it’s old news! Shouldn’t email real estate be reserved for the latest and greatest? Not necessarily. While email is great for pitching a new feature, website, or offer, remember that many subscribers have entered your list since “Campaign X” launched. I opted-in for ASPCA emails in 2007 and had never heard of Animaland. Until the email popped into my inbox. As long as it makes sense with your email’s message, don’t be afraid to remind subscribers about all the great things you already offer. It might be new to them!

Nicole
Marketing Communications Associate

Ps – OK, truthfully, I love puppies more than marketing. But only by a smidgen.

The best advice I can give email marketers to start their year is to craft emails that are optimized for the inbox.  Email needs to be given the same attention that is placed on your web and print marketing efforts  It simply cannot be an afterthought or a “digital version” of your print campaign – email is too powerful and has too many variables to be treated as such.  To attain maximum design success this year, marketers must recognize that email has a unique set of challenges and principles that need to be taken into account.

1.  Your email design needs to take into account image blocking, preview pane viewing and the unique nature of the various email clients. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your design is if your subscribers can’t see it!

2.  Make sure your primary call-to-action can be seen in the preview pane by including it in the upper left quadrant of your email. 

3.  By using HTML text for your call-to-action message, you will avoid the image blocking issue as well.  And by seeing a relevant call-to-action, your subscribers will be more likely to download the images, add your email address to their safe sender list, or interact with your email.

4.  Test your email in as many different email clients as you can. This can be accomplished using a service such as Pivotal Veracity or by signing up for free email accounts (Yahoo, Gmail, Windows Live Mail, etc.) and including them on a test list.Despite their differences, you can develop a version of your email that functions well across all the major email clients.

By taking these factors into consideration and giving your email design the attention it deserves, you will increase your chances of email design success.  So take a deep breath and repeat after me: Design with the inbox in mind!

Tim Siukola, Senior Email Campaign Manager

I just received an email from Sam's Club. For some reason I started receiving these emails a couple weeks ago. I never signed up with them--no permission. I have, however, registered to receive email from Wal-Mart. I assume that Wal-Mart shared my email address with Sam's Club, even though Wal-Mart's privacy policy does not state that they will do this, nor does the email newsletter preference center allow me to manage my Sam's Club email preferences. 

Initially, I let it slide.  I even got interested in doing some last minute online shopping today and clicked through on a link in today's email from Sam's Club. I did my shopping and at checkout I was faced with the following, oh so friendly (yet somewhat expected) message: "You must be a logged in member to purchase." Well, you guessed it, this means becoming a member of Sam's Club, membership fees and all.



What I don't get is why? Of course, I understand how Sam's Club works, but I am a Costco member. I don't want to pay another membership fee to Sam's Club. My why refers to WHY engage in such horrible practices?

• Sam's Club started emailing me without my permission
• WalMart shared my data in (seeming) violation of their own privacy practices
• I am not a Sam's Club member, it seems like they should have checked into that first
• Sam's Club won't let me buy online without becoming a member of their club
• Why put both brands at such risk??

There is a lesson here for the rest of us. The allure of a "bigger list" is always looming. Companies often see taking on their sister companies' lists as one way of growing their list. This is what Sam's Club apparently did, they simply took the WalMart list and called it their own without ever asking me if this was what I wanted. If this is something you are considering, know that lack of planning around three areas is likely to get you in trouble:

1. Do the people you are bringing into your program from a sister company WANT to be in the program? Simple solution... run an opt-in campaign. Tell the people you are inviting how you got their name, what you plan to offer them, and ask for positive opt-in.
2. Does the audience you are inviting even make sense? Sam's is sending me emails and I can't even buy from them until I become a member. In other sceanrios I have seen, the target demographics of the two sister companies are completely different... why send email to people who aren't likely to (or worse... can't) buy your products. It is a ROI loser!
3. Don't violate your own privacy policies. CAN-SPAM is one thing, violating your own stated policies is, at minumum, a PR nightmare waiting to happen. At worst, it is a legal nightmare. 

As for Sam's Club and WalMart. You need to update your privacy policy... especially if you want my trust as you so emphatically claim in your privacy policy:

We realize that making purchases at Walmart.com, or any other web site, requires trust on your part. We value your trust very highly, and pledge to you, our customer, that we will work to protect the security and privacy of any personal information you provide to us and that your personal information will only be used as set forth in this Policy. This includes your name, address, phone number, email address, and credit card or checking account information, in addition to any other personal information that can be linked to you, personally.

 

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!

