Email Marketing Message

Getting Past Listening on Twitter

Friday, March 19, 2010 by Dawn DeVirgilio

If you have read anything about social media, the first thing you can do when starting out is to “Listen.”

But it’s really not enough just to listen anymore.

Now don’t get me wrong, you definitely need to be listening. Listening to what your customers are saying about you will help you formulate how you respond and find trends in what people are saying about your brand.

Just like with email marketing you have to be relevant and engaging or people will unsubcribe via unfollowing/unfriending you. No one wants to talk to a brick wall and even worse no one wants to get a constant stream of interruptive marketing messages. Twitter provides an instant communication tool that allows you to have conversations with your customers on a daily basis. Why wouldn’t you use that to get feature requests, encourage customers to collaborate with each other and even get positive feedback!

Some of my most rewarding conversations have been helping our customers learn more about email marketing, learn more about our product, and help solve issues they may be having.

It is truly the year of the customer. It’s time to get past just listening and start engaging.

You can follow us (and talk to me!) on Twitter @ExactTarget or by being our Fan on Facebook.

Goodmail Confirms Yahoo Split

Monday, March 8, 2010 by Al Iverson

As I mentioned before, Yahoo is ending support for Goodmail CertifiedEmail.

Today, Goodmail confirmed this via an email notice to Goodmail clients and Goodmail partner ESPs. In the email, Goodmail says that "Goodmail and Yahoo failed to renew their service agreement. As a result, effective 3/24/10, Yahoo will no longer accept CertifiedEmail messages. We hope to restore the CertifiedEmail service at Yahoo in the not too distant future, but for now our customers are advised to plan on sending plain (non-CertifiedEmail) messages to Yahoo as of March 24."

We're already working with Yahoo to ensure a smooth transition off of Goodmail CertifiedEmail at Yahoo for any affected Goodmail-utilizing clients. I don't anticipate this being a painful process. Stay tuned; we'll be sure to post any updates as they become available.

Email Domain Alamedanet.net Retired

Monday, March 1, 2010 by Al Iverson

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

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

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

Goodmail Changes at Yahoo

Friday, January 29, 2010 by Al Iverson

Goodmail has just informed us that as of Monday, February 1st, how Yahoo will handle Goodmail CertifiedEmail messages delivered to Yahoo recipients will changes. Previously, Goodmail-certified messages were guaranteed inbox delivery with images and links enabled. Goodmail-certified messages will continue to be delivered, but inbox vs bulk folder delivery may vary based on unknown factors. I assume that the reputation of the sender is the primary factor there, but that is a guess on my part.

Goodmail has indicated to us that they are in discussions with Yahoo regarding the future of CertifiedEmail messages as it relates to delivery and disposition of those messages into Yahoo mailboxes.

Goodmail is currently notifying all CertifiedEmail-using clients of this change and has indicated that they will notify of any future changes.

As we learn more, we'll be sure to keep you updated.

Goodmail Goes Live With Verizon.net

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Al Iverson

Last week, Goodmail added verizon.net to its list of ISPs that support delivery of Goodmail CertifiedEmail messages. We're in the process of updating our local configuration to add support for this new domain, and it will be live on our end shortly. This grows the list of US mailbox providers supporting Goodmail to seven: AOL, Yahoo, Comcast, Cox, Mail.com, MySpace and Verizon.

Email Design Tip of the Week: Integrating Twitter to Your Email Strategy

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 by David Hoang

Twitter has revolutionized micro-blogging and ways users share content in real-time. Some believe that social media is more valuable than email, but I beg to differ, as both are powerful platforms and are different mediums of communicating. A great solution is integrating Twitter into your email campaigns to reach out to both audiences.

Why Twitter? According to Mashable, there was an estimated 18 million users on the popular micro-blogging site in 2009. Even with 60% of users quitting within the first month, there are roughly 7.2 million active users; untapped and perhaps not an email subscriber of yours. That’s a lot of people to reach out to. Twitter is a way to reach out to new users to: a) communicate with them outside the reach of email b) compel them to become an email subscriber.

Integrating Twitter to your email marketing campaigns will expand your presence and is very simple to set up. Here are a few ways to integrate Twitter in your email strategy:

Twitter integration
Twitter integration is currently an iLab feature and will be available to all ExactTarget users in the future, which will automatically post your email as a tweet to your company’s Twitter account. This is a simple and effective way to broadcast your message further; with the opportunity for your followers to re-tweet and share your email message.

