Online Email Marketing

Designing For Your Subscribers: Webinar Q&A

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Justine Jordan

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend “Designing For Your Subscribers: Tips and Tricks to Increase Email Marketing ROI” last week. We had an excellent turnout and plenty of great questions. If you weren’t able to attend the session, don’t worry! You can watch a recording of the one-hour webinar on 3sixty.

Do you have data on email clients that consumer subscribers tend to use?
While data is available, your mileage may vary. Each audience will be different, and you may see dramatically different segments in your list or even between lists, as we saw in the webinar. Fingerprint publishes an aggregate of the data collected from marketers utilizing their service. MailboxIQ provides an in-depth view of email client usage, where emails are being read, and more. Even a simple List Demographics report in ExactTarget can help you understand which email clients your subscribers might be using.

What are the default pixel dimensions for common preview panes?
Over half of subscribers use a preview pane in their email client. We measured each of the default preview pane setups on Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Mail using a 1024x768 monitor resolution. Read the blog post here.

Do you also have data on monitor resolutions in order to determine which portion of an email might be “above the fold”?
Similar to preview pane dimensions, the dimensions for the area above the fold may vary widely since individual users can adjust the size of their preview pane and their inbox in general. Keep in mind that your users may not be viewing your email in an inbox maximized to full screen resolution. w3schools.com publishes display resolution trend information (as do many other sites), but it’s important to remember this data comes from their own website traffic. Just as with email clients, your own website’s analytics data may reveal more pertinent information about your subscribers’ screen settings.

Browser Size by Google Labs is a great tool for indentifying what portion of your email might be “below the fold” in different monitor resolutions. Keep in mind the following caveats: you must have a web-hosted version of your email (you need a URL to paste in) and the email should be left-aligned for best results.

What should be the ideal width of an email in pixels?
We continue to recommend 600px wide as a guideline. We’ve seen success with narrower and wider variations. Again, your results may vary. Generally speaking, we wouldn’t recommend going much wider than 750px.

Where did the "50% of users have images turned off" metric come from?
Many popular email clients—including Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail—disable images by default, forcing the subscriber to choose to turn images on. As we saw in our discussion of email client usage, these email clients can account for 70+% on many lists. It’s important to note that images off is the default for these email clients.

When designing using ExactTarget templates, how can you edit the preheader teaser text?
Our Client Success Center would be happy to assist you. You may reach the CSC by creating a case in BackOffice, sending an email to help@exacttarget.com or calling 866-558-9823.

How do I find out what the "web safe" fonts are?
This site has a great list of web-safe fonts and matches font equivalents between a Windows and Mac environment.

Is there any way to control what content is seen on a mobile phone using CSS? How should I create a mobile friendly version?
There are ways for a website to detect a mobile device and automatically serve up appropriate content, but email currently requires a manual approach. If you’re seeing a significant number of subscribers viewing your emails on a mobile device, we’d recommend creating a simple mobile HTML version and linking to it in the upper left of your standard HTML email. This version would include web safe fonts with minor formatting (color, bold, italics), short teaser text linking to full content, and little more than a simple image (such as a logo) at the top. This creates a great foundation for a mobile-friendly program, which can certainly grow – for example, eventually you might allow subscribers to choose “mobile preferred” and send them a mobile specific email directly.

Thanks again for attending and for all the great questions!

Email Address Capture at Point of Sale?

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 by Al Iverson

According to this post on Eric Goldman's blog, it sounds like requesting an email address from a consumer at the point of sale during a credit card transaction at a brick-and-mortar retailer isn't allowed in California, according to that state's Song-Beverly Act.

The court found that the law's application to email addresses is not preempted by CAN-SPAM. It did not explicitly rule on whether the law applies to email addresses, but the law's definition of "personal identification information" (PII) is quite broad, and the court's analysis seemed to suggest it, so it would be wise to assume for now that it does count email address as PII.

The net here is that the law does seem to prohibit the offline collection of email addresses in California by brick-and-mortar retailers in the course of a credit card transaction. There may be allowable ways to collect email addresses or other information outside of the credit card transaction, but I'm not clear on what the options might be.

We're continuing to research the issue through various channels, and will be sure to share further information as it becomes available.

(Note that the Act does NOT apply to online transactions.)

