Porn emails have better deliverability than you...

When I waltzed into work today my boss passed along a blog post that he thought was particularly interesting and I have to agree with him.

In a recent study by Lyris, it was determined that content isn't always the factor that trips you up in the spam filters. Here are a few insights that stand out. Of the top 10 types of content that most often trigger spam scores, only two appeared with a frequency that might cause concern. Here they are:

1. Heavy use of images, which can increase spam scores up to a full point and render poorly in email clients with image blocking enabled.

2. Sending messages with a "From Name" composed of numbers or symbols rather than an actual name.

Not rocket science, but interesting nonetheless concerning that its so high in relation to everything else on the deliverability list.

Wendy at imediaconnection makes an interesting parallel about how the porn industry is able to endure high deliverability rates.

"Take the industry for adult content, for example. I'm talking about legitimate pornographic content: websites and distributors with paid subscribers who expect those emails to get through. There is no industry more closely watched and no email content more likely to trigger spam filters.

Yet, legitimate messages from purveyors of pornography or other sex-related content do manage to successfully land in inboxes. How? The senders scrupulously follow best practices and manage their reputations. They use double confirmed opt-ins, they scrub their lists regularly, and they're quick to respond when someone complains."

If there was ever a reason to clean up your email marketing act the time is now. Take a lesson from pornographers.

clipped from www.imediaconnection.com From your first communication, set up clear expectations. Tell people how to sign up or opt-in, and tell them exactly what they're opting-in to. Tell them how often they'll receive something from you and what it will be. Tell them how to opt out. Make them confirm the registration, and again remind them what it's for. Be aware of the company you keep. If your customer service department works hard to follow best practices, but your marketing department does not, then -- just like your mom warned you -- you'll suffer guilt by association. Don't learn this the hard way; if your friends smoke, your clothes will reek, too. Sometimes reputation is a matter of IP address. If it's new, the ISPs tend to be wary. Obviously, there are legitimate reasons that you might have a new IP address; if you're switching providers, for example. But if you have to switch, ramp up slowly.

ExactTarget Campaign Monitoring Widget

In an earlier post I commented on a cool Google Analytics widget that allowed for key web metrics to be displayed as a widget on the users desktop by the Yahoo! Widgets desktop application.

And then I ran across a neat email campaign monitoring widget for ExactTarget created by Doug Karr. In full disclosure I used to work for ExactTarget and my company is an agency client and preferred partner, so I may be biased...but I think this is a great tool!

Basically you enter a "job id" (a unique id applied to an email send) and then it updates that campaign every 15 minutes so you get near real time reporting on campaign activity. Pretty slick.

Also, There is another "Advanced Tracking" widget, but as of right now I could not get it to install properly on my computer. I do look forward to using it once they get it figured out! Once it is I will post it here.

So if your an ExactTarget client and find yourself obsessively logging in to see how your email marketing campaign in doing...this little tool may be the answer!

del.ic.io.us links for 2007.06.27

• Marketing Sherpa: How to Quadruple Lead Generation Response With Job Title Segmentation and Targeted Messages
  
  See how one financial tech company developed two separate integrated campaigns -- one that targeted by company size and one that segmented by job function. They're ecstatic that segmentation has quadrupled response rates and boosted conversions 24%. Includes test results and creative samples.


• A List Apart: Human-to-Human Design
  
  Help your audience fall in love with you by moving beyond human-to-computer interfaces and embracing human-to-human design.

And the funny one. This made me laugh out loud!

• SEOmoz: We Add Words to AdWords... Google Subtracts them.
  
  Rand asked me for some help with AdWords content. But I really don't know how to grab someone's attention in two lines. That is, without being really crass. So it got a little PG-13 in our apartment this afternoon, what with the liberal use of words like "Viagra" and "Yo Mama" jokes
  

Simple Newsletter Changes Bump Clicks 190%

I was reading Marketing Sherpa this morning and came across this interesting case study about how a simple change to your newsletter can make all the difference.

