This just in: 18-24 year olds think of email as a “formal” medium of communication. This is ironic, maybe even laughable or disturbing to some. I remember when email was first coming into broader adoption in the mid-90’s I read editorials discussing the demise of manners due to the loss of the personal, handwritten letter.

College students just think differently than us older (ahem, established career) folks. We recently hosted a panel of students from Ball State’s Center for Media Design (CMD) who hit this point home. For them, social media and SMS round out the top forms of personal messaging, and email is the realm of the formal, the land of the adults, parents, professors, and even grandmas. One student on the panel even said: “An email is like getting a letter. It’s just above a Facebook wall post of “sweet things.” Awesome.

This perception of greater importance, gravity, and formality of email could actually serve marketers well. For businesses that know how to respect the rights of their subscribers, and send relevant, permission-based and personalized content there is simply no evidence to support the pundits predicting the demise of the email. Email is still incredibly viable for all age audiences for messaging and permission-based marketing.

The 18-24 demographic is very savvy with technology, however. Growing up with email, they are masters of “making it work” for themselves so it fits with their lives and preferences. At our panel discussion the students commonly reported having multiple email addresses – each address with a distinct purpose. For example, one student said, “I have my college email address for emails from my administration and professors, then a Gmail account for the signing up for ‘stuff I want,’ to get about products, etc…and I have a Yahoo address for spam, which I use when I’m on a gamer site and I just want to play, not get their crap. It’s kind of a throwaway address.”

Everyone likes a handwritten letter. Why? I think there are two main reasons. First, letters are a symbol of caring due to the time investment required to create one. Second, the personal nature of seeing a friend or relative’s handwriting is simply compelling, flattering, and human. Letters are formal and show that the sender “cared” enough to take the time to write, etc. Direct Marketers figured this out in the 80’s and companies like Intelligent Ink sprouted up to add a new type of personal, human touch to direct mail. They employed an army of minimum wage workers with good penmanship to personalize envelopes. Though this technique may seem trite today, when these first hit mailboxes a few decades back the concept was new and differentiated, and the response increase was through the roof!

Think how you can improve your program by adding personalization and a bit of care to your next campaign. Start by thinking of your subscribers as individuals and you’re on the right track.

The future for email, however, is much brighter than it is for direct mail. Even in this down economy, a new study from eConsultancy says that 59% of companies plan to increase their spend on email marketing in the coming 12 months. Now if I could only get a fancy wax seal on my email...

JamBase Monetizes its Email Program

Last week, DMNews carried a great article describing how live music promoter, JamBase, is monetizing its email program by running ads inside the emails that alert fans when and where their favorite artists are performing. I think my friend, Andy Gadiel, and his gang may be on to something big here.
For brands that have been smart about building a quality email subscriber database, they now have a great way to capitalize on their efforts by offering advertisers a unique opportunity to reach a very qualified – and loyal – audience.
In case you got an early start on the Thanksgiving holiday, and missed it, here’s an excerpt:

“For online music site JamBase, monetizing e-mails just got easier. Since its ad network partner, Google Ad Manager, and its e-mail service provider (ESP), ExactTarget, integrated into one platform last week, JamBase is now running ads inside of its e-mails.

The new ExactTarget offering, deemed Live Ads, an integration with Google Ad Manager and Dart for Publishers, is helpful for a brand which usually finances its e-mails through sponsorships. The e-commerce site is a destination for music fans to learn all about upcoming concerts and music events. Fans who opt in to receive e-mails get updates about concerts coming to their area and information about bands they like.

Normally, the e-mails are paid for by the concert promoter, but this has caused a challenge when the promoter of a customer's favorite band did not sponsor an e-mail. To address this issue, last year the brand launched New Show Alerts, so that customers could always get an e-mail alert about a show for their favorite band no matter if the promoter was paying for the spot or not. But now, thanks to the new ExactTarget offering, JamBase is able to keep the consumer happy and finance their promotions.

“Because of [ExactTarget's] integration with Google Ad Manager, we can include ads in those e-mails so it solves the problem of who will pay for the e-mail,” said Andy Gadiel, founder/president of JamBase. “It helps us keep providing the service to help customers keep up to date with the music that they love.”