B2B Contact Databases Are Poor List Growth Sources

Friday, February 26, 2010 by Al Iverson

This morning, I took one of the numerous bits of B2B spam that I received, and I replied to the sender. This time around, it was a staffing services company, looking to help me with all of my staffing needs. He's ready and willing to help me with all of my staffing needs in the aerospace, transportation, and defense verticals, just to name a few.

In my reply, I asked him where he got my email address. "Through the company website," he replied. That's odd, I thought. My email address isn't published on our website. So I replied, saying exactly that. He replied with, "Have you ever heard of Zoominfo?" Sure, I've heard of Zoominfo. I've previously blogged here that it's a bad idea to grow your list by working with companies like Zoominfo, Jigsaw and Netprospex.

Why? Let's use me as an example. If this guy really did get my email address from Zoominfo, he bought a useless record. I'm not a hiring manager, I don't buy from spam, and I spend a lot of time tracking spam and spammers. I can't be the only one in that Zoominfo contact database who has no interest in receiving exciting, valuable unsolicited offers for help with my staffing needs.

After I informed the guy that if he bought my address from Zoominfo, he ought to try to get his money back, he changed his story. Now he's quoting my online bio at me as if this is somehow proof of an opt-in (buh?), and saying he's going to report me for harassment.

So, it's hard to say if this data really came from Zoominfo or not, as this guy keeps changing his story. But I get an awful lot of B2B spam, and people have to be getting my email address from somewhere. What do you think, dear reader?

Twitterview: Digital Marketing Budgets in 2010

Friday, February 12, 2010 by Dawn DeVirgilio

Today I had the pleasure of Twitterviewing Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director at Econsultancy about our collaborative research, Marketing Budgets 2010: Effectiveness, Measurement and Allocation Report.

There is alot of great info on email marketing and social media! If you missed the live version here's what we talked about:

@ExactTarget: According to the report marketers are shifting their budgets to digital channels. Why?

@LinusGreg: The shift to digital is an on-going trend. The wider use of online to boost brand reputation is giving this fresh impetus

ExactTarget: Would you say this was the biggest surprise coming out of the research?

LinusGreg: Yes. We expected ROI would drive the shift. Now seeing softer metrics along with harder financials driving digital spending

LinusGreg: Another surprise-a # of companies mentioned lack of training budgets for digital. Need ongoing training to succeed

ExactTarget: Were there any differences between marketers in the US and UK that caught your attention?

LinusGreg: Yes, more than a quarter (27%) of UK marketing budget is going digital, compared to only a fifth (20%) for US companies

ExactTarget: For marketers what should be the priority? On-site social media (blogs, ratings), or off-site social media (Social Networks)?

LinusGreg: There is no fixed formula for social media. The right mix of strategies, tactics and web sites depends on your business

LinusGreg: There is a lot of focus on Facebook and Twitter, but building Social Media into your own site is important. Use both!

ExactTarget: U found digital budget allocation is based on “more science than art” What's the impact on those still trying 2 track Social Media?

LinusGreg: Social Media has benefits that precede hard metrics. E.g., reputation must be good in order to sell. Tracking ROI will come.

ExactTarget: How important will brand management be in 2010 and how does social and email fit in?

LinusGreg: Brand management is more important than ever. Well-thought-out social and email strategies are integral to brand-building.

LinusGreg: Social media helps monitor what is resonating. Email is crucial for reaching out and maintaining ongoing relationships

ExactTarget: Lastly, what is the biggest challenge facing digital marketers?

LinusGreg: Staffing is a big challenge. Companies are short handed, which makes it difficult to spend time needed educating stakeholders

LinusGreg: But the real challenge is understanding what works and why ... and trying to explain in 140 characters ;-)

ExactTarget: Where can people go for more information on Marketing Budgets in 2010?

LinusGreg: The full report is @ http://bit.ly/marketingbudgets and free ExactTarget briefing with extra charts @ http://bit.ly/anwhlH

The 7 Secrets to Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts

Monday, February 8, 2010 by Joel Book

On Tuesday. February 16^th, I have the pleasure of co-hosting a webinar that will tackle the problem of shopping cart abandonment. The webinar is titled, “The 7 Secrets to Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts,” and will cover the strategy and technology required to implement an effective shopping cart abandonment solution.