The idea of sending an opt-in (or “re-opt-in”) campaign to subscribers to verify email permission is not new, but the frequency with which we deal with these campaigns is increasing.  Over the course of the past year, I would estimate that I have personally worked with over 20 email marketing clients on these types of campaigns… and ExactTarget as a whole has run many, many more.  Here are a few interesting things we have learned about how to run these:

1) Be clear in the subject line.  Email subject lines like, “Verify your subscription continue receiving [XYZ]” or “Your subscription will end soon” tend to work well.  Often these campaigns are targeting subscribers who have not responded in a while, so breaking the mold with this type of concise and straight-forward subject lines help get people to open the email.

2) Restate your value proposition. This is a simple reminder of what your email program offers.  A concise restatement of what your subscribers can expect reminds them of what you are all about… and what they will miss if they do not confirm their email subscription.

3) Use YES and NO options. This is huge (read this part carefully)!  The misconception is that if you only offer a “Yes, please subscribe me” option that more people will react positively by opting into the program.  We have tested using a single “Yes” option vs. the “Yes and No” options for at least 6 different clients.  In every instance the “Yes and No” option resulted in significantly more opt-ins!  There is something about seeing both options that drives more people to respond.  Maybe these emails seem like less of a gimmick, more genuine, or more serious. Whatever the reason, the reality is that by including that NO option, you will actually get more people to click YES.  (See the Peppermill Example below)

In addition, this approach to email opt-in campaigns provides you with clear answers.  There are three resulting groups: 1) Those that opt-in, 2) those that opt-out, and 3) those that did not respond (even if they opened the email).  This third group of non-responders will be your target for a second request.

4) Try sending a second request.  There are situations where a second request is not appropriate.  For example, if you are trying to clean a list suspected of containing spamtrap addresses.  However, if you have used the YES and NO options cited above, the non-responders are a prime target for a second request for email permission.  We find that these second requests consistently get nearly the same number of opt-ins as the first, so failing to do so could have a material impact on the success of your campaign.  We have worked with organizations that have tried a thrid request using the same logic, but the dropoff at this points has been substantial in our experience--two appears to be the right number.

Peppermill re-opt-in email example

The Peppermill decided to conduct a re-opt-in campaign to these subscribers and tested the following two emails:

Version #1

Version #2


Which version do you think resulted in the most affirmative opt-in responses?  (Keep in mind that the only choice in Version #1 is “Yes”, while Version #2 has “Yes” and “No” displayed with equal prominence.)  Given the context of this example, I hope you picked Version #2.  It was the winner and the results are statistically significant.

Last week I spoke at the Email Insider Conference in Park City, UT with Matt Day of Agent SILVERFOX on the topic of search and email integration.  One interesting case study Matt presented was related to how email campaigns affect brand search traffic.  So, the scenario is straight forward enough, a customer or prospect receives an email from XYZ Corp and they then go to the web to search for the term “XYZ Corp” or possibly a product that XYZ Corp sells.  This results in a bump in search traffic to the website that is normally attributed to search marketing instead of email marketing.

While working with Matt on preparing the presentation, we came up with a methodology for quantifying this traffic that many at the conference found useful: “search through rate”.  To estimate this lift, compare the average search traffic on days where no email is sent and then compare it to the search traffic on days where an email is sent.  The calculation for this is very straight forward:

This phenomenon is even more significant when emails are sent through partners.  If you partner with a program like CoolSavings.com to send an offer to their client list the search through rate is usually higher than when sending to an in-house list.  This makes logical sense since the people receiving this offer are less likely to be familiar with your brand and may choose to check out your site before proceeding with the offer.  So, it follows that the conversion rate on these searches may be different than typical searches for your brand as well.  Thus, we need to evaluate the conversion rate on these email influenced searches to get a good understanding of impact of these incremental searches.  The calculation for the conversion rate on email influenced searches is:

Where:

• Conversion RateIS = Conversion rate on email influenced searches
• ConversionsO = Observed Conversions for 24 hour period following the email send
• ConversionsA = Average Conversions for 24 hour period with no email send (Can be calculated as Average Conversion Rate off Search times SearchesA)
• SearchesO = Observed Searches for 24 hour period following the email send
• SearchesA = Average Searches for 24 hour period with no email send

The conversion rate on incremental searches should be compared to the average search conversion rates to determine if these email influenced searches are performing consistently with typical searches.  By looking at the incremental conversion rates, in addition to the direct conversions from the email itself, we can get a more comprehensive view of the efficacy of our email campaigns. 

In my experience, many (by no means all) third party email campaigns have had a tough time justifying themselves in terms of direct sales.  However, looking at the influence of email on search and subsequent conversion provides a more comprehensive financial picture by which to evaluate the success of these campaigns.

We already know that the ROI of email is very strong.  By looking at these metrics and adding them into your analysis of email campaigns, either to your in-house list or through third party advertisers, we reallocate dollars that should have been attributed to email all along—demonstrating even more value being driven out of our email marketing programs.

If it’s been awhile since you visited our case study library, now’s the time.

We just added a cool feature called an “easy access form” that will change the way you interact with our website – for the better!

