Email Marketing Subscription

Coupons Boost Email Response Rates

Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Joel Book

Retailers and consumer packaged goods marketers that include coupons in consumer email communications are experiencing higher open and click-through rates.

As reported in the November 19th eMarketer Daily Newsletter, “There is a pronounced difference between open rates for e-mails that include a coupon offer and those that do not. Open rates of around 24% to 25% for coupon e-mails dropped to just 16% to 18% for non-coupon campaigns.”

Open Rates for Coupon Offers vs. Other Mailings

The eMarketer article also confirms that “Higher open rates for coupon offers translated into higher click rates as well, though the difference was much smaller. emails with coupons that could be used online were most likely to be clicked, at 4%.”

Click Rates for Coupon Offers vs. Other Mailings in the US

As coupon use expands, I believe those brands that are able to personalize offers to the product needs and purchase behavior of individual consumers will have a distinct advantage over those brands that practice a “one-size-fits-all” coupon strategy. To learn more about technology that enables marketers to deliver relevant and timely offers – including coupons -- based on email subscriber data and behavior, check out ExactTarget Live Offers at ExactTarget.com

What About Mobile Coupons?

Are mobile coupons ready for prime time? Not quite, but we’re getting there fast – really fast. According to a recent Mobile Marketing Survey of 511 consumers by HipCricket, 83% of US consumers say their favorite brand has yet to market to them via their mobile phone, even though 37% say they would be interested in participating in a mobile customer loyalty program from a brand they trust.

This indicates growing consumer interest in mobile marketing and represents a significant -- but largely untapped -- opportunity for brands to connect with customers on mobile devices. “With consumer interest in mobile marketing continuing to steadily increase, it’s clear that now is the time for brands to launch and execute their mobile strategy and programs,” said Scott Debson, HipCricket’s VP of brand solutions.

It seems that brands are starting to listen. Ten million digital coupons were redeemed in the first six months of 2009, up 25% from a year ago, according to Inmar, a coupon-processing company. But they still account for less than half a percent of all coupons distributed.

Top Tips for Using Mobile Coupons

If you’re looking for practical insight on how to use mobile coupons effectively, check back here to see my next post, “Five tips for using Mobile Coupons to Drive in-store Traffic.”

Require a login to opt-out?

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Al Iverson

If you're wondering if it's OK to require that recipients must log into your website before they can unsubscribe from your emails, the answer to that is no-- it's prohibited under US Federal law.

The FTC explicitly clarified this in the May 2008 CAN-SPAM Rule Update. It's on page 104, near the bottom.

Here's what it says:

Section 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out. Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page, in order to: (a) Use a return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3), to submit a request not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from a sender; or (b) Have such a request honored as required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(B) and (a)(4).

What does that mean? Read carefully: Senders are not allowed to require recipients to "provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences." That means you can't require them to login to your website before continuing on to a preference center or other page. The only thing a recipient has to give you is their email address, and the opt-out preference. (i.e. do you want to opt-out from all messages, or would you like to opt-out only from certain specific lists.) The law prohibits any requirement that the recipient "take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page" when unsubscribing -- meaning it's not OK for it to take five clicks for somebody to unsubscribe. Interact with one page means the unsubscribe link takes them to a web page, where they are either unsubscribed automatically, or push some button on that web page to complete the unsubscribe process. (That would be interacting with that single web page.)

For more information on CAN-SPAM, visit our CAN-SPAM Information Center at http://canspam.etdeliverability.com/

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Yahoo!

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Tana Babcock

Continuing with our Email Rendering series, let’s take a quick look at a few quirks that Yahoo! is known for. Much like Gmail, Yahoo provides two web based clients, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Classic Mail. To change versions of Yahoo!, select from the “Options” drop down on the far right side of the screen.

Below are some great tips to consider when building your email campaign in order to create the best experience possible for Yahoo! subscribers.  

Image Blocking - Alt Tags
Images are blocked by default in Yahoo!. However, Yahoo! does display stylized “alt” tags, so add those to your design when it makes sense to help create brand synergy.  You can always edit this image-blocking feature in your Mail Options. There are a few choices, “Always show images…”, “Show images only from my contacts”, or “Initially block images”. Personally, I have them turned on by default – but many of your subscribers may not, or may not even know they can edit this feature.

While no Email Service Provider can enable your images to display in an email client that blocks display, services such as Goodmail or CertifiedEmail™ allow email marketers to pay a per-message fee to deliver emails with “images on” to AOL, BT and Yahoo!.

Avoid Paragraph Tags

Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mail Classic do not support the use of HTML paragraph tags <p>. Paragraph tags are used primarily to create space between sections of text. If two sections of text are each contained within paragraph tags the space that normally appear between the paragraphs will not be seen. In order to avoid this, break tags <br> can be used. Two break tags in a row will create the same amount of space between text sections as a paragraph tag.

Make sure to keep checking back for more useful rendering tips regarding other major email clients!