Hope to See You at NCDM
If you’re looking for an “executive primer” on email marketing, I highly recommend you sign up for the special pre-conference workshop that my friend and colleague Jeanne Jennings of JeanneJennings.com will lead at the upcoming National Center for Database Marketing Conference (NCDM) in Orlando. Our seminar, “Insider Tips for Making Your Email Marketing Efforts More Effective – and More Profitable” will be held on Monday, December 8th from 9:10 AM to 11:50 AM.

If you have not yet registered for NCDM, there’s still time and there are plenty of registration options to fit your needs. To register, just go to the NCDM registration page on the NCDM 2008 website where you can also download the complete NCDM 2008 Conference Brochure.

Israel has a new anti-spam law that takes affect today, December 1^st, 2008. Ultimately, it seems to boil down to: Opt-in is king. Companies who don’t already live up to the opt-in standard (with appropriate tracking of opt-in permission) seem to be rushing to reconfirm their email lists. ExactTarget’s contract requirements already require opt-in, so that’s a great start. But, if you send mail into Israel and/or have a presence there, I’d strongly recommend contacting an attorney for guidance. My (very limited) Hebrew skills make decoding the Israel Internet Association’s anti-spam website a bit difficult, but it does suggest to me that getting permission in writing is a requirement, as is labeling the message as an advertisement.

There’s definitely some confusion out there regarding what’s allowed and what’s not allowed under the law, and it’s unclear to me what ability there would be to take action against senders located outside of Israel, but it’s not the kind of thing that I recommend you find out for yourself. Our recommendation is always to comply with the legal requirements of every jurisdiction you’re knowingly serving mail to.

Last week, I had the pleasure of participating on a panel at the inaugural Internet Summit ’08 conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The event attracted more than 600 marketing and technology professionals to the Friday Center on the UNC campus. It was a first class event all the way around. My compliments to Eric Gregg, Scott Hedrick and the TechJournal South team who produced this conference.

Our panel tackled the topic, “Next Generation Email Marketing” and not surprisingly, many of the questions focused on how businesses are using email to stay engaged with customers and prospects in today’s challenging economy.

One thing is clear. Those companies that have invested in the development of their email subscriber base are now reaping the rewards for their efforts. Companies that have the ability to use email to nurture leads, convert prospects to buyers, drive repeat purchase, and generate referrals from satisfied customers have a huge competitive advantage over those that don’t. 

At a time when advertising and marketing expenses are being slashed and marketers need to do more with less, it’s no mystery why we are seeing budgets shifting to email. With an average ROI of $45 for every dollar spent (Source: The DMA), email has become the “linchpin solution” for customer retention and growth.

Where to Get Your Email Marketing “Executive MBA”

If you want to know about the top trends and best practices of email marketing, I highly recommend you sign up for the special pre-conference workshop that my friend and colleague Jeanne Jennings of JeanneJennings.com will lead at the upcoming National Center for Database Marketing Conference (NCDM) in Orlando. Our seminar, “Insider Tips for Making Your Email Marketing Efforts More Effective – and More Profitable” will be held on Monday, December 8th from 9:10 AM to 11:50 AM.

Whether you’re managing email, direct marketing, or the web, figuring out the best combination of customer touch points to increase response rates and drive sales shouldn’t be a guessing game. At NCDM, you’ll learn about the latest online and offline analytical approaches, multichannel marketing strategies and technology solutions that you need to make your database marketing program effective.

Get Registered for NCDM!
If you have not yet registered for NCDM, there’s still time and there are plenty of registration options to fit your needs. To register, just go to the NCDM registration page on the NCDM 2008 website where you can also download the complete NCDM 2008 Conference Brochure.

Sales are down. You’re having a slow quarter. You need to squeeze every last email address you can find for every last dime you can get. Let’s grab ‘em all – even the ones we haven’t touched in years – and send them a big email blast. Good idea? Bad idea?

BAD IDEA.

Why? Because it’ll harm your email deliverability. Batch and blast – grabbing up a bunch of old email lists and sending everyone a 20% coupon code – is going to get you blocked. Tailoring your message to the economy isn’t a bad idea. Throwing permission practices out the window because you feel you need to email more people – well, that is most definitely a bad idea.