If you’re an online marketer, and shopping cart abandonment is a recurring problem, I highly recommend you register to attend this webinar! Joining me to co-host this webinar will be Charles Nicholls, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of SeeWhy. What’s great about this webinar is that we will take you “behind the scene” of the highly successful shopping cart remarketing strategy of Smiley Cookie. Smiley Cookie is using SeeWhy’s Abandonment Tracker Pro to trigger remarketing campaigns using ExactTarget’s transactional API. This provides a real-time follow up to shopping cart abandoners.

Smileycookie.com is a division of Eat’n Park Hospitality Group, which includes Eat’n Park Restaurants and Six Penn Kitchen. Eat’n Park’s mascot is “Smiley,” a walking sugar cookie with a smiley face. Eat'n Park is well-known for its Smiley Cookies, which are frosted sugar cookies with smiley faces drawn on them in icing. Last year, Eat’n Park made over 11 million Smiley Cookies.

Our Interview with Adam Golumb of Smiley Cookie

Recently, Charles Nicholls and I caught up with Adam Golomb, director of e-commerce at Smileycookie.com, to discuss their new shopping cart recovery program. Adam is responsible for the online channel — www.smileycookie.com/ — which sells Smiley Cookies and related merchandise on line.

Website Conversion: Why did you decide to start a shopping cart abandonment remarketing program?

AG: We spend a tremendous amount of money to get customers to the site, but with 60 percent abandoning the shopping cart process, remarketing represented low-hanging fruit. These customers were already interested in the brand and had placed items in their shopping cart, only to abandon, so sending follow-up emails seemed like an obvious tactic to get them back and convert them into sales.

Website Conversion: What have you learned about shopping cart recovery?

AG: It’s still the early days for Smileycookie.com, but it’s clear that it’s a good tool to recover some sales, in particular where customers thought that they’d completed their purchase, but hadn’t. Some customers have replied to the email explaining why they had abandoned their shopping cart. The cost of shipping is the number one reason given, very much in line with industry numbers. As a result, we’ve been testing a free shipping offer when they spend $40 or more. This looks promising and has helped to raise our average order value. We don’t offer any incentives yet in our current campaign, and we think this will be important in driving additional sales.

Website Conversion: What’s next in your remarketing campaign?

AG: We’re just about to roll out a multi-step version of the campaign. We started with a simple service-based follow-up email which is sent out immediately following an abandonment. This is a simple reminder email that the customer did not complete the process. Our multi-step campaign will contact them again after 24 hours, and then after 7 days, and include some incentives. We’re pretty excited about it and think it will drive additional sales.

Website Conversion: How have customers reacted?

AG: We haven’t had anyone feeling that it was ‘Big Brotherish,’ and some people have found it very helpful. In particular where the customer thought that they’d made it all the way through the shopping cart process, but hadn’t, the email is a prompt for them to contact us, often by phone. Customers are very grateful when this happens. It has also highlighted some problems with our shopping cart process on the website which we’ve now addressed.

Website Conversion: Does it matter that you don’t have a persistent cart?

AG: Definitely. We’re working on putting a persistent cart in place, although we don’t offer many SKUs. Today we provide a link in the follow-up email which takes them back to the item they placed in their cart. We’ve had customers following the link back, going directly to the website and contacting us by phone. A persistent cart should make it easier for them to complete their order online.

Website Conversion: How do you measure success?

AG: We measure success based on the number of completed orders. So we compare the sales generated by the program with spend on other marketing programs. It’s a bit manual because we get some orders coming in by phone.

Website Conversion: Can you talk about setting up the program and how complex it was to do?

AG: It took a bit longer than I thought it would. We already had an existing relationship with ExactTarget, so getting the email campaign set up and using SeeWhy to trigger emails using our existing ExactTarget account was straightforward. What took longer was tagging the site and working through our check-out process. Every time I thought we were nearly there, the IT guys seemed to have to make additional changes in order to get the detail right.

Website Conversion: How was it working with the SeeWhy team?

AG: It’s been great; they’ve been extremely responsive. When we had any issues they’ve been really proactive and very accessible. Smileycookie.com is using SeeWhy’s Abandonment Tracker Pro to trigger remarketing campaigns using ExactTarget’s transactional API. This provides a real-time follow up to shopping cart abandoners.