Lashback Working with Yahoo

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Al Iverson

Lashback reported today (via Twitter) that they're working with Yahoo nowadays to help Yahoo determine the "unsubscribe reputation" of senders. What does this mean? According to Yahoo's help pages: "We work with LashBack to identify certain senders that honor unsubscribe requests. When a user reports "Spam" on an email from a sender that has a good unsubscribe reputation (as per LashBack's UnsubSafe score), LashBack facilitates an unsubscribe request so the user is removed from the sender's mailing list."

What does this mean for you, dear senders? I think it's another suggestion to keep your nose clean. I think this means that if you send mail to people after they have unsubscribed, you're going to end up with yet another data point identifying you as a bad guy, and it's going to further interfere with your ability to deliver email, at Yahoo, and elsewhere.

What is Lashback? Lashback calls themselves "The Email Compliance Authority." They do a few different things. They offer an email plugin for end users to download and install, and the plugin helps them compile unsubscribe compliance information, the goal of which is to help people unsubscribe from emails more easily, and denote when senders do not respect the fact that a recipient has unsubscribed. They also denote when suppression lists have been abused, are receiving mail that they shouldn't be. The goal is to denote when senders or advertisers are out of compliance with CAN-SPAM.

We actually contract with Lashback to help us monitor client compliance with unsubscribes (and help us monitor for the unlikely event that our own unsubscribe handling processes were to fail). Some of what they look at is specific to third-party ad networks and ExactTarget is not a third-party ad network, and declines to serve mail for third-party ad networks, so not every single bit of data they collect is going to be useful to somebody like us. But, overall, they provide really useful data that has helped us take action against numerous clients engaged in bad acts.

So, it doesn't surprise me to see Yahoo referencing Lashback data, since I find it valuable myself.

Drip Model Marketing– Is that a leaky faucet or your email marketing software?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 by Kristeen Hudson

Phrases like “drip campaign”, “automated email drip”, “drip email program”, and “drip email” are thrown around ExactTarget a lot. This is because ExactTarget is in the business of sending email, especially automated email drips. However, everyone may not understand what a drip campaign is. Let me tell you a little bit about the basics of drip marketing.

Drip marketing comes from the phrase drip irrigation, which is where crops are watered in small amounts over a long period of time. This same concept is applied to marketing and is called drip model marketing. Customers or potential customers are given small amounts of information over a long period of time.

The idea behind a drip campaign is that it takes between 3 and 30 impressions of a brand to make it sink in. When creating a drip campaign its important to have a consistent brand with varying messages to help develop the reputation of your company.

Drip emails are the most common type of drip communication, however there are other ways to communicate in a drip campaign. Some other options are - voice messages, SMS messaging, and direct mail.

Drip model marketing is a good way to help avoid always trying to sell a product and a good excuse to provide content that will engage subscribers. Think of this as a great way to nurture your potential clients. Drip marketing can be used for business to consumer or business to business email marketing solutions.

The good news is ExactTarget is one of the best email marketing software providers for creating automated email integration. To learn more about ExactTarget checkout their website.

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Gmail

Thursday, November 5, 2009 by Andrea Smith

This week we’re focusing on email rendering in Gmail. Gmail, like other web-based email clients, is constantly evolving. These updates continually change the way HTML emails are rendered. Not only do email designers need to pay special attention to Gmail, they need to be aware that their Gmail subscribers may be seeing one of two different versions of Gmail. Depending which browser and version you are using, scroll to the bottom of your account and select the “older version” link to test that version of Gmail. To revert back to the newest version, select the “newer version” link in the top right section of the account.

Below are some great tips to consider when building your email campaign in order to create the best experience possible for Gmail subscribers.  

Image Blocking - Alt Tags
 Images are blocked by default in Gmail. Gmail does display stylized “alt” tags, so add those to your design when it makes sense to help create brand synergy. 

CSS
In both versions of Gmail, CSS must be applied inline. External or embedded CSS in the head of the HTML will be stripped out.

 CSS Borders
The newer version of Gmail has difficulty rendering CSS borders in IE8. Occasionally, 1-2 pixels of white space will be added to the left or right side of the content enclosed within the border. This issue affects some designs more than others, so if you have a particular element that depends on symmetry, test both old and new Gmail versions to ensure your design renders properly. If CSS borders are giving you trouble, you may want to consider using a background color combined with a spacer .gif to create the same look.

Background Images
Background images are supported in both versions of Gmail. However, the “background-image” CSS property is not supported, so the HTML “background” attribute must be used to assign a background image. Previously, there were issues using the CSS property “background-repeat”, but that property is also now currently supported.

Gmail Themes
Gmail introduced the concept of “themes” this year, which allow the user to select different combinations of background colors, text and link colors to personalize their inbox. Some combinations may render light text on a light background, or dark text on a dark background. The bottom line: you must specify background, text, and link colors in your HTML, or they may be changed in accordance with your subscriber’s Gmail Theme.

Testing
Always be sure to test in major web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, and remember that there are both newer and older versions of Gmail. Gmail is a great client to test first when finishing your campaign, as it exposes rendering problems and is unforgiving of any HTML syntax errors. 