ISPs care about reputation, and you build a reputation by staying true to permission. Old lists, bought lists, opt-out lists – mailing to any of these will spike your bounce and spam complaint rates. The result? You’ve just been identified as a spammer.

You might be hoping for that last minute revenue boost, but you could actually see a revenue decline because your mail is no longer getting to the inbox at AOL and Yahoo.

What’s the impact to your bottom line if you lose access to 30% of your list?

I Just Called…To Say….That Voice + Email is Powerful Punch

With all the buzz around channels like Voice and SMS, it can be tempting to implement new programs just for the sake of doing what’s hot.  And let’s face it, that’s not so hot for your subscribers.  So if you’ve been searching for a meaningful way to incorporate Voice into your own marketing campaigns, bravo! 

Truth is, we’ve been looking, too.  Sure, ExactTarget offers the integrated one-to-one platform to make sending Email, SMS and Voice from a single user interface a snap.  But we’ve been known as a leading email company for years, and our B2B environment often lacks the promotional and urgent nature that’s so conducive for some emerging media.

So when R.J. Talyor, one of our Product Marketing Managers and Voice Expert Extraordinaire, approached us about conducting a Voice test for the Email Marketing Intelligence Webinar Series we’re hosting with MarketingSherpa, I was a little apprehensive.  Would it add value for our webinar registrants?  Would they be receptive to new channels of communication from ExactTarget?  Can Voice make a measurable impact on the event attendance?

In short, all findings point to YES.  I’m pleased to report that the Voice testing results from the first webinar were extremely positive.  I hope you find the following information both useful and encouraging when considering how (and when) to add Voice into your own marketing mix.

Webinar Reminder Testing Goal:  To find the ideal messaging mix to drive webinar attendance via reminders

Testing Approach
Registrant list split into three random groups to receive reminders the day of the event.

• Email-Only Reminder Group
• Voice-Only Reminder Group
• Email + Voice Reminder Group

Test Findings

• Email + Voice reminders drove the highest webinar attendance (43%)
• Email-only reminder came in second (36.3%)
• Voice-only reminder drove fewest attendees (29.6%)

 We’ll be continuing to test Voice for the next few webinars, so sign up to see them in action and stay tuned for further results!

Cheers,
Ashley Sales
Manager, Marketing Communications

Yesterday, an article I wrote on the Best Time of Day to sent email was featured in MediaPost's Email Insider column. The post highlights an interesting new perspective that our friends at The Center for Media Design have provided on when, and how, consumers read email.

The key take away of this article is similar to the key take-aways of the whitepaper we collaborated on, namely, that the details of our consumers lives matter. As we develop an email marketing strategy, we need to keep in mind what is going on in our consumers lives. This applies not only to targeted email campaigns by way of delivering relevant content, but to delivering the right types of messages at the right time of day. Wondering if morning or afternoon is the right time to deliver your messages? Well, based on the insights from CMD, it may depend on the type of message. Newsletters likely make sense early in the morning (especially for B2B marketers) when people first login to their email client and have some uninterupted time to read your message. Direct response messages may work better in the afternoon or evening when subscribers are in "quick hit" mode.
 
To give you a taste for the depth of insight of their work, you can download two free reports from their site. High School Media Too provides a look into a day in the life of 15 teenagers, while Middletown Media Studies 1 is the first wave of this research that they have made available since it is getting a little old. Payment is required for the more recent and more extensive studies, but at worth the investment. BTW, if you can't tell, I am a big fan of theirs.

Dear Retailers:

We can’t see your images in your emails.

We can’t see your 20%-off merchandise or special offers. We can’t see your holiday sweaters, or dresses, or suits, or toys.

Why? It is because your emails are made entirely out of images, and due to image suppression at the bulk of receiving email clients and ISPs your emails look blank, imageless, and don’t reflect the brand you hope to portray.

Want to increase your holiday sales for 2008? Start by optimizing your emails using the principals of what we call “performance-based design.” How? Head on over to the ExactTarget design blog and learn about their recommendations for email marketing design best practices. Also, check out their latest whitepaper: Email Marketing Design: The New Essentials.

The key to the success of your email program this fall will be about making an impact in the inbox that is relevant to each subscriber’s wants and needs…not about sending more email.