This is a great reason to start doing that email testing that you have been putting off because the results can be amazing. Every email that goes out without a split is a missed opportunity to gain insight into your recipients behavior.

clipped from www.marketingsherpa.com SUMMARY: Sometimes even the smallest change can make a world of difference in your email design. See how one publisher transformed a related stories link into a gray utility button and immediately saw a 190% increase in clicks and traffic is up 6% on a different landing page. It's an easy tweak that if you haven't considered, you may want to test on your own newsletters.

Putting Email Design in the Hands of the Subscriber

I was doing my regular surfing of my favorite website today and came across another cool article that I wanted to share...

clipped from customer-driven-marketing.blogspot.com Why not let your customers pick an email template and color theme from a set of available themes when they register/optin to your marketing campaign? It could be something similar to how blogger lets you choose a template and color theme for your blog. Your mailer program could then leverage this to send out visually personalized email.

I am a fan of the Customer Driven Marketing blog and it never fails that I run across some interesting ideas every time I visit. This little musing got me thinking about how we always fret over the look and feel over our email templates...and what if we just turned it over to the subscriber? And make it a part of their preference center so they can change whenever they want? Its food for thought.

List Rental...the Right Way

I came across an awesome article the other day and definitely wanted to share it with you. Kelly Rusk at Card Communications has hit the "mail" on the head (okay, bad pun!) with 5 easy tips to do it right. I clipped my favorite below...but you have to check out the full article here!

clipped from www.cardcommunications.com Make the most of your rental, ask for an opt-in - Make the primary call-to-action a request to subscribe. You could try to sell a product, and that may bring in X amount of dollars, but if you convert the rented names to join your own house list, you can sell to them time and time again.

Constant Surveys in Emails? Not likely.

Constant Contact just released a survey component to their email marketing product, a great addition...except that its late in the game to be joining the email survey crowd.

The problem is not with the idea, but instead with Outlook 2007 and the future of email rendering. Since form elements in emails rendered in O'07 do not render, you are forced to view blank form elements in the email itself and required to view the email as a web page in order to interact with it. Email rendering rules are getting tighter...not lighter.

Don't misunderstand me on this... I am a huge evangelist when it comes to the importance of surveying and obtaining qualitative data, it is infinitely important when conducting analysis. My point is that its just as possible to integrate with a dedicated survey vendor who specializes in conducting surveys like Survey Gizmo or Zoomerang. It may be a better use of your money...especially with the current email rendering trends.

As a marketer I loved having surveys in emails and hope to have them back someday. But without my crystal ball I wouldn't likely select my ESP based on that.

Nice feature set...but a little too late.

Email Subject Line Testing

A recent article in Marketing Sherpa points out a study done by Pivotal Voracity that concludes 53% of all email subject lines are broken and what you can do to help ensure that yours are not included in that number.

I come across this alot when I people ask me why wierd characters end up in thier subject lines. The quick and easy way to ensure that your subject lines are viewed correctly is to paste them into notepad first and then re-copy and paste it into your email program. This will remove any non-ASCII formatting. If you require special characters then you will need to brush up on encoding them correctly.

This article is a must read for any serious marketer - and even more so for the SMB out there conducting thier own email marketing. You dont want to get flagged as spam...

And while your at subject line testing here is a cool little tool by Email Labs that will help save you alot of time. It will help you see how your from name, from email, and subject line will appear in all of the major ESP's.

Email Marketing by the Numbers

I just want to take a moment and tell you about a book that has come out recently that I highly recommend - "Email Marketing by the Numbers". It is a great book by Chris Baggott and Ali Sales - both of whom I collaborated very closely with during my days in marketing department at ExactTarget. They are both extremely talented marketers to which I can personally attest.