Add social forwarding on your emails
The ExactTarget application provides a simple way to spread your email message beyond your lists with our social forward feature. Social forward will include buttons in your email message (Twitter is included as a ShareThis feature) which easily allows your subscribers to share your message. You will reach out to users who are not your subscribers; opportunity for new relationships.

Start a #hashtag
It’s amazing what people will do if you simply ask them. If you’re trying to reach out to your audience on Twitter, consider asking them to be an extension of your broadcast by starting a hashtag. For example, if Northern Trail Outfitters wanted to start a hashtag on Twitter, they could send an email asking subscribers to tweet with the hashtag “#NTO.” This begins a searchable discussion of content tagged “NTO.”

For a great example, check out Style Campaign’s blog post on how HBO’s True Blood used Twitter in their emails. This is a great way to utilize email to leverage your Twitter campaign.

Post content on your company Twitter account
Your presence matters. Regardless of the size of your company, start a Twitter account and open dialogue with the Twitterverse. Consider posting links, re-tweeting useful content and speaking with your followers. Set up a search and see what people are saying about your company.

Link to your Twitter account on every email
Again, your presence matters. Put a link to your Twitter account on the footer of your email messages; could be a button or simple link. Let people know you are there.

I want to conclude with a few reasons to use email in your marketing campaign, that doesn’t quite work on Twitter:

Sometimes you just need more than 140 characters.
HTML email will allow you to send your message to your subscriber’s inbox.
Your Twitter posts can get lost in the timeline and be bumped out of the real-time stream.

When integrating Twitter into your email strategy, think about the differences between the two platforms, the people on them, then ways you can converge the two together.

For great insights on the rise of social media and its relation to email, check out our whitepaper, Expanding the reach of email with social networks.

Follow us on Twitter at @ExactTarget and @ETDesign.

Happy Tweeting!

Design Tip of the Week: Email + Video: Take 2: Connections ’09 Panel Recap, Part 2 (of 3)

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Chris Studabaker

Last post, I discussed current support and delivery methods for email + video. This time we're going to focus on some of the benefits and concerns and finish with a few closing thoughts. As I mentioned last time, please note that this blog centers on the technological considerations around email + video—the strategy around sending video in email (or not) is another discussion!

Benefits of email + video

Strong emotional appeal
Highly engaging
Personal, even user-generated content

Video offers incredible emotional appeal and a personal, highly engaging form of communication. Online video and social media offer the additional bonus of user-generated content, an incredibly effective tool for brand recognition and even advertising when used properly. Volumes have been written on this subject, and I recommend further reading on video as an advertising medium.

Concerns regarding email + video

Development cost and time
File size and bandwidth
Frame rate inconsistencies
Deliverability

Video use does come with some concerns, the foremost being that video represents a considerable development cost and time investment. Integrating video with email requires first having the video! Creating video content then requires the same commitment to brand standards and quality that comprises the rest of your brand experience.

Moving to technical issues, browsers interpret animated .gif frame rates differently, so it's important to test and ensure your .gif appears as desired in all browsers. File sizes and bandwidth are also a concern. A typical HTML email message may be no more than 150KB, including images, but even a simple animated .gif can double the total file size. To carry this further, sending a 1 MB video to one million subscribers can demand significant resources, and adding send frequency to the equation means we must be cognizant of the effect video can have on web hosting and bandwidth. The lack of video standards also raises concerns with deliverability. ISPs and email clients have different standards when determining spam/junk/trash messages, and the lack of generally accepted practices makes testing even more important.

These concerns can certainly be addressed successfully, but these points show it's important to remember that adding video to an email program represents far more than simply a new content block to plan.

Conclusion

Remember the message's primary goal
Consider video in content hierarchy
Know your audience
Subscriber expectations

In the end, we land on a mindset you're very familiar with: Subscribers Rule! Whether it's text headlines or Hollywood-style full motion video, know your subscribers and provide relevant content. Crafting engaging calls to action, nurturing a subscriber-centric content strategy, and establishing strong subscriber relationships are still primary concerns to email marketers, and video is a powerful new tool we can begin to use in accomplishing those goals.

You can check out Part 1 of this series for info on current support and delivery methods for email + video. Part 3 will share some interesting customer experiences and discuss ExactTarget's animated and static .gif testing using Connections '09 emails.

