With tax season at its annual April 15th climax, my attention has naturally been focused on one thought, and one thought only: I hope TurboTax got the math right, because frankly it would stink to be audited.  Never having been audited, I picture the process being about as enjoyable as an evening singing Alvin & The Chipmunks karaoke…with Celine Dion.

There is one type of audit, however, that I can whole-heartedly support—the email marketing audit.  I conducted my first email marketing audit on behalf of a client back in 2003, and honestly, neither the process nor the tremendous ROI upside has changed that much since then.  In a nutshell, to conduct an email marketing audit, you:

• Identify & map the different types emails that are being sent to customers, prospects, partners, and other constituents
• Interview internal staff and external partners who play any part in creating or delivering emails to your various audiences
• Document the systems—ecommerce, CRM, ESP, etc.—through which these messages are being sent
• Document the points of current integration between these systems, if any
• Document the email creation, broadcast, and reporting process
• Analyze the creative being used across all of the different message types
• Analyze any available performance data for the different message types
• Make prioritized recommendations on how to improve performance and streamline processes based on your findings

Does this email marketing audit process require a significant investment of time and effort?  Absolutely.  Is the ROI worth the investment?  Yes—but only if your organization is committed to turn the audit recommendations into reality. 

A thorough email marketing audit uncovers all sorts of “low-hanging fruit” opportunities for marketers.  The quick wins often range from improved design to verifiable delivery to the holy grail of one-to-one marketing—a consolidated view of all enterprise messaging at the individual subscriber level. 

Even more importantly, triggered emails that were once the shadowy purview of IT or e-commerce developers now appear clearly on the marketing team’s radar for review and optimization.  Examples of such triggered emails include:

• Welcome emails
• Automated replies (from customer service, HR, product, and other inquiries)
• Order confirmations
• Shipping alerts and confirmations
• Abandoned shopping cart notices
• Account alerts
• Registration confirmations
• Event reminders
• Membership confirmations
• Service notices (including those relating to service disruptions)
• Account expiration notices

If you know your organization is sending out any of these types of triggered emails—but your marketing department lack visibility into the creation, design & deployment—then it may be time to don your best blue suit and start auditing.  You’ll be surprised by how quickly you’re able to identify opportunities for improvement.

For more information on ExactTarget’s extensive email marketing audit services, please contact us.  For a more ideas on how to set up and conduct an email marketing audit on your own, check out Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Audit Kit.   

Let’s be frank…designers are great.  They wear the coolest clothes, carry the coolest gadgets, and fill their next generation iPods with only the coolest of tunes.  Granted, their spelling could use some work – but I’m willing to forgive that as long as they keep me on the invitation list to their exclusive parties.

That said, when dealing with designers on certain email projects, I have been reminded of the old saying:
 
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Or, to put it in design terms:

To a designer with Photoshop, everything looks like a canvas to be filled.

The truth with email design, however, is that less is often more.  Consider  an email alert.  Email alerts are sent for a variety of reasons, including:

• An emergency requiring immediate action or response
• A timely correction to information contained in a previous email or other communication
• A notice to subscribers of a service issue or disruption
• A breaking news story

In each of these situations, there is a single, primary purpose for the message — to communicate a time-sensitive piece of information quickly and clearly to subscribers.  In situations like this, the best designs are those that are nearly invisible to the recipient.  There’s a logo to confirm the message source, and a font selection that ensures maximum legibility — there might even be an executive signature to punctuate the message with a sense of its importance.

If you’re blessed with an intuitive designer, they may instinctively understand the difference in design needs between an email alert and a promotional email.  If not, it would be wise to work with your design team to develop a simple email template to have on hand in case you’re faced with a situation warranting an email alert.  Less can be more—but only if you’re as conscious in the design or your email alerts as you are with your email promotions.
 
As the late, great designer Charles Earns said, “Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”  Whether you’re an email designer, developer or consultant, the more you can help define the need to be served, the better your design (or lack thereof) will ultimately be.

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

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

Email List

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

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

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

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

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

Subscriber-centric.  Now those are beautiful words.

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

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

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

With the pace of marketing change these days, it is easy to get overwhelmed and seek refuge in what you know works.  For many marketers, email is their trusted medium of refuge. Email does, after all, produce the highest direct marketing ROI per dollar spent—$45.65—according to the DMA’s latest survey. 
 
But online marketers who rest on their laurels—or industry statistics, for that matter—are likely to find themselves quickly displaced by more nimble, insightful competitors.  Like it or not, even email marketing is a medium defined by change—changing subscriber preferences, changing consumer interests, and changing ISP requirements.  The net effect is that to be effective, email marketers must maintain a Constant Improvement Mentality (CIM) to achieve lofty returns on investment.
 
So what is a CIM?  It’s that internal voice that keeps your eyes peeled for ways to improve your email marketing performance.  It is that voracious appetite for testing to determine what works based not on personal assumptions, but rather real consumer data.  It is that steady drumbeat that leads you to challenge your champion design in hopes of finding even the slightest modification that will improve ROI.
 
Admittedly, a CIM can be both a blessing and a curse.  Some might call you a pessimist or conclude that you are never satisfied with anything.  Let them talk, because we know the truth.  The path to a higher email marketing ROI will be paved by those with a healthy CIM.

As a new blogging voice here at ExactTarget, the first thing you learn is that you have to come up with a catchy name for your blog. Unfortunately, my surname doesn't lend itself to stellar email puns such as those of my cohorts Joel Book (Email Marketing by the Book) and Chip House (House of Email Marketing).

So what's a nascent blogger to do? Well, I thought long and hard about this medium called email and where it is headed. Clearly, other messaging technologies--SMS, MMS, RSS, etc.--are gaining acceptance among consumers. As a result, the complexity of creating lasting, one-to-one marketing relationships is increasing dramatically. Marketers must now be attentive to permission across multiple channels & honor the unique nuances that each medium demands.

Fortunately, there's a mantra from the one-to-one marketing toolbox that we can extend to guide all of our efforts in this brave, new world of messaging options:

• Deliver the right message
• To the right person
• At the right time
• Through the right medium

These "four rights" must be front and center in our collective efforts to engage customers via one-to-one messaging whether it is email, SMS or voice.

As such, I can think of no better moniker for my blogging efforts than "The Four Rights"--a place to explore the concepts of message, person, time, and medium and how they can be optimized to achieve one-to-one marketing objectives.  Contributing to this exploration with their own take on The Four Rights will be some of the leading interactive marketing minds from ExactTarget's partner agencies. 

It should make for an interesting journey--I hope you'll join us.