I bought the book as soon as it came available and was delighted to find it not just a book by Chris, but a compilation of work from many talented internet marketers from around the world. Many of those talented professionals are people I worked with while at ExactTarget like Morgan Stewart, Chip House, Joel Book, and Ali Sales. Other contributors, specifically Amol Dalvi, I continue to work with in my current position at tech start up Right On Interactive.

I also want to mention Kelly Rusk with Card Communications who is an email marketing expert who contributed to the book as well - she both posts and links here and is an extremely talented internet marketer. I met her by chance when I started blogging and have been faithfully reading her posts ever since!

Besides the fact that many reputable professionals contributed to the book (my friends!) - it is also an easy read. A book on email marketing could easily put anyone to sleep (even die-hards like me) but instead it flows nicely and the examples and insight are truly inspiring.

So if you are truly interested in adding email to your marketing arsenal or just want to hone in your existing skills - you cant go wrong buying this book. Good job guys!

Outlook 2007 - more like 1999...

If you are a marketer you have to be pulling your hair out at the new Outlook 2007.

Check out the article at Marketing Sherpa.

What we have here is a major shift in how marketers will have to approach email marketing, since Microsoft has decided to move away completely from usability and technology in favor of security. (It should be noted that I don't accept the premise of the argument that it is ultimately a choice of one or the other...)

If you are a web designer - you may want to relearn how to design using tables because the new Outlook does not support CSS floating or positioning. The irony for us old web designers is that we actually remember what it was like to hack together a design using tables - most new designers are unfamiliar with the old way of designing on the web...welcome to 1999!

If you put forms in your email - don't expect those to render either. You know those sophisticated emails that contain surveys or registrations...kiss them goodbye because they are now the odd man out. Sit back and think about what this means as marketers...yep, it sucks that bad.

And if you were ever holding out for rich media - videos, flash, applets ect...fuhgettaboutit! Microsoft doesn't seem to think that those spam filter issues are going away any time soon - so now it will be even longer before they become available in email. Thanks alot.

The biggest point I am making besides the fact that all of these changes really impact email marketing negatively - is that its a fundamental shift in Microsoft's way of thinking. Instead of pioneering the way to help make email more user friendly and extending its functionality, they have decided to force us into much more primitive email. It almost feels like Microsoft is trying to revert back to 1999.

But then those were much better times for Microsoft.

Is All Email Marketing Spam?

This guy seems to think so...

My first reaction was to get defensive and debunk everything he said - I come from an email marketing background so we're a little edgy about being called spammers. But I realized that this guys opinion is really just like alot of people's opinion of email marketing - he believes that everything he receives is junk.

So the second half of his rant makes sense about building trust economies and speaking to customers as individuals. Email as come a long way - but alot companies are still catching up with using email correctly. For a smart marketer this is the opportunity.

Unfortunately the comment that all email is spam is just not true. If you do email correctly and build out your opt in email customer database you should have no problem segmenting your audience and providing extremely relevant information to them. Email is just another way for a company to connect with its customer...its how you talk to them thats important.

He speaks about social networks as the future of online marketing, but when I sign up for Myspace the first friend I have is some jackass I never met before who founded the company - not to mention the daily social network spam from random bands, porn sites, and teenagers trying to build their friend empire online.

I agree however, that if approached correctly social media can be a great medium to market to individuals. Again, its just another channel to facilitate communication and its how you talk to each other that is important. You would apply that logic to every customer interaction whether it be in the store, on the phone, through email, or online.

I guess since this guy is in the search marketing business he has no vested interest in promoting email. The unfortunate thing is that this guy is a marketer and should know better than to spread misinformation... it does a disservice to his credibility and his company.

The plain truth is that email marketing works - otherwise companies wouldn't do it.

Bloody Knuckles and Email Marketing

I ran across this video today and it made me laugh out loud...so I thought I would share it with you.

I'm tuning into his next video where he passes out drunk and his friends write all over his face...and then gives me advice on search optimization...

Have fun!