Personally, I love using Gmail — it has great features including shared docs, calendars, folder organization tools and other interactive capabilities, so let's make sure our subscribers continue to have a great experience in Gmail. Portions of this blog, Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Gmail, and more information on email rendering can be found in our whitepaper "Email Marketing Design: The New Essentials”.

Real Email Threat #3: Lax Permission

Tuesday, November 3, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

The issue of permission presents one of the greatest threats to the future of email marketing. According to data shared by Julie Katz at Connections ’09, consumers want greater control over email. They want control over SPAM, they want to be able to unsubscribe from email more easily, and they want greater control over the frequency of commercial email coming to their inboxes.

In both 2008 and 2009 we asked consumers to indicate how acceptable it was for them to be contacted via email for “Promotional messages (i.e., sale, special offers) from companies whom you regularly conduct business, but have not specifically asked for ongoing information.” As we outlined in the 2009 Channel Preference Study, consumers’ attitude toward non-permission communications from known companies is souring quickly. In 2009, 50% of consumers considered these messages with unacceptable, nearly doubled from 26% in 2008. The belief that marketers can send email to their customers based on a ‘prior existing relationship’—the premise for email appends—is dead. Customers don’t want the practice to continue.

Nevertheless, the industry continues to allow embarrassing practices like email appending and list rental. Not surprisingly, the only people that fully endorse these practices are those that profit directly from them. The rest of us squirm and manage to squeak out the words, “It can work, if you do it right.” However, few believe that it ever will be done right on a consistent basis. After all, we've been writing about this for quite a while.

There are three interrelated reasons for this. First, as I mentioned in my first post in this series, email is too easy and too cheap. It’s simply easier to do email appends and list rental incorrectly, using an opt-out model that has no regard for permission. The numbers are more impressive--and let's face it, big lists still sound better than little ones. Second, pricing models are still based on match rates and list sizes. These models favor sending to the masses, which in turn favor the opt-out model. Third, since there are still enough suckers out there who will pay to do it incorrectly, email append and list rental vendors have no incentive to change their revenue model. Given that opt-in revenue models are likely to be less lucrative, it won't change until the issue is forced.

But it may already be too late for email append and list rental companies.

While the industry has failed to police itself, two entities with the ability to make real changes have lined up with consumers. First, ISPs continue to serve the best interests of their customers by increasingly relying on reputation systems that include engagement measures such as opens and clicks to determine if messages should be routed to the spam folder (see What’s in store at the ISPs 2009-2010 from Pivotal Veracity). Second, Canadian Parliament continues to push forward Canadian Electronic Commerce Protection Bill C-27 which mandates an opt-in standard.

Comparatively, US CAN-SPAM laws are notoriously weak, making the joke that US CAN-SPAM laws say, “yes, you can spam consumers so long as they can opt-out.” Unfortunately, Unfortunately, many companies use this law to condone their continued distribution of non-permission email. In short, the US Law falls short of meeting customer expectations—again more than half of consumers believe non-permission email is unacceptable, even when it's from a known company. This doesn’t support an opt-out standard. I interpret this as, “there is no excuse for sending email without the express consent of consumers. Period.”

Interestingly, in the same comparison of opt-in promotions from 2008 to 2009, there was no change. Consumers believe permission-based email is highly acceptable. In fact, given the choice, 75% of US consumers (see the 2009 Channel Preferences Study) and 74% of UK consumers (see Strategy Meets Customer Expectations) prefer to receive permission based promotional messages through email.

It’s simply that we need to draw a hard and fast line. Opt-in permission should be the only standard by which we live. Not supporting efforts to eliminate questionable practices in our industry reflects poorly on the industry as a whole. After all, as Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, recently wrote, “What's good for consumers is great for direct marketers. Marketing is not what it used to be, the lines between good and bad actors have been blurred, and the consumer is now in charge.” Amen!

It's time we completely honor consumers' preference for an opt-in standard. We can no longer afford to lend any support, even passively through silence, those who don't.

I'm Honored

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Joel Book

Vote for the Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management in 2009

I am really honored to have been nominated as one of the Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management in 2009 and would sincerely appreciate your vote.

When I was notified about my nomination last week by Jim Obermayer, Executive Director of the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA), I was humbled because the list of nominees includes so many of the top professionals in our industry – including ExactTarget’s CEO, Scott Dorsey.

Voting is open until November 13th. Both SLMA members and non-members can vote for up to five nominees. You can view a full list of finalists here.

Taco John’s and Scotts Highlight MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer

The recent MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer conference in Chicago attracted more than 300 interactive marketing professionals and was a huge success. Congratulations to Anne Handley and her team for producing a first-rate event.