Sincerely,

Your Once Loyal Customer (Please give me a reason to buy from you)

“Our terms of use specifically require that all members abide by all local, state and federal laws, including CAN-SPAM and we make sure to educate our customers accordingly,” says an email I received today.

That’s a red flag. When you brag to me about CAN-SPAM compliance, it tells me that you need something to brag about other than permission, other than clear and direct consent.

Sure, there’s spam out there that is far from legally compliant. But there’s such a thing as legally compliant spam, and it’s just as unwanted. What governs your ability to get your mail delivered? Permission, not just legal compliance. And legal compliance isn’t a substitute for permission.

Bragging about legal compliance is a bit like bragging about how fabulously shiny your subject line is. It makes for great marketing filler, but it means absolutely nothing.

If you’re bragging about CAN-SPAM compliance, it tells me that you either don’t understand how email reputation works, or you’re attempting to deceive, because you know you don’t have a solid level of permission involved.

I’m not sure which is worse, but either way, it means something doesn’t smell right. And in this case, the rest of the email message did nothing to allay my concerns. There was absolutely nothing about permission. No mention of clear consent. Just a lot of talk about legal compliance, and how anybody can opt-out, and we suppress X million addresses, and how they’re leaders on the lead generation and prospecting front.

Really? Leaders? Without permission? I don’t think so.

In Part 1 of my interview with Jason Baer of Convince&Convert, we talked about the importance of agencies developing digital marketing capabilities.  In Part 2 we talk about what agencies can do to develop this expertise.

Joel: With the explosion if digital mediums in the last three years, is it realistic to expect agencies to know everything they need to know to master digital marketing?

Jason: In some cases, agencies (especially the big ones) are offering amazing digital solutions that are on par with anyone in the world. In other instances, agencies have deep knowledge in a particular corner of the digital marketing realm. The adequacy of an agency's digital capabilities is in large measure based on the digital demands of its clients, although that can be a chicken and the egg situation at times.

Ultimately, I would say it's unlikely that ANY organization knows everything about digital marketing any more. It's gotten big and complex in ways that traditional media is not. I believe we're entering into a new era of specialization, where people that were formerly broad digital marketers will focus on a small number of facets and go deep in those areas. That's certainly the path I'm on, and I suspect I'll have plenty of company.

Joel: What services does Convince & Convert offer agencies to help them develop the digital marketing capabilities they need to compete?

Jason: There are of course a ton of digital marketing conferences out there, many of them quite good. However, I find that conferences are better for inspiration than they are for training. I work with agencies to provide highly pragmatic, tactical training that shows them step-by-step processes for how to actually do digital marketing. I'm off on a trip next week to the east coast to conduct all-day training workshops on the ins and outs of social media for two fantastic PR firms that know how important social media is, but they need help on how to block and tackle.

Beyond training workshops, I work with several agencies on an ongoing basis. When they need digital strategy or an idea for a pitch or for a new client, I help them with concepts and execution. They get access to an experienced digital marketer without having to pay for one full-time, and they avoid the in-house guru scenario.

Get on the Bus!
My thanks to Jason Baer for his insight on what agencies can – and must -- do to inject much-needed digital marketing expertise into their organizations. And if you would like to take a daily drink from Jason’s cup of knowledge, I highly recommend you subscribe to the Convince & Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide. I guarantee you’ll love it.

On May 12, 2008, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved four new rule provisions under the US Federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM, they also included some very important clarifying information in the related Statement of Basis and Purpose (SBP), which was published shortly thereafter in the Federal Register. The most important bit of that clarifying information relates to forward-to-a-friend messaging and how that messaging is covered under CAN-SPAM.

In a scenario in which someone either receives a commercial e-mail message and forwards the e-mail to another person, or uses a Web-based mechanism to forward a link to or copy of a Web page to another person, the FTC explains that, generally speaking, if the sender offers something of value in exchange for forwarding a commercial message, then that company must comply with CAN-SPAM.

Meaning, if you offer an incentive to people to forward your message to a friend, you have to ensure that they do not forward your message to somebody on your unsubscribe list, else you are liable for a CAN-SPAM violation.