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

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by Chris Studabaker

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

Benefits of email + video

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

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

Concerns regarding email + video

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Email Design Tip of the Week: Email + Video: Take 2: Connections ’09 Panel Recap, Part 1 (of 3)

Thursday, January 14, 2010 by Chris Studabaker

Video in email is one of the most intriguing hot topics regarding email's technological growth and audience engagement capacity. Current support for the combined use of these mediums is low, but audience interest and advertiser investment in online video—and this type of media convergence—continues to grow. This blog recaps the major points I discussed in the "Email + Video: Take 2" panel at Connections '09. Please note that this blog centers on the technological considerations around email + video—the strategy around sending video in email (or not) is another discussion!

Online video
Online video, itself, is young—it only began to take root in 2005—but it's quickly become an integral part of our online lives. Discussed in conjunction with email, it's imperative to note that online video has already seen rough standards emerge (formats such as .mpg, .mov, .wmv, and .avi). Email, unfortunately, continues its history of little to no standards, and the emergence of video in email has created a new set of compatibility issues.

Current support for video in email
Today, there's a near complete lack of support for video across the major email clients. Sporadic support exists for some formats but the animated .gif is the only format reliably supported. Gif is a standard web image format and supports animation, though it's limited to 256 colors, does not support sound, and inconsistent frame rates are possible. It's hardly a true video format—which has given rise to some innovative, albeit workaround, solutions—but animated .gif images remain the best all-around option for including motion graphics in email.

There are also a few companies in the marketplace offering paid solutions to include video in email. These companies offer two main services: first, the technology to send video; and second, relationships with consumer email services (such as AOL and others) to allow the successful receipt of that video. However, the list of ISPs supporting these services is limited and should be researched. Lastly, HTML5 is around the corner and there are indications that it might open more options for including video in email.

Delivery methods

Streaming – video downloaded as it plays
Linking – click through to externally hosted video
Embedding – video data included in sent message

To avoid confusion, it's important to set a few definitions regarding the three methods of video delivery. Streaming video refers to a hosted video beginning to play as soon as enough data has loaded, and then continuing to load as it plays (as on YouTube, for example). Ultimately, this is the experience that marketers hope to deliver with video in email. However, the current standard practice is to use a static image with a "play" button, linking to a page on which subscribers can watch the externally hosted video—your website, a landing page, even your company's YouTube channel. Linking to video poses no technical challenges and will work in all browsers and email clients.

Embedding is occasionally mentioned and refers to actually inserting the video file or video code into the email itself, almost like attaching the video to the email. This is a workaround, represents a negative user experience in many ways, and is not recommended.

Part 2 of this topic will contain a look at benefits & concerns of email + video and give a few concluding thoughts. Part 3 will share some interesting customer experiences and discuss ExactTarget's animated and static .gif testing using Connections '09 emails.

Join today: Email Design Testing Webinar

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 by Kristina Schott

At ExactTarget, we design emails for success. Part of that process may include putting a few design variations up against each other in a test.

In September, ExactTarget hosted the Extreme Makeover: The Email Design Competition as a highlight to Connections '09. Read up on an overview and results here.

On January 13th, MarketingExperiments, the researchers who partnered with ExactTarget to analyze the data of the tests, will hold a webinar exploring the results.

The ExactTarget Design Solutions team will be logged in, watching the results unfold with you! We're excited to see the data of our redesigned emails analyzed by MarketingExperiments' Senior Manager of Research Partmerships, Andy Mott. Also exciting is the opportunity to hear the dulcet voice our very own Joel Book, who will be appearing as a special guest.

Register and join us to celebrate performance-driven design!

Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain in email response!
Wednesday, January 13, 2009
4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST

Register now!

DNS? Do Not Send? Donuts Never Salty?

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by Karen Balle

Domain Name Service

Just a quick post today for more advanced senders. When you're sending email, sometimes you need to understand things other than SMTP - Simple Mail Transport Protocol (what we use to send email). There are a lot of other internet protocols involved in getting your email from one place to another. DNS is one of them. DNS is involved in EVERY online interaction. It's very technical, can be difficult to understand and even harder to explain.