Among the conference speakers were Renee Middleton of Taco John’s and Kip Edwardson of Scotts. Both joined me in presenting a special session to a standing-room-only audience titled, “Email, Social and Mobile. The New Triangle Offense of 1to1 Marketing.” Renee and Kip are on the cutting edge of one-to-one marketing, and discussed how they are using email in combination with social networks and SMS text messaging to attract consumers to their websites, convert them to email subscribers, and use email to drive consumers to retail stores. What they are doing – and the results they are achieving – serves as a great example of what’s possible when you match the right strategy to the right technology.

If you were not able to attend the conference, and would like to get a copy of our presentation, leave a note in the comments and we'll get you a copy!

Real Email Threat #2: The Specter of “Inbox Clutter”

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

There is a lot of talk about the sheer volume of email consumers receive. According to Forrester, 60% of consumers believe they receive too many email offers and promotions (Forrester, December 2008). Thus, it should also be no surprise Forrester also found 64% of consumers say they delete most email advertising without reading it and for them to conclude that consumers find marketing emails a burden.

According to MarketingSherpa, 32% of marketers see general inbox clutter as the biggest challenge to their success in email marketing (MarketingSherpa, Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, September 2008). In Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power, Forrester found that 90% of marketers who believe email will be less effective in 2 years believe the reason for this decline is “too much clutter in consumer inboxes,” while 59% believe “SPAM” will drive this decline.

Yes, inbox clutter is impacting the industry-wide success of email marketing. In fact, at the beginning of this year I the following prediction in our 2009 Marketing Almanac: “On average, we expect open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates will decline in 2009 as subscribers’ inboxes are flooded with bad email from marketers trying to stay afloat.”

The latest DMA figures suggesting that the ROI from email marketing slipped again this year, down 3% from last year to $43,62, support this prediction. However, recently release open rate benchmarks from Epsilon suggest my prediction was wrong. They say open rates have increased slightly in each of the past 4 quarters. From Q2 2008 to Q2 2009 they report an increase from 18.8% to 22.2%. That’s an increase of 18%!

Okay, so the DMA says ROI is down 3% and Epsilon says open rates are up 18% over the past year. At the end of the day, all this suggests is that even if inbox clutter is having a negative impact, it isn’t having much of one on individual marketers.

Consider the following information presented by MarketingSherpa. 31% of consumers indicate that one of the reasons they unsubscribe or disengage from emails is related to inbox clutter. However, this is the third most common reason identified in this survey. The relevance and frequency of YOUR emails are much more important.

Thus, I call this threat the specter of ‘inbox clutter’. It's simply another myth that your emails are being crowded out by junk. Unless you plan on running an average or below average email program, none of this matters for you! If your program delivers value, your program will continue to thrive. The problem is not “out there” as the specter of inbox clutter suggests. More and more, the challenge is to create an above average program.

Are Your Subscriber's Fan's For Life?

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Lindsay Niemiec

On my drive back from Chicago last week, I noticed a large billboard towering over the interstate. Of course, many billboards crowd every interstate, but this one was different. The advertisement for the Chicago Bears, read “if you’re not a fan, you’re a tourist”. What grabbed my attention was not only to how clever I though the ad was, but how applicable it is to the ExactTarget’s Subscribers Rule! philosophy. Everyone wants to be a part of something special, and marketers want their customers to feel as if they are special too. It starts with delivering 1 to 1 direct marketing of which subscribers are a fan.

Does your marketing program address what your subscribers want? Or do you blast out the latest news and hope for click-throughs? Do you dynamically target the content of your emails to your subscriber's preferences? Or do you batch and blast the same email to everyone, hoping they find it relevant? As the NFL season continues and the holiday season kicks off, the relevance of your email campaign programs could be the key component in making your subscribers true fans.

If you make your subscriber a fan, then much like a Bears fan, they're in it for life. If not, then they're just a tourist on your list for now waiting for the next best thing.

Real Email Threats #1 – It's Too Easy and Too Cheap

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

Last week I addressed several misperceptions about the future of email and provided a list of recent statistics showing that the future of email looks bright. I also mentioned that there are real threats to the future of email.

I had the honor of moderating a panel at Connections titled “Research Survey Says!” On the panel were three of the smartest folks one could have the pleasure of working with: Julie Katz from Forrester, Rebecca Lieb from eConsultancy, and Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa. With the assignment of presenting “relevant research” and a stacked deck of panelists, my job was simply not to mess it up. My strategy? Leave the topic really loose. I asked two simply questions, “What are the perceived threats to email?” and “What are the real threats to email?”

To my surprise, there was nearly unanimous consensus about the real challenges facing email. In summary, email is so easy and so cheap that even when used ineffectively, it still gets results. And that is a big, big problem since it makes it easy to send bad email.

According to research shared by Stefan Tornquist, email programs that do not follow best practices (e.g., batch-and-blast) are becoming less and less effective. In fact, these programs were half as effective in 2008 as they were in 2002. In contrast, programs that do follow best practices (e.g., segmentation, personalization) are slightly more effective today than they were five years ago.

While email experts have been talking about relevance for a long time, I have not seen it presented in a way that makes it this clear. It is not enough to send email. It is imperative for marketers to deliver authentic value to subscribers--and that is not easy!