Let’s break it down even further. Imagine this scenario:

• You have a Forward-to-a-friend, invite-a-friend, or any type of viral marketing mechanism where a recipient has the ability to submit an email address, and you then send that person an email.
• You offer an incentive to people to submit their friends’ email addresses.
• You then send an email message to those friends.
• If any of those friends were on your unsubscribe list, if they had previously opted-out from your messages, then you’ve just broken the law.

Not good!

Our recommendation is that you don’t offer an incentive to subscribers to forward your email unless you have ability to honor existing and future opt-out requests. This isn’t typical, standard functionality. If it’s something you plan to do via ExactTarget, make sure you talk to your account manager and the deliverability services team, to better understand the legal liabilities and technical requirements relating to any sort of forward-to-a-friend process.

In closing, here’s one additional thing to keep in mind: If that message you send purports to be from the friend, the friend must have control of content. In the past, the FTC levied record fines against a company who sent messages as the friend, but didn’t give the friend control over the content. This is the kind of thing where they’re likely to actively prosecute bad actors. As always, make sure you don’t implement this in a way that makes you look like a bad actor.

Jason Baer understands the game-changing value of adding digital marketing expertise to an agency’s service offering. Before he founded Convince&Convert, a social media and email consulting firm that helps agencies beef up their digital marketing capabilities, Baer headed the interactive division of Off Madison Avenue in Tempe, Arizona. Recently, I sat down with Jason to get his take on why agencies must get serious about developing digital marketing capabilities.

Joel: Why is it critical for agencies to develop digital marketing capabilities?

Jason: 500% more people in the U.S. have a MySpace account than watch American Idol, which is far and away the #1 TV show. More dollars will be spent on Internet advertising this year than on radio advertising. We're at the point in the development of the Web that digital marketing capabilities are no longer optional, they are required. To be any sort of marketing consultancy today and not having digital expertise is akin to not having the expertise to write a press release or design a logo.

Further, the inherent tracking and testing opportunities that digital provides can dramatically enhance ROI of offline marketing, when those techniques and philosophies are applied universally. For example, using banner ad rotations to test creative messaging that is then rolled out in print, radio, TV etc.

Lastly, in this uncertain (at best) economy, clients will be gravitating even more toward digital because it is definable and measurable and the production costs are minimal in comparison to other tactics.

Joel: What “land mines” agencies should avoid in developing digital expertise?

Jason: I find three primary problems when traditional agencies try to enhance their digital capabilities.

First is the guru syndrome. I've written about this on my blog. Many agencies want to find a Web genius who can handle everything, and that will make the pain go away. Unfortunately, digital marketing is so broad and so nuanced now that one person cannot possibly stay on top of all of it. Also, if you accept the proposition that eventually digital will be baked in to essentially EVERY marketing program, having that digital knowledge siloed creates huge operational challenges for the agency. The guru ends up doing nothing but going to meetings, and does little actual digital marketing.

Second is the notion that digital marketing begins and ends. The reason digital marketing works is that it's a process, not a project. The ability to tweak and improve based on a careful study of analytics and other feedback mechanisms is a concept that is outside the historical world view of many agencies that specialize in "making stuff" like TV commercials, radio ads, outdoor boards, etc. The idea that once it's made, that's just the beginning of the marketing program, not the end is a big change for many agencies.

Lastly is the belief that digital marketing is a young man's game. So many small and medium-sized agencies make the junior staff handle all the digital work because it's familiar to them. That's a huge mistake. The potential for digital to transform a client's business - both positively and negatively - is real (especially in email and social media). Consequently, senior staff not being in the digital trenches creates missed opportunities, both for agencies and the brands they represent.

Check back on Wednesday for Part 2 of my interview with Jason as we talk about what agencies must do to master digital marketing.

Project Honey Pot is a group that collects and collates data on harvesters, spammers, dictionary attackers, and other bad actors, and they make this data available for spam filterers and those looking to sue spammers.

Email address harvesting, the process of obtaining email addresses by extracting them from public information sources (such as web pages) via automated means, has long been a common way for bad guys (spammers) to build up their spam lists.

According to the folks at Project Honey Pot, harvesting is illegal under CAN-SPAM. "The law defines every message sent to a harvested address as "spam" and imposes potential liability on the sender. This is regardless of whether the sender complies with the law's other requirements. In other words, including an opt-out link and following the Act's notice regulations is not enough to spare bulk mailers sending to harvested addresses from liability."