When you're trying to understand or explain to someone about sender authentication (Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM), it can seem an impossible task. I found DNS Oversimplified the other day. It explains the basics without making it sound like rocket surgery. If you're looking to understand a little more about how the internet works, I recommend taking a look.

Connections Extreme Makeover: Pier 1 Redesign

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 by Andrea Smith

Our previous blogs, Connections Extreme Makeover: AAA Ohio Redesign and Connections Extreme Makeover: MarketingExperiments Redesign covered the Design Solutions teams’ redesigns for AAA Ohio and MarketingExperiments. To finish up, we’d like to share our thoughts on our final redesign.

Pier 1 Imports is a retailer that focuses heavily on unique furniture, home décor and accessories. Based on our conversations with Pier 1, the bulk of their customer base falls around females in the 50-60 age range. High quality products are marketed through the channels of print, in-store collateral, web, and email. Though the use of email and web, Pier 1 uses these channels to drive brand recognition and encourage online browsing before driving the consumer to the store to make a purchase.   

With this in mind, the ExactTarget team took a very sophisticated and streamlined approach to the Creature Comforts email campaign, using warm, harmonious colors and existing brand elements to deliver value and increase engagement with the Pier 1 brand. Let’s break apart our strategy and check out the email:   

Preheader
Experience and testing tells us that this area of the email is very important, and can serve as a main driver to engagement. We deliver two strategic ways to view the email as a web page, forward the email, and connect via social media on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. As an added benefit, some email clients pull this teaser text into their inbox preview before the email is ever opened.   

Header
The header features the brand mark in prime email real estate and will link to the Pier 1 homepage. To the right, we’ve pulled out the three most strategic links to drive subscriber engagement based on past email performance metrics and value provided on the website. Room gallery is an important place to drive web traffic and engage the subscribers in furniture placements in different room settings. The Pier 1 Studio offers amazing design tips and ideas that will engage subscribers, and Special Values have proven to be of high interest based on past clicks and obvious savings.   

Feature
This feature uses a combination of on-brand fonts, text rendering and imagery to offer a clean look directly placed in the preview pane. This simple room shot will encourage click through to the website, focusing on a clean, simple, and sophisticated approach in line with the quality of the products offered. The design elements of line, color and quirky framing will help the Pier 1 brand stand out in the crowd.   

Body
Four products are dramatically outlined and provide a sleek way to encourage pre-shopping on the website. These products were strategically chosen from the images provided as they are highlighted in the campaign and artfully pull through the rich fall colors. Allowing subscribers to see the actual prices and pieces of furniture pulled out can help set brand expectations and encourage click through.   

Recovery Module
These three items provide even more value to the subscriber audience, giving them convenient access to savings through Pier 1 Rewards, ability to buy gift cards online, and finding a store. Metrics show that most subscribers already know where their stores are, but those that don’t can easily click through. 

 Footer
Main website navigation is important to include, but click data shows us that it does not necessarily require prime real estate in the email. Copyright, privacy, unsubscribe, and customer relations functionality are important (and some are required!) and can fall in one clean line as they are self explanatory. Disclaimers and CAN-SPAM compliant mailing address follow.

  While the results of the Makeover showed that Pier 1’s control design outperformed the redesigns in actual sales conversion, our team strove to stay true to the brand and add a new dimension to the email program that strategically reorganizes Pier 1’s offerings, allowing the true beauty and quality of the products to shine. It is highly useable and engaging, with strategic goals of boosting click-through, web traffic, and ultimately driving consumers inside the Pier 1 stores for more.

Thanks for reading some of the stories behind Extreme Makeover: The Email Design Competition! Look for more 1 to 1 marketing advice and Email Design Tips in our upcoming 2010 blogs.

Is 2010 the Year to Partner for Messaging?

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 by Dennis Hall

"Should we build or partner?” Executives around the world and across industries have to make this call on a daily basis. A little more than a decade ago companies routinely built their internal business applications, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Inventory Management systems. I still have nightmares about a custom CRM application we deployed in the early 90s...