This point is further supported by consumer-oriented research:

58% of consumers say the primary reason they unsubscribed or simply stopped reading emails from businesses is because “emails were not relevant to me,” followed by 44% who said they “Received too many emails from the sender” (MarketingSherpa, Consumer Media Survey, Sept 2008)
54% say most of the email ads they receive don’t offer them anything of interest (Forrester, “Winning Email Subscribers in a Down Economy” Dec 2008)

Earlier this year, I asked a professional triathelete to coach me in preparation for a half-marathon (we'll see how that goes before I sign up for a full marathon). In that time I have learned that while nearly everyone can run, the majority of people do not run well. I find myself cringing at the sight of people clodding around my neighborhood and placing unnecessary stress on their feet and knees. Only six months ago, that was me.

Email marketing is similar. Since nearly everyone who tries it sees some degree of success, many mistakenly believe they have it figured out. "Why bother with all that stuff the 'experts' preach?" Because if you don't listen and apply what they say, your glory days are behind you. Your email program will grow less and less effective. It's all downhill from here.

This does not need to be the case. The success of your program is in your control. Commit your program to constant and never-ending improvement. Keep learning. Keep modifying. Keep delivering content your subscribers find valuable (not what you think is valuable). Do this and the value derived from your email program will continue to grow.

The Effect of Email Engagement on Inbox Delivery

Monday, October 26, 2009 by Chip House

You're likely not surprised to hear that 90% of the email ISPs have to deal with is spam, which has driven them to constantly evolve and improve their filtering processes. Competition for users with mail accounts hasn't abated, meaning that the ISP that does the best job of keeping the inbox clean and relevant wins.

In a recent article at eM+C titled: "The Effect of Email Engagement on Inbox Delivery" I discuss the balancing act marketers need to deal with at major ISPs. In this article I mention: "For marketers, this means that gone are the days when you can email away willy-nilly while ignoring what’s happening on the other end. You need to monitor all of your campaigns for engagement, looking primarily for opens and clicks, which indicate that subscribers care about your email. If they don’t, over time the sum total of those ignoring you may outweigh the ones that are paying attention to you. If, in addition to this, some portion of your target audience continues to vote your email as spam, you could end up in the spam folder."

We have evidence showing that Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and AOL.com all monitor the engagement level of your email recipients as part of their email filtering algorithms. We've known for years that ISPs monitor user complaints, but now the implicit actions of your subscribers are just as important as the explicit actions. I like to think of the process as being a large scale used to distinguish the mail that recipients want from the mail that they don't want.

Al Iverson hit this in his recent blog titled, "The Rise of Emperor Engagement." In it he states, "If your mail is going to the bulk folder at a top ISP, it's probably going to be because recipients don't care about your email. They're not engaged."

The good news is that focusing on creating content and offers that your subscribers want will not only boost your deliverability, it will also boost your email revenues!

Time for your Halloween email...I mean Holiday Email Program

Monday, October 26, 2009 by Shelly Griffin

I don't know about you, but I like to enjoy each holiday on its own and in order. Especially in the Fall when the three big holidays come hurtling at you back to back from the dark days of Fall: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don't put out Halloween decorations until October, I don't buy a turkey until November and I don't really start planning for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. I definitely do not shop for Christmas presents in July! Who really does that anyway?

Unfortunately in the world of email marketing, you need to start planning your holiday email program now - today - Yesterday! You need to ensure that your emails are planned, designed, tested, scheduled and ready for delivery. The holiday season is when the inbox gets the most congested and without advance planning, your emails may be lost in the crowd. In addition to driving for results, you want to ensure that you are not one of those marketers that over do it - sending a different offer everyday. After just a few of these emails, your subscribers will start ignoring (and deleting) your emails. Chip House spoke to this very subject in a blog post from last year "High Holiday Frequency Drives the Ignore Rate to New Heights".

You also don't want to be one of those marketers that make no significant change or improvement in your email campaign. Those emails seem uninspiring at a time of year when you should be grabbing the attention of your subscribers. Make sure to check out our design tips and tricks at Email Marketing Design blog. Then on top of everything else, there are deliverability challenges at the holidays.

Where will your email program land?

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Friday, October 23, 2009 by Karen Balle

When my nephew was much younger, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas together on VHS until the tape broke. He even thought his name was Jack the Pumpkin King! The soundtrack will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.

Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, but it's a wonderful commentary on the state of email marketing during the holiday season. I don't just mean that trying to get email delivered is a nightmare starting around Halloween or that marketers find themselves in somewhat different situations than they're used to during the rest of the year. The flow of the movie and the soundtrack fit with how email marketing happens during the holiday season. It happens every year.

There's a dramatic uptick in all email marketing, be it legitimate email marketing or spam, that starts when the weather gets cold. Some years, it triples or quadruples normal email volume. And that means slower mail servers, more filters, more complaints, and slower response times. It also means overworked, cranky mail and abuse admins. I know. I've been one of those cranky abuse admins.