Not everybody agrees that this interpretation of how harvesting is handled under CAN-SPAM is correct. Regardless, mining public data sources for email address clearly is not the best path. Even if it were universally believed to be legal, ISPs are quick to block spammers. Mailing to harvested email addresses is one of the quickest ways to get yourself tagged with the "spammer" label. If you want to get your mail delivered, you don't harvest email addresses. It's that simple.

I know you’ve heard me tout the value of personalizing email content hundreds of times. Still, I am amazed that many marketers don’t believe personalizing email is worth the effort! So, for those of you who still doubt the value of personalization, here’s more proof.

Writing in the October 28th issue of MediaPost’s Email Insider, Alex Madison and Lisa Harmon of email marketing agency, Smith-Harmon, note that a report put out this past summer by the Aberdeen Group found that top performing, or "Best-in-Class," organizations that collected and used data to personalize email campaigns, experienced an average order value increase of 57%.”

The report “Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your Customers” identifies the effects of email personalization on subscriber engagement. The study represents the views of more than 550 organizations and groups companies based on annual performance increases. Through their survey, Aberdeen found that top performing organizations (referred to as “Best-in-Class”) are twice as likely as “Laggards” to use the information collected within their database to personalize email campaigns.

Thomson CompuMark Believes in Personalization

Dave Wieneke, Interactive Marketing Manager at Thomson CompuMark, has proven the value of email personalization. He sends the monthly Client Times Online newsletter “on behalf” of CompuMark’s 22 account managers to attorneys who specialize in brand and copyright law. Each subscriber’s newsletter carries the photo and contact information of the CompuMark account manager with whom they work, and articles are personalized based on the defined preferences of each subscriber.

Says Wieneke, “The dynamic content tools of ExactTarget make this kind of personalization straight-forward; our marketing team implemented this without any specialized resources.”

Since Thomson CompuMark began personalizing email, the number of clickthroughs has increased by 63% and the amount of time subscribers are spending on content has gone up 41%! This is genuine subscriber engagement!

Using CRM Data to Personalize Email Content

One of the reasons Thomson CompuMark has been successful in personalizing email is because they have integrated their CRM system (Salesforce.com) with their email system (ExactTarget). To learn more about how to use CRM and Web Analytics data to personalize email content, download the ExactTarget white paper, “Integrating Email, CRM and Web Analytics”.

If you’re an online marketer and were not able to be in Las Vegas for Shop.org's 2008 Annual Summit, you missed a great presentation by Sheldon Gilbert, founder and CEO of Proclivity Systems, on how to use email to boost online sales and reduce customer attrition.

Sheldon offered seven tips that represent little things you can do that can have a big impact on your bottom line. I liked Sheldon’s ideas so much, I wanted to share them with you, so here they are:

1. Remind Customers about What They Already Want: Send a monthly e-mail of their 'abandoned products' and introduce cross-sell items, as well as use their shopping car as a default wish list.
2. Spread the Love: Thank customers for spreading the word with a 'your friend has received your e-mail' note. Personalize the experience for the customer and introduce a new offer.
3. Mix and Match with Precision: Use the 'thank you for your order' confirmation e-mail as a cross-selling vehicle. If 60 percent of the people who have bought X sweater have also purchased Y scarf, send an advertisement for the scarf to everyone who has bought the sweater.
4. Build Your Brand: Leverage the 'under the fold' portion of the e-mail. Educate customers about products by including a 'style guide,' or descriptions on how to use or accessorize.
5. Know Who Your High-Rollers Are: Identify segments that exhibit disproportionate buying power and start marketing to those groups immediately.
6. Never Say Never: Feature new and top-selling products, through 'null search results.' Just because a customer can't find a particular item on a company's Web site doesn't mean they aren't interested in that brand.
7. People are Only as Faithful as Their Options: Allow your customers to opt-down and select a lower frequency of e-mails instead of completely opting-out. Save the cost of marketing to recoup lost subscribers.

Sheldon is one of those guys who is simply a great common-sense thinker when it comes to using email to make money. You can pick up more ideas like Sheldon’s in ExactTarget's new Field Guide to Triggered Email. It’s full of easy to execute applications of triggered email like shopping cart abandonment, transaction confirmation, customer feedback, and product replenishment notification to help you get more juice for the squeeze from your e-commerce web site.