However, with the proliferation of technology, most notably open source code and software as a service (SaaS) applications, an executive would be thrown out of the boardroom today for suggesting a 6 or 7 figure project to build CRM over adopting salesforce.com, Siebel OnDemand or Microsoft CRM Online (and tens of other applications per vertical per industry!).

For commercial technology companies, this is a more acute (and contentious) issue. How can you justify acquiring technology from another company when building it is part of your core business? There are Engineers just sitting there waiting to build the next cool thing! Well, there is no question that developers can build most anything if given the time and resources, but these are finite commodities often overwhelmed by demands surrounding core product development and innovation.

At ExactTarget, we’ve built a business dedicated to partnering with technology companies in order to solve this challenge – ExactTarget Embedded. As Bryan mentioned in “2009 in Review”, we are seeing strong demand from technology providers, especially in the Computer Software, Direct Marketing Services and Commercial Printing verticals. The primary motivators for these companies include satisfying customer demand, achieving competitive advantage, increasing market share + revenue, and reducing COGS.

To support your decision process in 2010, we’ll share a series of articles around the topic of “build vs. partner”, including a deep dive into leading technical requirements, go to market business models and partner case studies across industries.

We welcome your input and look forward to an interactive discussion!

Dennis

Big Players in B2B Deliverability

Monday, December 28, 2009 by Al Iverson

A client was asking the other day about B2B deliverability, how it differs from B2C, who the big players are, etc.

This isn't the first time the topic of deliverability in the B2B (business-to-business) email realm. Back in June, I answer the question, "Is B2B Deliverability Different?" In a more recent blog post, I link to information from Google about how they've become a very large host of B2B mailboxes.

Clearly, Google is a big player in this space. Meaning, a lot of the B2B mailboxes you send to are going through spam filters run by Google; just as if your recipients were at Gmail.com. What that means to you is that the same rules apply to sends to both those Gmail.com users and any B2B domains hosted at Google.

As I mentioned before, Yahoo, Hotmail and Google host mail for more than 264,000 domains, Google making up approximately 106,000 of those domains. (All three of these guys probably host mail for very many more domains than this; this is just a snapshot based off of last year's client list data. Meaning, if a domain doesn't show up on an email list, I don't know about it.)

That means you've got a huge chunk of the B2B email space hosted by top consumer webmail providers. Meaning that the B2C rules significantly apply to B2B senders, by the fact that the same spam filters are involved.

In the more specific B2B realm, there are too many players to list. Postini, Cloudmark, Barracuda, Ironport, Symantec Brightmail and MessageLabs are just a few of them. There are hundreds, maybe thousands more.

The way these filterers work is very similar to how B2C ISP spam filters work. They build a reputational view of you based on spam complaints, engagement, bounce rates, etc. They're a bit more invisible to some senders, as it's not always easy for you to know exactly what % of your mailing list might be behind a Brightmail filter, for example. But they still matter, very much so. In this combination of hosted service providers and appliance developers, getting tagged as a bad guy means you end up with delivery problems far and wide.

If you end up with a bad reputation as measured by Barracuda, and your mail is going to be blocked or filtered at the more than 85,000 customers that use Barracuda spam-filtering devices.

If Cloudmark determines the mail you send merits a bad reputation, you'll probably find it hard to successfully get to the inbox at any mailbox protected by any of Cloudmark's anti-spam solutions -- that's over 850 million mailboxes in 190 countries!

That's why B2C and B2C are more similar than you might have thought. Filterers handling either type of mail both look at your sending reputation, and treat your mail acordingly. Blocked at any of these providers on either side of things means that you're going to have issues delivering mail to a whole bunch of different mailboxes.

Take Responsibility for Your Deliverability

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 by Phil Schott

Taking responsibility for one's deliverability is something every sender should logically do. Not only is it in your best interest as a sender, but there are many variables that are beyond anyone else's control but the sender's.

The sender typically provides the method of opt-in for subscribers, builds the emails and communications, loads subscriber lists into ExactTarget, segments subscriber data, and hits the "send" button. Seems to me that the party responsible for the aforementioned, the sender, has a vested interest in monitoring how all that hard work pays off.

Not monitoring your deliverability is like spending money without regularly checking your account balance and just figuring that your financial institution will let you know when you're out of money and in trouble. Sure you can keep spending and spending without giving thought to how much money's in the account, but eventually your account is going to run dry, you're going to start getting penalized for attempting to spend money you don't have, and eventually your ability to use your debit card or write checks is going to be suspended.