Background: Our Marketing Team spends a lot of time researching what resources our clients need to improve their email marketing programs. We particularly enjoy sharing our client’s success stories through user-friendly, engaging case studies that are available for download through the resources section of our website. If you’re an existing customer or a newbie to the email marketing world, check out our 14 exciting case studies (including the newest ExactTarget CaseStudy featuring CareerBuilder.com) and learn how to optimize your email marketing program from marketers who have been there and done that.

If you visited our site in the past, you probably had to complete the same form every time you wanted to download a case study. Annoying, right?

We agree. That’s why we just added an “easy access form” to our case study page. Let’s take a look on what’s going on behind the scenes:

1. You submit your email address, tell us how you heard about us, and click “submit.”

2. A script calls the API and checks to see if your email address already exists in our CRM database.

3. If you already exist in our CRM system, you’re done. No more forms. A triggered email is automatically sent from the Marketing Team’s Enterprise Edition with a link to the case study you requested. (Screen1)

4. If our system doesn’t recognize your email address, you’ll be asked to fill out a few other pieces of information before downloading a case study. But remember, this only happens once. The next time you visit the site to download a case study, our system will recognize you and save you the hassle of filling out another form!  (Screen2)

 

How can this scenario benefit your own website visitors? With the launch of our Fall 2007 Release, ExactTarget now supports the ability to create microsites, which are HTML pages hosted by our system. That means you can now combine web forms and email campaigns (both of which are tracked in one application) and immediately see results from inside your email marketing program. How cool is that!

Next up: “Easy access forms” for whitepapers – stay tuned!


Michael Mehrmann
Manager, Web Development

Stop me if this sounds familiar. You’re an email marketer with a big campaign coming up. You create your email, import your subscribers, segment your list, etc. To make sure everything goes smoothly for the big send, you send test emails out beforehand to other members on your team for review, various domains, and hopefully even a testing tool like Pivotal Veracity. Everything works beautifully.

And then…something doesn’t work. Maybe you catch a typo the day after you hit the send button. Maybe your CRM integration doesn’t work quite as planned. Maybe someone else on your team mistakenly deletes a profile attribute you need, or you forget to add a Forward to a Friend button. Whatever the case may be, all those days of careful and cautious testing can go down the tube pretty quickly.

It happens to all of us. Evidence: a version of our October InSight was accidentally sent twice to a small group of subscribers. Ugh. While no one factor was to blame, looming deadline + miscommunication + technical issue + haste = embarrassing duplicate send.

We were lucky – the list was small, the impact was minimal, our metrics for the month were extremely strong, and InSight subscribers are a surprisingly forgiving bunch. Now that the smoke has cleared, it’s easy to see that this problem could have been prevented had our pre-send testing environment exactly matched our real send environment. So if you’re an email marketer, learn from our mistake. Here are some tips (a.k.a lessons learned) to help:

1. Your Test is Not a Test.
   Adding even one “untested” variable into the mix come send time can have serious repercussions. So treat your test like the real thing. Sending to an integrated list and a non-integrated group? TEST. Scheduling a send with a 15-minute throttle? TEST. Sending in Multi-Part MIME? TEST. TEST. TEST. Sending with various language encodings? Yep, TEST THAT TOO.
2. The More Eyes the Merrier.
   Send out your email to as wide of audience as possible for review. For example, we send out an “FYI” version of InSight to our entire sales and services teams 24-hours before we complete the send to our subscribers. Each month, I am surprised (and extremely grateful) for the feedback that comes in. I’d rather our internal teams point out a typo or a misdirected link than one of our subscribers (and they will!)
3. Put Yourself on Lockdown.
   We’ve recently started enforcing a 24-hour lockdown on our newsletter. This means that no matter what, the newsletter has to “sit” with no changes for a full 24 hours before we send it. This helps minimize last-minute changes that could be disruptive, and also provides more time for more eyes to review it. In fact, we’ve found this to be so helpful we’re looking to bump the lockdown up to 72 hours.
   
4. Balance Deadlines with Double-Checking.
   I’m a firm believer in deadlines. But there comes a point when, quite simply, you have to be flexible with deadlines in order to not compromise the integrity and validity of your tests. Know when to back off for the sake of your send. If that moment of hesitation flashes before you hit the send button, don’t do it! You should feel confident – not anxious – when you hit the send button.

If you have more testing / preparation tips to share, we’d love to hear them!

Cheers,
Ashley Sales
Manager, Marketing Communications

Question: How can I save time when testing my email designs?

Answer: We’ve all heard about how important testing is when it comes to the design and layout of emails.  But the reality is that in order to benefit from design testing, there’s a large amount of time that must be invested. Unfortunately, the commitment required to successfully test design discourages many marketers from doing it.