Ending the Spam

Thursday, December 17, 2009 by Al Iverson

A reader named Don posted a comment containing the following question: “I'd really like to end your spam. I do not trust the link on your spam because, just like all the other spam merchants out there, your e-mail appears to be poised to cause more problems than clicking is worth. How do I make you go away and stay out of my in box?”

Don, I'm sorry you're receiving spam from a client of ours. Our clients are only allowed to send mail to people that signed up for their lists. We don't buy or sell email lists, nor do we allow clients to do so. If you want us to investigate, and make the mail stop, feel free to send us a spam report at abuse AT exacttarget.com. Note in your email that the message is unwanted spam and be sure to include a copy of the message, including full headers, if possible. We will immediately investigate, and take action against our client if they are indeed out of compliance with our opt-in permission requirements and anti-spam policy.

Policy compliance (making sure our clients don't send spam) is occasionally a challenge for anybody providing email-related services to a large number of clients. We've got the tools and expertise to be able to nip a lot of these issues in the bud, before you ever see them. But, one of the many components to taking action against spammers is based on reports we receive from the outside world: ISPs, anti-spam groups, and end recipients like yourself.

As far as trusting the link in the email message -- all the unsubscribe link does is mark you as unsubscribed in that client's account. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't secretly sign you up for somebody else's email lists. It doesn't give the client permission to email you later (and if they do, they're breaking our rules). However, it doesn't tell us that you thought the message was spam. So if it was spam, feel free to report it to our abuse address, as well, as noted above.

As far as trusting us, the company, ExactTarget, I'm not sure what I can tell you to convince you that we're a legitimate email service provider and not spammers. But here's what I know. ET is a real company, based in Indianapolis (though I work from Chicago), and I've worked for them, helping to oversee and continually improve our anti-spam efforts, for more than three years now. (I have a long history of spam fighting, going back more than ten years.) As you can see here, we have a lot of legitimate, well-known companies as clients. Also, if we knowingly let our clients send spam, ISPs would get fed up with us and block all mail from all of our clients. So that's why it's in our best interest to prevent our clients from sending spam -- it's necessary for us to be able to succeed in the email industry. So it would be extremely unwise of us to do anything other than immediately respect your click on the unsubscribe link, and ensure that our client stops sending you mail.

Project Honey Pot Receives their 1 Billionth Spam Message

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 by Phil Schott

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

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

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

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

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

Gmail Offering Unsubscribe Functionality

Thursday, December 10, 2009 by Al Iverson

Somebody asked me today if we support Gmail's unsubscribe functionality (yes), so I thought it would be good to mention it here again.

Since this summer (2009), Gmail has offered an option on some email, where, if you click the "this is spam" button, the Gmail system will ask you, "Would you like to unsubscribe?" If you click yes, an unsubscribe request is sent back to the sender. In the case of ET-served emails, yes, ExactTarget handles this unsubscribe request automatically and will unsubscribe that recipient.

For more on Gmail's unsubscribe process, check out this August, 2009 Email Experience Council (EEC) article by my boss, Chip House, and this July, 2009 blog post by Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise.

Note that we can't MAKE the unsubscribe option appear on your email messages in Gmail - Gmail chooses whether or not to make this option available in response to specific email sent and whom it was sent by. It looks to me as though they tie it to sender reputation - meaning, if you're a good, clean sender, this functionality is more likely to appear.

4 Ways to Use Analytics to Improve Your Email Campaigns

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

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

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

1. Improving Delivery Rates:

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

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

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

2. Improving Open Rates:

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

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

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

3. Improving Conversion/ Click-Through Rates:

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

4. Decreasing Unsubscribes

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

What do you think?

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

Authenticating based on the Sender Header in an Email

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Al Iverson

Did you know: For a while now, ExactTarget has had the ability to add a "sender" header to your email messages, and authenticate off of that header, instead of off of the from address?

There are some scenarios where this might come in handy. For example, if you're serving an email message initiated by a user outside of the system - like, a forward to a friend or other "viral marketing" scenario. You might want the friend's from address to show up in the From: header, but still authenticate the message properly. With use of a "sender" header, everything will authenticate properly.