The rules surrounding email deliverability, which are confusing enough, get more complicated during this time of year. It feels like every company you have ever driven past and every partner of theirs is vying for your attention. There are a lot of little things that you can do, from holiday ramp-up strategies to promoting special holiday-only marketing campaigns that draw customers in.

I'll leave you for now with this very important thought.

Engagement is more important than ever. If you don't get the attention of your recipients, you'll find your email in the spam folder or blocked during your most crucial sales period.

As I've been writing this, the song "Making Christmas" has been running through my head. It makes me want to ask which mindset do you have for your email campaigns, going into this holiday season?

"Snakes and mice get wrapped up so nice with spider legs and pretty bows.
It's ours this time."
(Your focus is on your ideas of what your recipients should want. You reach years back into your subscriber database. You send out email to people who didn't give you permission.)

Or
"This thing will never make a present. It's been dead now for much too long.
Try something fresher, something pleasant."
(Your focus is on what your customers are really interested in. You're interested in actively engaged subscribers rather than the number of subscribers on your list. You use dynamic content to create a one-to-one experience for your customers.)

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.

Do people really report legitimate email as spam?

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 by Karen Balle

Gmail and MSN Hotmail have recently started offering an unsubscribe link instead of a report spam button for some permission-based mailing lists, using the hidden X-List-Unsubscribe header that many email marketers and ESPs include in their emails. It makes sense, as many people use the This is Spam button instead of unsubscribing from opt-in email.

A customer asked us for some solid numbers on their unsubscribes, as they're trying to make some internal decisions on how to handle their unsubscribe process. I knew the number of subscribers who click on the spam button was significant, but the numbers were eye-opening. I looked at data for almost 80,000,000 emails sent (Yes, 80 MILLION emails), with complaint rates that never came near where an ISP would block and bounce rates that would make you drool.

17% of unsubscribes came from customers who hit reply and asked to be removed.
43% of unsubscribes came from customers who followed the unsubscribe link in the email.
40% of unsubscribes came from customers who clicked the This is Spam button.

That's right. 40% of legitimate unsubscribes came through the feedback loop as a complaint. ISPs take this figure into account, but it should give you something to think about next time you look to expand your email campaign.

Even though they recognized the brand.

Even though they signed up for the email.

Even though they recently purchased from the company.

Even though many of them will continue to purchase services from this company.

On a list with engaged and active subscribers, 40% of the subscribers who no longer wanted to receive promotional materials that they had signed up for used the spam button instead of the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

Delivering Relevant News

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 by Lisa White

The majority of people in the US prefer television as their source of news, followed by daily newspaper, radio and online sources. Even though it is currently being beat by other news sources, a study found that US adults currently get close to 15% of the their news from online sources, which is an increase from 12.7% the previous year.

It would be interesting to see if more targeted email marketing would help give the internet the edge over tv and radio as a news provider. Online news providers can target their audience geographically to give subscribers local news that is relevant to them. Moreover, they can target the subscribers by preferences to give them easier access to stories that align with their interests. The power of one to one marketing would allow for subscribers to receive news that is personalized particularly for them.

Live Blog: Financial Services Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

We've got quite a change of pace in the ol' developer track conference room. Chris Murray of ExactTarget is the emcee for the Financial Services Solution Showcase.

He starts by introducing the first segment:

Beyond Deliverability: Consumer Choice & Control
Authentication, Privacy, and Policy
by Craig Spiezle
https://otalliance.org

The Online Trust Alliance is concerned with security in online activity, especially financial services. Spoofed email, phishing, and online exploits are a major challenge for financial organizations that operate online.

Craig said that government regulations are likely to come about in the next few weeks as a result of the identity theft incidents that we've heard of recently. Craig said that the United States is actually behind other parts of the world in consumer production.

Craig discussed extended validation certificates. In order to get one of these certificates, the business must prove that it's registered with a local tax authority. While this can't verify that the business has good business practices, but it does require that the business be a real business. When a business has this certificate, it turns the address bar in your browser green when you visit their site. If the address bar isn't green, you know that it's a spoofed site.

He continued to talk about the business value of authentication. Not only does this help protect your business from being spoofed, but also improves your deliverability.

Of the top 100 financial institutions in North America, only 43% have protections in place for consumers.

Craig talked about the problem with unsubscribe: an unsubscribe link in the footer of the email is required by CAN-SPAM, but consumers are warned not to click links in emails they don't want for fear that they'll alert spammers that they're a real person. An unsubscribe header allow ISPs to render an unsubscribe link in their client so that people can unsubscribe without clicking the "report as spam" link and degrading your reputation. About this time, someone from ExactTarget piped up to mention that ExactTarget email already does this automatically.

Addressing Email Security Concerns
Matt Burton - GMAC/Ally Bank

Matt talked about Ally bank and the fact that its customers were receiving more spoof emails that were pretending to be from Ally as they were receiving from the real bank.

Ally Bank, like many places, would love for there to be a "silver bullet" that would solve the problem, but in fact the best way to protect consumers is with a combination of proactive monitoring, excellent deliverability of your legit content, and customer education.