I’ve got good news, though.  There are features in ExactTarget that help you save some time in your testing process. 

Whether you’re performing a simple A/B split test or a complex multivariate test, you still have to create multiple versions of a particular email.  But using a combination of templates and stored content in ExactTarget will help you to cut a considerable amount of time out of email creation.  To truly take advantage of these capabilities, I’d recommend that you start by  developing a plan for all of the different email versions that need to be created.  This will help you stay organized and keep track of your testing progress.

Once your testing plan has been set, you can analyze the similarities that exist between the different design versions.  For example, your emails may be using the same creative shell with a different content layout – or the same layout with different elements present and not present.

Take these similarities into account when creating your templates, and code them to be scaleable to fit a number of different content possibilities instead of creating a separate template for each layout.  Keep in mind that there will always be occasions when you need a separate template, but you can save time by having one template that will work for multiple emails.

Once you have created your template(s), the next step is to build out your content boxes. This can be done from within an email, or from directly within the Content Library.  In ExactTarget, any pieces of content that you need to include in multiple versions can be created once, saved, and then retrieved later on.  To store a content box in an email you can click on the “Store Content” button. You can then bring this stored content into an empty content box by clicking the “Retrieve Content” button. Using this method you can create additional email versions considerably faster than by populating each box one at a time.

Another time saver is to create emails using the “Revise Existing Email” option, which creates a copy of any email you have already created. You can then add, remove, or reposition elements to generate you next email version to test.

Through careful planning and employing the methods mentioned above, you will be able to design and create multiple emails in far less time than creating them one by one.  And at the end of the day, the more emails you have to create and test, the more you stand to benefit!

Tim Siukola
Senior Email Campaign Manager

As a web developer, you tend to spend a lot of time online. As a web developer in marketing, you spend even MORE time online since you’re always looking for new ideas. Working on a corporate web page may limit the development of certain things, but you’re never limited on creative ideas!  Here’s one cool marketing tool I see more and more often on web pages to grab people’s attention. 

A great way to show that you are up-to-date on your webpage is to let your users see and know what they or others like / dislike. For example, on Flickr you’ve probably noticed a bunch of keywords served up in one spot based on peoples’ search. This collection of search keywords is called a "TagCloud".  But I call this a Web 2.0 enhancement!  Basically, a TagCloud is just a collection of good old meta tags bundled up and visualized to help your web page visitors to find what they looking for (or not looking for!).

Definition: "TagCloud is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud."  Sounds impressive, huh? And it’s actually fun (and useful) to serve up dozens of links that are just waiting to get clicked and result in marketing action.



Want to try your own TagCloud for your webpage or email marketing campaign? You can get useful help at TagCloud - Generator


Michael Mehrmann
Manager, Web Development

ExactTarget was a silver sponsor at Microsoft Convergence EMEA in Copenhagen 2 weeks ago.  This was our first wide scale exhibition of our integration to the European market.  The feedback was ecstatic.  It did not matter the language that was being spoken....the dialogue was the same:  Email marketing is not as strong without leveraging the data and CRM is not as strong if it is difficult to act on the data.

Three days of these conversations got the international ExactTarget team excited.  The need for an integrated system that can send automated email campaigns from Microsoft CRM continues to grow as Dynamic CRM's reach continues to penetrate the market.  This comes on the heels of David Daniel from Jupiter Research's report on the status of the International Email Marketing Adoption.  One factor that David highlights in this report is the growth of email marketing in Europe is coupled by an increase of in-house systems.  One reason that we heard at Convergence was that people like the idea of having everything inside of one tool.  The integration of Microsoft CRM and ExactTarget gives everyone the power of CRM and targeted, email marketing in on user interface!

Exciting times indeed!!

As reported in eMarketer Daily on Tuesday, October 30^th, the Direct Marketing Association is reporting that spending on direct marketing commercial e-mail in the United States will hit $600 million in 2008. That number represents an increase of nearly 25% over 2007.

That statistic is impressive until you consider that – according to the DMA -- spending on non-e-mail Internet direct marketing—such as search and display—is expected to hit $23 billion! Are you kidding me?

Why more marketers are not locked and loaded with email is amazing -- especially when you consider two other findings – also courtesy of the DMA:

• "E-mail produces the highest response rate for lead generation—especially for house campaigns—of all direct mail methods we have studied," according to Anna Chernis, Senior Research Manager.
• Commercial e-mail's ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008. By comparison, direct response newspaper advertising ROI is $16.86, non-catalog direct mail ROI is $15.60, and telemarketing ROI is $8.61

I have been – and will continue to be – a staunch advocate of multi-channel marketing. But at a time when marketers are being hammered to produce "more juice for the squeeze" from the dollars invested to drive new and repeat sales, many need to seriously re-consider how their marketing dollars are being invested.

Joel Book
Director, eMarketing Education