The only down side is that certain email clients display the sender information in a funky format. You might not like that. This is an issue when sending to recipients at Microsoft-owned webmails (MSN, Hotmail, Windows Live Mail), and users of Microsoft Outlook. When you send a message with a sender header, recipients on those platforms will see the from address show up like this:

From (the sender header) on behalf of (the from address)

So, in a typical client scenario, it could look like this:

From (company@compay-email.com) on behalf of (randomjoeuser@example.com)

That is potentially sub-optimal in some situations, so you'll want to consider this before utilizing the sender header functionality.

If you'd like to enable this functionality in your account, please contact your ExactTarget representative, or our client success team, and they can get you going in the right direction.

(Update: Added Hotmail/MSN/Windows Live. H/T to fellow deliverability guru Greg Kraios, who shared in comments that the from header shows up this way at those properties as well.)

Is Dead Really Dead?

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 by Al Iverson

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

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

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

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

Data Point: Engagement Affects Whitelisting

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by Al Iverson

Hot off the press over at AOL's Postmaster Blog, Christine highlights recent changes to AOL's enhanced whitelist. What changed? Engagement. It sounds as though they're now using it as a metric when determining who qualifies for AOL's EWL (enhanced whitelist), the bit of magic that allows your images and links to work automatically in the AOL inbox.

For good guys, I don't know that this is much of a change. Engagement has long mattered at top ISPs, including AOL. Though, it seems to me that perhaps AOL is closing a loophole -- eliminating a method for gaming one of their whitelisting mechanisms. Having a good reputation was already important, but this adds yet another data point into that specific EWL reputation calculation, helping AOL more accurately identify mail that their users care about and want to receive.

It's yet another data point that recipient engagement matters! How people interact with your email messages, and whether or not they interact with your email messages, is more important than ever before.

Study Implies Best Practices for Social Marketing

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by Amanda Cross

The Nielsen Norman Group has done a study on people's behavior when they consume marketing messages over social media. They specifically looked at how people interact with RSS feeds, as well as social networking sites like Facebook.

Challenges implied by this study:

Finding the balance of posting often enough to be noticed--you're message has to be recent or no one will see it--and posting too much--people don't want marketing messages to crowd out their personal messages.
Using the correct tone--people expect a different tone in social settings...except for some companies.
Knowing what to say--what will make people find your social marketing to be worthwhile?

You can read about the study on UseIt.com, which also includes a link to guidelines for your marketing in social media.

And once you've decided how to deploy your social marketing effort, check out the ExactTarget Social Forward feature to see how to make it happen.

5 Tips for Mobile Coupon Success

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 by Joel Book

Thinking about using mobile coupons? If you are, here are 5 things you absolutely must know about planning and managing a successful mobile coupon strategy.

1. Make the Offer Relevant to the Consumer. “Opt-in mobile marketing has an enormous potential if done responsibly and is specifically focused on the stores/restaurants that matter to each consumer,” said Alistair Goodman CEO of 1020 Placecast.

A recent study conducted by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 adults measured cell phone owner preference levels and receptivity for opt-in mobile marketing messages from brick-and-mortar businesses. The study revealed that 51% of cell phone-owning men ages 18-34, and 34% of women in the same age group were interested in receiving opt-in shopping alerts on their cell phones.

The ability to deliver mobile coupons that “personalize offers” to the profile, needs or purchase history of the consumer is a huge advantage for marketers because it drives traffic to stores. But like all things in database marketing, the key is having the right customer data and the right mobile marketing technology to deliver relevant and timely communications.

2. Integrate “Front End” and “Back End” Systems. One of the cardinal sins (and death traps) of any direct marketing campaign is not having your back-end systems and processes in place to properly redeem coupons and capture customer data.

Integrating your “front-end” POS coupon scanning technology with your “back-end” marketing database, CRM, call center, and customer communications software -- such as email -- is an absolute must.

One company on the leading edge of systems integration is Cellfire, a San Jose based mobile couponing service provider. Cellfire has begun matching store loyalty card numbers with mobile phone applications in an effort to solve some of the back- and front-end IT integration problems, according to August Trometer, co creator at Yowza, which provides location-based coupons for the iPhone.

Cellfire’s software application lets customers scan mobile coupons directly from their phones at checkout. The company is currently working with Kroger in Dallas, as well as JCPenney in the Houston area.

Starbucks has also announced that it has begun using Cellfire’s application to test a mobile payment option that lets people buy products by swiping an on-screen barcode that is scanned similar to a plastic Starbucks Card. Sixteen West Coast Starbucks stores are participating in the test.