Governance, while unpopular, is critical. If your company has multiple business units, ALL of them have to have successful security.

Some financial institutions do not include links in their emails, instead telling consumers to go to the website. This is problematic because it requires more copy and results in fewer site hits. Also, this doesn't prevent phishing emails from including links in their emails.

Security tools, such as ISP Phish Blocking and Certified Mail, are available to help prevent risk and increase confidence in your message respectively.

Education of consumers can be tricky. Sending emails that tells customers how to tell whether your email is real might make it look like you're a spoofer trying to set them up to trust fraudulent email in the future. Better to just remain consistent in your sending so that consumers become accustomed to your style and learn to identify spoofs on their own.

To wrap up, Matt recommended proactive risk diminuation rather than waiting for a problem happens and only responding then.

Technology Solution
e-statements at Nationwide
Brian Jaffe - Nationwide Insurance

Nationwide was facing a "statement challenge"--sending statements to customers on email. The address this issue, they created an elegant solution.

Governance - As part of this process, they codified their program for sending emails.
Preference management - allow customers to specify their preferences. Brian recommends double opt in.
Billing format - recreate view of paper statement
Send mode - bulk or single send. You probably batch up your bills, but some might do individual sends.
Data preparation - attributes or data extensions? what is the unique subscriber key? You need to understand your extremes (what happens if you have an extremely large amount of data?) and your data-display issues.
Deliverability - decisions about IP and Domain. Learn from your deliverability team!
Feedback - decisions about bounce management, reply management. If people unsubscribe and then try to sign up, you could have technical problems sending emails. Make sure you understand how your unsubscribes are managed. And be ready to monitor replies, even if you tell people not to reply to a message.
Inserting marketing messages into transactional emails - CAN-SPAM does allow you include marketing messages into your transactional emails under certain circumstances.

Paperless statements can create issues. For example, what if customers call in saying that they never received their statement. Customer service needs to be able to access tracking to see whether the subscriber ever opened the email and have other strategies to deal with these complaints. Customer service needs to be able to resend statements.

Nationwide includes quite a bit of personal information in their emails so that subscribers know that the email must be legit, since a phishing scam wouldn't have access to so much personal information. Watch out for links to log-in pages, since phishing emails like to send very similar emails that direct to their own "login page."

Having a protocol to deal with bounces is wise. In their case, if a subscriber soft-bounces, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream for one cycle and try paperless again for the next cycle. If they run into a hard-bounce, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream indefinitely until the subscriber re-enrolls themselves in the paperless process.

Nationwide's solution is based on the ExactTarget SOAP API. Their OMS (outbound messaging service) is a middleware layer of abstraction that actually sits behind their firewall. Between the OMS and ExactTarget much communication occurs to get the statements out to subscribers.

The content of the eStatement itself uses AMPscript to build the bill by parsing concatenated attributes and dynamically displaying content in appropriate data tables.

Michael Murdza (ExactTarget) took us through the technical aspect of the eStatement data flow. A sophisticated decision tree weave through the Nationwide database and ExactTarget application, using XML, AMPscript, and API calls.

And then the presentation wrapped up, and everyone started getting ready for the evening entertainment. I've really enjoyed live blogging the technology track for everyone today, and I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed writing it. See you between the lines :)

Mobile Developers Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Ratul Shah is the presenter for the first part of the solution showcase. Unlike every other presenter that's talked in this room so far today, Ratul is maneuvering through the crowd with the hand-held mic. What a showman. :)

Industry Standard Terms

SMS = short message service, aka text messaging. It has a 160 character limit.
MO = mobile originated = a message sent FROM a phone
MT = mobile terminated = a message sent TO a phone
short code = a 5- or 6-digit number that you buy from a carrier to send messages to your customers. http://www.usshortcodes.com
vanity short code = a short code that spells something out, such as our, ETSMS
random short code = a short code that doesn't intentionally spell anything. These cost slightly less.
private short code = only your traffic goes through this code
shared short code = a code that you share with other SMS users. Keywords differentiate your traffic from the traffic of other people on the shared short codes.
MMA = Mobile Marketing Association http://mmaglobal.com/policies. A group that creates guidelines for United States mobile marketing.
Aggregator = a third party company that maintains connections between the carriers and the content providers. When we provisioning a short code for you, we work with an aggregator to get you approved for all carriers.

ExactTarget SMS Architecture
You create JOIN, VOTE, HELP, UNSUBSCRIBE and other kinds of actions that subscribers use to send you MO messages to get in on your mobile messages.

Unfortunately, you can't create keywords or actions in the API at this point. You can initiate SMS sends through the API, however.

System Terms

Subscriber key = unique identifier for subscribers. Allows you to identify subscribers by phone number instead of email address.
Publication list = contains subscribers who opt-in using their mobile device
Data extension = contains subscribers whom you import through the GUI or the API

Implementing Text

Keyword response - text in and receive a response
Mobile capture - captures email address for list growth
Vote and check vote count - submit your vote. poll the response
Outbound (with opt-in) - a message from ExactTarget to the mobile device
Custom campaigns

Wow, Ratul goes through a lot of content fast, and a lot of these slides are very graphics heavy and difficult to translate to blog. Thankfully, everyone at the conference is supposed to be able to get the slides.