You'd never dream of spending without monitoring your account balance and leaving it up to your bank to monitor, so why would you send through ExactTarget without monitoring whether or not your email is arriving in the inbox and your hard work is paying off?

Thankfully, ExactTarget gives you the ability to monitor your sending, and thus, your deliverability. We've built a whole host of tracking mechanisms and reporting tools so that our clients can monitor opens, clicks, subscriber engagement, and bounces, among other things.

If you notice that opens or clicks seem lower than usual or if your deliverability rate drops, it could be due to a deliverability issue. Let us know about it and we'll look into it. You can get in touch with us by calling our Client Success Center at 866-558-9823 or by emailing help@exacttarget.com. You can also open your own Client Success Center case in ExactTarget 3Sixty under the BackOffice tab.

Project Honey Pot Receives their 1 Billionth Spam Message

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 by Phil Schott

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

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

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

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

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

4 Ways to Use Analytics to Improve Your Email Campaigns

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

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

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

1. Improving Delivery Rates:

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

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

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

2. Improving Open Rates:

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

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

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

3. Improving Conversion/ Click-Through Rates:

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

4. Decreasing Unsubscribes

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

What do you think?

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

Connections Extreme Makeover: AAA Ohio Redesign

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Anna Meier

As I kicked off last week in Connections Extreme Makeover: The Email Design Competition Results, our next few design blogs will focus on each of our Design Solutions teams’ redesigns for AAA Ohio, Pier 1 and Marketing Experiments.

So let’s get right to it: AAA Ohio’s Annual Membership Renewal email. AAA's current email was being sent to members annually to prompt online, phone or in-store renewals. After our first meeting with AAA, we realized that members could benefit from AAA in many life activities, which in turn fueled their customer loyalty. Thus, our “Renew Your Journey…” design was born. After brainstorming on the idea and experience of a AAA member’s journey, we saw the opportunity for a wide-format email. Yes, I said wide-format email, a.k.a. “the horizontal scroller”. Some might despise the idea of side-scrolling, others may love it, but we couldn’t know for sure without a test! And test we did.

Out of the three redesigns tested in the competition, our design outperformed the control CTR by 26% and outperformed the projected revenue of the 2nd place finisher by 4%.

The beauty in this horizontal format design is that subscribers choosing not to scroll will not miss the main message or click-through opportunity. These subscribers are still able to view the header, footer and primary call to action. Therefore, nothing is withheld from the subscriber choosing not to scroll. Instead, scrolling only adds to the email experience while revealing added benefits of membership. This format also made sense because it created brand synergy with AAA Ohio’s wide format web and print elements.

In the screenshot at right, you’ll see we optimized the preview pane view with an html text preheader linking to the AAA renewal webpage, browser view and mobile version; all elements that are visible when images are off. We added the AAA logo at left for immediate brand recognition as well as navigation to AAA’s core business segments and contact link within the header.

Our primary “Renew Your Journey” call to action is also visible within the preview pane. It is supported by three main values of membership followed by an html text button. Once the email is opened, contact information and CAN-SPAM compliant footer are included as well as the bold arrow image with instructions for scrolling.

Once subscribers choose to scroll, the photography illustrates member benefits in travel, entertainment, roadside assistance and dining as demonstrated in this screencast. A final opportunity to click-through to the renewal webpage wraps up the journey.

Overall, we were confident this design would increase subscriber engagement. The format was non traditional, but in this case made perfect sense for the concept and type of email. Stay tuned next week to learn about the Marketing Experiments redesign.

Personalizing Email for Sales Agents Boosts Response

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 by Joel Book

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you sell through sales agents or dealers, one of the smartest things you can do to boost email response is to personalize the email by sending it “on behalf” of the customer’s sales rep or account manager.

Putting the agent’s picture and contact information on the email will boost response rates by a factor of 15-20%. The reason? No matter how advanced and how sophisticated we get at using technology to improve sales and marketing, one fact remains constant: People by from People.

And you can automate the entire process using “dynamic content” technology to personalize the content of every email you send based on what is relevant to each customer.