Sometimes, we get letters. Jared writes, “Its great to see your helping people get away with spamming. You should throw my email into your mass email spam lists. Get in line with the others.”

I find this type of email really frustrating. I don’t hear stuff like this all that often, thankfully. But when I do hear it, I wonder, what? Get away with spamming? You really think that’s what ExactTarget does? Help people spam? Yuck.

Jared also sent along a link to some old blog post that shows how long subject lines can be in different email clients. So, he might not be all that knowledgeable about email or have a clear picture as to what he’s mad about.

Regardless, that got me thinking. If somebody out there does think that about us, maybe I should take the time to answer the implied question. Do we spam? Allow spam? Help spammers? The answer is a loud and clear NO. NO, we are not spammers. NO, we don’t allow spam. NO, we don’t support spam.

ExactTarget is not a list broker. Don’t call us to buy a list. We don’t sell them. We don’t buy them, either, so spammers should feel free to stop trying to get me interested in their “guaranteed opt-in leads.”

We don’t allow clients to buy lists. This isn’t a lead generation system, and permission-based email doesn’t work with lead generation lists. It’s just not compatible.

ExactTarget is a tool. A really powerful and useful tool, one that allows our clients to mail their own customers. People who have signed up to receive email from them directly, not to mail random people that some company *thinks* might want to hear from them.

The six of us here on the core deliverability services team act as the spam police. We enforce our anti-spam policy, sending guidelines and thresholds, and the opt-in provisions of our contracts. We suspend, reform or terminate spammers regularly.

We look at what clients are doing constantly.

• If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import,  
• If too much of their mail bounces,  
• If they receive too many spam complaints from a large ISP,  
• If they get blacklisted by a reputable blacklist like Spamhaus or Spamcop,  
• Or if they do something that shows me that they’re not complying with the opt-in consent requirements contained in our contract,  
• Then the client is funneled through our policy enforcement/best practices process to help address the issue, reform the process, remove the bad list, educate the client, and, if those steps all fail, terminate that client.  

Over the past month or so, we’ve worked with over twenty-five clients, guiding them on how to shore up their opt-in practices; giving them a clear understanding that only opt-in is allowed. For a few of those, we told them we’re not going to be able reach out to an ISP for assistance until a problem is resolved. In some of those past instances, our requirement has been that the client must reconfirm their existing email list.

We end up terminating an average of one client a month, and this month was no different. Of course, we like our clients a lot, and ones that can be reformed, we’d much rather reform them than terminate them. A reformed client means no more spam, and a client we keep means they keep paying us. Everybody wins. But, they don’t always want to work with us, or don’t always agree with our policies. And in those cases, it’s in our best interest to move on. So we do.

That’s what me and my team here at ExactTarget have done to stop spam lately. What have you done to stop spam lately?

You just can’t make this stuff up. I saw this story on Yahoo a few days back which read: “U.S. doctors have found the Bee Gees 1977 disco anthem "Stayin' Alive" provides an ideal beat to follow while performing chest compressions as part of CPR on a heart attack victim.”

Now, since I’m a drummer in my spare time, using a popular rhythm to use as a comparison to a critical heart rhythm makes sense to me. It speaks my language. Thankfully, because of this article I now know that I can comfortably conduct CPR at the right pace since I seemed to have the tempo of Stayin’ Alive stored somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain.

Those connections to individuals are less easily predicted online. Yet these types of esoteric facts about an individual can make the difference between a non-response and a sale. The problem is most marketers don’t know what questions to ask or which behaviors to monitor.

In fact if a marketer wanted to target me differently based on my being rhythmically-oriented, they would have to guess, ask me, or append psychographic interest data from a database that somehow listed my subscription to Modern Drummer Magazine (which I haven’t had in 20 years).

Combining preference data and behavioral data is the only way to go. Neither are perfect, but combined they are very compelling. Preferences alone may point you in an entirely different direction than a subscriber’s actual behaviors. That is one of the points we made in our recent whitepaper, “Messaging Behaviors, Preferences and Personas.” Our research with the Ball State Center for Media Design showed combined observations on media usage behaviors with survey data on how each type of medium is used.