FanMail Solution

Dave DeVore - CEO FanMail marketing
Josiah Kaiser - Senior Operations and Solutions Consultant
Tim Kauble - ExactTarget product specialist and world-class AMPscript guru

FanMail Marketing is using SMS to capture email addresses. Initially they were asking subscriber to text their email addresses in this format:

krohn email@example.com to 88769

but they found that customers found this confusing and made errors that prevented the system from capturing their information. So for the next phase, they made it into a 2-stage process to make it more like a conversation. In the new setup, subscribers text in in this format:

stubbs to 88769

then the system sends back an text saying something to the effect of, "Thanks for your interest. Reply to this message with your email address to join our mailing list." When the subscriber responds with the email address, it is added to the email list. The customer gets an email immediately welcoming them to the list, and then any future mailings to that list.

The SMS message that was sent back after the first message included AMPscript to trigger the welcome email.

The first use case resulted in more errors than the second, and people weren't willing to try to sign up more than once. A limitation of both use cases is that it only captures people's email addresses, omitting other important subscriber information that would be useful for relevant messaging .

In the third phase of FanMail's SMS evolution, they integrated their SMS with landing pages to allow the capture of more subscriber information. People text in:

butter to 88769

The system responds with a message saying to respond with an email address. When the subscriber replies with the email address, the system sends them an email with a link to a landing page built with the Smart Capture feature. People complete the Smart Capture form and now the system has information to send really personalized information. For example, this band (Hot Buttered Rum) uses the subscriber's ZIP code to let the subscriber know about upcoming concerts in their area.

What FanMail discovered was that going through this process aggregated higher quality subscribers who were more likely to be engaged with the marketing campaigns and therefore higher ROI on their marketing efforts.

The future phases of this SMS evolution may allow subscriber to provide attribute information via SMS, such as ZIP code to empower the functionality above.

Another thing that FanMail has discovered is that subscribers are willing to send you SMS messages if they're interested in what you have to offer, but they don't like for you to begin the SMS conversation.

Custom Use Case
Tim Kauble took the stage for the final portion of this presentation. Poor Tim--his phone junked out on him this morning and his data connection didn't work, so we're seeing a modified version of his presentation. Typical of technology!

Tim talked about designing a system to allow him to manage his own tasks using text messages. He wanted to accomplish the following:

Accept tasks
Assign those tasks
Assign priority, including deadlines
Expose the tasks to landing pages so that he could see them all
Support multiple methods of input, such a forwarding emails to an endpoint that generates a task with the content of the email.

Tim demonstrated texting in to the system to find out how many tasks he had. He had 30, by the way, plus the system also sent him a message to stop messing around with text messages and get back to work. :)

Tim also brought up the landing page where we could see his lengthy task list--such is the life of the ExactTarget employee!

Live Blog: SMS Text Messaging for Marketers Helps Increase Subscriber Engagement

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Berkey

Today at Connections 2009, I spoke on an industry panel about how SMS Text Messaging fits into the one-to-one marketing campaigns. We had four customers on the panel share their mature SMS marketing strategies. Hearing from the US Navy, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Pier 1 Imports, and Hyperdrive Interactive, the attendees heard one common element throughout each story. In every case, text messages were used to improve subscriber engagement, marked with explicit permission.

The reason why SMS mobile marketing is so successful is because people always have their mobile phones with them, but they may not have their computers handy. People don't leave home without their mobile phones. And as marketers are looking for ways to set themselves apart in the marketplace, SMS mobile marketing can help give them an edge.

Based on the 2009 Channel Preference Study whitepaper, consumers surveyed say they want to receive SMS mobile messages with expressed permission for companies to send transactional messages, time-sensitive alerts such as flight notifications, and operational alerts such as banking messages for suspicious account activities. The key learning for marketers to is understand which messaging channel their subscribers prefer for different types of messages.

A best practice to solve this challenge is to collect your subscriber's preference for marketing channels they prefer for various message types in the future. For marketers considering SMS text messaging, the first step is supporting inbound Text to capture new subscribers to your future drip marketing campaigns.

Capitalizing on real-time interest when you have prospects' attention at a live event or retail location, gives the marketer new possibilities. Seasoned marketers know that offering incentives to potential texters helps drive people to participate in these new campaigns.

When Pier 1 launched their first SMS campaign they captured new subscribers in a younger demographic for future email marketing campaigns. Subsequent drip marketing emails featured a message with a youthful tone and unique offers to help drive conversion. Read more from their story in Mobile Marketer. Texters were incented to engage in order to enter the sweepstakes to win a free Pier 1 Papasan Chair.

Text messaging is all over Connections this year, powered by ExactTarget Text. Check out SMS marketing program examples.

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