3. Use Smart POS Technology. Today’s smart phones are wonderful tools for delivering mobile coupons to consumers. But everything can fall apart if your POS technology cannot read the barcode and accept the coupon.

JCPenney has begun testing a new system from Cellfire at Houston area stores that lets customers scan mobile coupons directly from their phones at checkout.

The program, launched in late September at 16 JCPenney locations, is enabled through new imaging scanners installed at registers that can read the "2D" barcode coupons and save sales clerks from having to manually enter promotional codes for coupons.

"These mobile coupons are the ultimate in customer convenience, because there's no need to clip or carry around a printed coupon, and they can be instantly scanned from a cell phone. It's another way we're innovating to enhance the customer's shopping experience," said Mike Boylson, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for JCPenney, in a statement.

4. Use Bar-coded Coupons to Track Customer Purchase Data. Using bar-coded coupons to capture the identity of the customer making the purchase, the promotional code, and the amount of the transaction is smart marketing. And we are about to see an explosion in the use of bar-coded coupons in the US.

Barcodes save time and eliminate errors in data entry. And for marketers focused on using customer purchase data to model customer product preferences and predict future product interests, bar coded coupons provide an ideal method for capturing the data needed for predictive modeling and offer targeting.

The key to using bar-coded mobile coupons is to use standard, familiar SMS, MMS and WAP technologies to deliver a scanable bar-coded message to consumers’ mobile phones.

Water Wheel Car Wash in California, uses mobile coupon technology from OzNet Systems, is to provide mobile coupons for their customers. The company sends bar-coded coupons to their customer’s mobile phones eliminating the need for customers to print out paper coupons therefore reducing waste. To get their mobile coupon, all customers have to do is Text WATERWHEEL to 84045. Customers can choose which product and coupon they desire from any location.

“We are a small business and we have to be conservative about our marketing dollars. As a small business you always have to be looking for something different,” says second generation Water Wheel Car Wash Owner, Alex Naber.

Users of the system can also pull an electronic report showing exactly how effective their marketing campaign has been.

5. Use Mobile Email Rendering Software. According to Len Shneyder of Pivotal Veracity, "The mobile smart phone market is evolving at a rapid tempo. Because the cost of smart phones, the most robust and powerful of the mobile market, is falling almost as quickly as the companies are innovating, the rate of adoption is skyrocketing. More powerful handsets mean more people accessing email on their mobile devices. More varied devices means there are more challenges for email marketers than ever to getting email to render correctly. "

For mobile coupon campaigns to be successful, you must have the right software to ensure your coupon offer and barcode appear the same regardless of whether the consumer is receiving the mobile coupon on smart phones from Blackberry, iPhone, or Palm.

What should you do? Check out eDesign Optimizer and the Design Guide from Pivotal Veracity. These design tools and guidelines will enable you to verify that your links and images work, validate your code, and visually ensure that your mobile email and coupons appear the same regardless of the mobile phone your customer uses.

The Takeaway

Jordan Cohen from Pivotal Veracity says it best, "What we are witnessing in the mobile space is unprecedented. Having the web in the palm of your hand is in demand like no other technology in human history, and it is fueling the biggest revolution in computing in at least 15 years. I've said it before, and now will say it again: The time to adopt a mobile email marketing strategy is now. Blink one or two more times and your competitors might just leave you in the dust."

Excitement in the World of iLab

Monday, November 9, 2009 by Kyle Rechin

With the 135 release on November 6^th, iLab is rolling out new and exciting products and user interface updates. Not only does iLab let you be one of the firsts to adopt these products and features, we allow you to do so for free!!

New to iLab are the user interface updates Save Email as a Template and Streamlined Content Creation Tools. Save Email as a Template allows clients to quickly leverage their polished emails by creating reusable templates. Streamlined Content Creation Tools will simplify the ways in which templates, surveys and emails are created while maintaining the perfect balance between sophistication and ease of use.

We are also very excited to have released Twitter Integration on November 6th. This innovation allows clients to extend the reach of their one-to-one marketing programs to Twitter. With a single send, you will be able to reinforce email messages with a coordinating Twitter status or execute a Twitter campaign alongside an email program. The Twitter integration is the next messaging channel in ExactTarget’s expanding capabilities across email, mobile, social and sites. We are now recruiting current ExactTarget clients to help us test the all-new Twitter Integration, but do not delay because spots will be filled by November 11th.