We found, for example, that teens tend to use social networks extensively and most often when communicating with friends. However, most of this same group said they were much more likely to respond to a promotion when presented to them via direct mail or email (unless it is spam) than via a social network or a text message. They hold these newer media to be more personal to them.

That isn’t to say that social networks should be devoid of marketing or businesses. In fact, a recent survey from Cone showed that adult users of social networks have some expectation that businesses will be there (not sure if it is expectation or “acceptance”).  In this survey 51% said companies should have a presence in social media but only as needed or by request. Our own research points to the same thing: Opt-in is still king and email is not dead….and now I can do CPR!

For email addresses retrieved from services such as Zoominfo and Jigsaw, do opt-in requirements and CAN-SPAM requirements still apply?

Absolutely, yes. You need affirmative consent to be able to add an email address to your list, unless you want to be labeled a spammer, get blacklisted, and/or find yourself suspended from ExactTarget.

This applies regardless of where an email list has been obtained from and regardless of how an email address was obtained.

Contacts found on sites like Jigsaw and Zoominfo (and similar services) haven't opted-in to receive emails from you. If you take email addresses obtained from a service like this, and you add them to your list, they're going to report your mail as spam in very high numbers. It's going to get you blocked at ISPs. It's going to cause blacklisting issues.

I've talked to various clients and prospects on this very topic. Invariably somebody will say, "Hey, wait a minute. Jigsaw is just B2B lists. This is business contact info. This isn't B2C. I'm not sending mail to Yahoo."

CAN-SPAM (and opt-in permission requirements) still apply in the B2B realm. Keep in mind that B2B filters like Postini, Barracuda, MessageLabs, and others, they all work in a manner very similar to how ISPs work. They receive spam reports from unhappy recipients, people forwarding spam, or people clicking on a "report spam" button in an Outlook plug-in. They look at reputation measures in much the same way that ISPs do. And they will block you for spamming, just like the ISPs will do.

In the B2B world, it can be harsher on you when this happens. If you're blocked at Yahoo, you know specifically that you're blocked at Yahoo. But, if you're blocked by Postini, you're blocked by the thousands of companies that use Postini as their spam filter. It becomes a much broader issue, one that can be a lot more difficult to investigate and resolve.

The moral of the story is, when you're getting a person's email address from somebody other than the user of that email address, then you shouldn't be emailing them. You don't have permission from the user of that email address, and if you add them to a list, and send them email, you're spamming.

Contact databases are a useful tool, but not for email list building.

(This blog post was re-purposed from a question I received during a Q&A panel I participated in back on September 17th for MarketingSherpa.)

As promised earlier this week, I have compiled data showing the influence different channels have on driving purchases. I have only included data for teens and young adults. Moreover, this chart only takes age into account, while the recent white paper provides insights on personas that are more tightly defined specifically to drive insights for email marketing, SMS marketing, and direct marketing strategy at large.



One other point, there have been several questions about the comparisons of email marketing versus social network marketing highlighted in our research. Clearly, each channel plays a distinct role in the marketing mix. The main point regarding Social Networks is that they do not drive consumer to make purchase decisions. They may influence purchase decisions through branding, customer service, etc. But, as a direct marketing vehicle, Social Networks simply aren't the right vehicle to drive purchase decisions.

Following the recent release of our latest research paper, Messaging Behaviors, Preferences, and Personas, done in collaboration with Ball State's Center for Media Design, there have been some requests to see more detailed data by age. Specifically...

@josephjaramillo wrote: 18-34 doesn't make sense as a group. I'd rather see 18-24, 25-34.

For the collaborative study with Center for Media Design, it made sense to use a slightly broader age group in order to merge our insights with their observational data. As you might imagine, following people around all day is a slightly larger undertaking than collecting survey data, so this was necessary in creating personas that include both attitudinal information and data on real-world media exposure.

That said, we do have the attitudinal data people are asking about. Here are two charts showing preferences for where consumers want companies to send them permission-based promotions and unsolicited promotions. This is not the same as driving purchases, which is referenced in the report... we have that data in smaller age chunks also, I just need to compile it. Enjoy!

Data for opt-in promotions:


And here is the data for unsolicited messages (aka, SPAM):