Personalized Email Works for GLS Companies
GLS Companies sends personalized email on behalf of each sales agent to people they meet at trade shows. The Integrated Communication Solutions (SM) company also uses personalized email to nurture leads.

Jim Benedict, Marketing Director for GLS, reports that this tactic is being used effectively to shorten the sales cycle.

Expedia Leverages Personalization
As reported in the December 2nd issue of MarketingSherpa, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, a brick-and-click cruise agency has more than 2,500 cruise consultants who operate independently or from franchised locations across North America. The cruise agency uses an automated, centralized email and website system that creates personalized communications for its 2,500 sales agents. Putting an agent’s face and name on correspondence has lifted clickthroughs 23%. You can read the entire article online at no charge until December 12th.

Marketers, We Have a Problem

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 by Chip House

Reflecting on day 1 of Media Post’s Email Insider Summit in Park City, Utah I am left with the summary thought: marketers still have a lot of work to do. We all know relevance works, but very few marketers collect all of the customer preferences they should, or act on the knowledge when they have it.

Eric Kirby from Merkle kicked off the day with some of the results on their consumer preferences survey that they have been conducting for a number of years running. It echoes and confirms much of the research from our 2008 and 2009 Channel Preference Surveys. Consumers are becoming more mobile and more social (we all know that) but their preferences are not necessarily what you’d think. Specifically, most marketers are too quick to jump to conclusions and assume that the rising preference for text and social for messaging means the same for commercial communications. It doesn’t. Overall, per Merkle’s study, 87% prefer to “hear from companies” via email.

We included direct mail in ExactTarget’s 2009 Channel Preference Survey as a survey option, and added the qualifier of “permission-based communication” since that is so critical to consumer acceptance. 75% still prefer email, which is up from 72% in 2008, and direct mail is a distant second at 17%, down 8% from 2008. Text messaging and social networks are still only preferred for promotions by 4% and 1% respectively.

Email as a preference for permission-based marketing communications is still growing. Go figure.

Per Forrester’s Q4 2008 Global Data Privacy and Online Preference Survey, only 33% of marketers actually capture their customers’ preferred channel for message delivery. That’s the problem marketers. You have to collect preferences if you truly want to send more relevant communications. Let’s all do better in 2010.

NCDM 2009 Looks Like A Winner

Friday, December 4, 2009 by Joel Book

I’m really excited about the upcoming 2009 NCDM conference which kicks off Monday, December 7th in Las Vegas.

Attendance is up 20% over last year and the lineup of sessions and speakers is outstanding!

This year, the conference programming committee placed special emphasis on inviting speakers who are true practitioners of database marketing, and will share case studies of how they are using data and technology to sell and serve customers more effectively and efficiently.

For complete session details, download the NCDM 2009 conference brochure.

This year’s NCDM conference will feature several ExactTarget clients and partners.

Sean Mattson of Hitachi Data Systems will team with me to present a fantastic B-to-B marketing case study that describes how Hitachi uses email as the backbone of a global one-to-one marketing strategy that has made Hitachi Data Systems a world leader in data storage technology.

Dan Heimbrock of HyperDrive Interactive will discuss how Dreamfields Pasta has built a powerful and influential brand fan community of more than 400,000 consumers by using email marketing, social media, and word-of-mouth marketing to drive brand recognition and dramatically accelerate sales.

Augie MacCurrach of Customer Portfolios and Michael Enright of online gaming company, WorldWinner, will describe how WorldWinner uses customer playing behavior data to execute automated email programs that deliver personalized offers that keep players highly engaged.

For attendees looking for a practical and useful short course on techniques and best practices for effective email marketing, Jeanne Jennings of JeanneJennngs.com and I will be conducting a special pre-conference seminar on Monday titled Accelerating Email Marketing Performance and Profitability. It’s chock full of great examples of what to do, and how to do it right.

 If you are still on the fence about attending, I urge you to take advantage of a special offer which will save you $100 over the onsite price when you register in Las Vegas. You can also take advantage of this offer by registering online at http://bit.ly/3bq2aP. To redeem this offer, use code: ONSM when you register online.

  I hope to see you in Las Vegas for NCDM 2009, which promises to be one of the top conferences on tactics and techniques for data-drives sales and marketing.

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.”

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