Check out iLab today in ExactTarget’s 3Sixty to take advantage of all these new features, or search iLab to adopt other new innovations. Also make sure to join the iLab group on 3Sixty to get real time updates on what’s coming next.

Email System Process Term of the Day: Asynchronous, Scheduled, and Real-Time

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Your email marketing messages don't have to be processed right away. Different timing is appropriate for different tasks, and in some cases the ExactTarget application gives you the control to choose how--and when--your system does its work.

Asynchronous
An asynchronous process is a process that runs “behind the scenes” while you continue to use the interface to perform other tasks. You receive an email or other alert that the process is complete so that you can view the results.

For example, if you start an asynchronous report, the report runs while you continue working. When the report is done, you receive an email that contains the report results.

Scheduled
A scheduled process is a process that runs automatically at the time you designate. You receive an email or other alert that the process is complete so that you can view the results.

For example, if you schedule an email send to begin at 11p.m., the system begins the send at 11p.m. and can send you an email when the process completes to give details on the success of the send.

Real-Time
A real‐time process is a process that runs in the foreground of your application. You cannot
perform other tasks while the real‐time process is running. When the process is complete, the application presents the results on your screen.

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Outlook 2007

Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Andrea Smith

written by David Hoang

With the move from Outlook 2003 to 2007, Microsoft made a lot of security improvements. Along with that, however, were a number of design changes. Outlook changed its engine for rendering HTML content from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Word. Before, it essentially meant that if your code looked good in Internet Explorer, it looked good in Outlook.

However, that is not the case anymore.

This is a huge impact in the way we design emails; because of the high volume of Outlook users, particularly in the Business-to-Business realm.

Here are a few key elements to consider while designing email messages in Outlook 2007 to ensure it looks sharp.

Keep your styles in-line
Though Outlook 2007 does support embedded CSS, there are certain properties that present challenges, such as margin, line-height and float/clear. Keep your styles in-line while you are designing. In addition to being an email design best practice, using style attributes in-line will help ensure that your message renders properly.

No Animated .gif files
Animated .gif files will not function in Outlook 2007. However, there is a solution for using .gif files with Outlook 2007. Since the file will not animate, you only need to make sure the first frame makes sense; as that is what will appear in Outlook 2007.

Contain Yourself, No Floating!
Outlook 2007 does not support floating or CSS positioning in any capacity. Use standard HTML tables to contain and control the layout. This will ensure that your design elements won’t go flying all over the place!

Specify Accurate Table Widths
When using HTML tables it is important to specify accurate table widths to ensure proper display in Outlook 2007. This is especially important in table structures that contain multiple columns. For example, when you have a table cell that spans two columns, the width for that cell should equal the sum of the widths of the other two cells.

Continue Using Alt Tags
As it was in Outlook 2003, it is in 2007; images will automatically be blocked. While you’re designing your email message, keep in mind of what it will look like with images disabled. Remember that Outlook will display alt tags, but they will only appear after a default security message. For a list of acceptable tags in Outlook 2007, check out this guide on Microsoft’s website.

No Forms
Outlook 2007 disables embedded forms. If you design an email with a survey or form in the content, include a direct link (hosted from a website) to the survey for your Outlook users. Indicate clearly in your design that the form is not broken, so subscribers don’t get frustrated by trying to fill out the form.

With 2010 quickly approaching, you may be wonder if there will be any major CSS/HTML changes in Outlook 2010. Right now, don’t expect major changes.

To conclude, sticking to standard HTML table design for emails should help you effectively render emails in Outlook 2007. Be sure to read our design tips in the coming weeks for rendering tips in other email clients, including our past issue: Email Rendering in Hotmail by Anna Meier. Portions of this blog, Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Outlook 2007 and more information on email rendering can be found in our white paper “Email Marketing Design: The New Essentials.”

For additional information about rendering in Outlook 2007, check out our white paper, Seven Email Marketing Design Tips for Outlook 2007.

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

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

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

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

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

Pew Internet & American Life: Online Activities Trends

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

MarketingSherpa

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

USC Annenberg Digital Future Report

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

Participatory Marketing Network

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

Pontifelx / Harris Interactive Survey

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

SmartBreif on Social Media

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

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

ExactTarget – Is Email Marketing Endangered?

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

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

ExactTarget – 2009 Channel Preferences Study

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

Forrester Consulting – Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power

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

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

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