What’s got me thinking was a recent article in Wired magazine on the increasingly fraught relationship we have with email, which to some degree mirrored my relationship with my own inbox.  A few years ago I started using a nifty programme called X1 to index and better search my ever growing email archive. The amount of time (and frustration!) it has saved me has been amazing and today I really couldn’t live without it. This is just one example of how the changes made to Outlook over the years haven’t really been geared to making our experience with email smoother and more efficient.

Now a new generation of software startups have noticed some of the other glaring gaps in Outlook’s functionality and are attempting to fill them. There are new ones appearing all the time but the two that have been receiving the most attention recently are Xobni and ClearContext. Both are free to download plug-ins which integrate with Outlook’s interface and use clever analytics to highlight patterns in e-mail usage. They also provide a range of cool features which automate many of those tasks which can take forever when using Outlook.

Clive Thompson’s recent article on e-mail in Wired magazine is a must read and highlights the excitement that users who have downloaded the applications feel. The piece also points to the potential challenges which could face the e-mail marketing industry as a result. For instance, Clive talks about how Xobni has identified the times when his most important contacts are likely to e-mail him, and how he has used this to ‘switch off’ e-mail during the periods in between.

The ClearContext application also offers the ability to use its ‘artificial intelligence’ to automatically sort a user’s inbox and provide recommendations on which e-mails to read and reply to first, based on who you tend to respond to most quickly. This is a major change to the first-come first served approach which has typified most e-mail use to date.

So the obvious question is how will these new e-mail applications treat marketing e-mails? Will they be automatically banished to a special folder, sent to the back of the priority queue or automatically labeled as ‘spam’. The answer is we don’t yet know. Most of these applications are still at version 1 and it’s difficult to predict how they might develop and evolve.

I think what could be as significant as how marketing e-mails will be classified are the behavioral changes in e-mail use that these applications could encourage. If e-mail moves from being an always-on tool to one which is used more selectively, how will this impact on how often and when we deploy campaign on behalf of our clients? As an industry, we will certainly need to conduct much more detailed research into people’s daily e-mail habits rather than continue to rely on potentially out-dated assumptions. 

Now there are some people who will say that all this is just the latest Web 2.0 fad. These applications could easily remain in the realm of ‘techie geeks’ or they could spread virally and become everyday tools. Only time will tell. In either case, the interest in them will probably not go unnoticed by Microsoft’s developers in Redmond working on new versions of Outlook. Better analytics functionality and an intelligent inbox designed to improve the productivity of employees would certainly be a very powerful USP. On which would certainly encourage businesses to invest in a major software upgrade!

I for one will definitely be following these companies with interest. As an industry we should of course never fear change and innovation - but we do need think ahead and start planning now for the potentially huge impacts, both positive and negative, that these simple pieces of code could have on our multi-billion dollar industry.

By Simone Barratt, Managing Director, e-Dialog EMEA

There already exists a simple way of ensuring email communications resonate, particularly those facilitating third party promotional offers.  As long as the sender does not conceal their identity and uses clear from lines and branded email templates, there should little to confuse a communication with spam sends.  Couple that with targeted and relevant activity and you would hope that such simple steps are helping to preserve the integrity of the channel. 

Unfortunately, a number of data providers renting their bases steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that the treatment of their media in this manner is worth doing.  Some will pass their media from pillar to post, even contributing to pooled media offerings where there is a trend to hide the source of the original permission or opt in.  These anonymous pools of email data only serve to add to a recipient’s view they are being spammed.

It appears there is a real need to up the ante in terms of how responsible data collection and its usage are reflected to the consumer.  Perhaps a data collection ‘kite mark’ could be introduced on websites as a means to offer the appropriate assurances?  This standard could be displayed at the point an individual submits their details alongside a brief description of what exactly PECR compliancy actually means.  For media owners collecting and using email correctly this would merely endorse and reinforce the responsible application of any media moving forward.  Where future communications might already resonate with the recipient as the sender’s identity is made clear, a quality standard mark contained within the body of an email will further serve to offer an additional level of integrity.

This could be another small step towards a better delivery environment running in tandem with existing technical authentication protocols.  In a marketplace where data standards easily slip and reputation is key, it could enable at the very least a more transparent and auditable means of ensuring media quality is at its highest.  There already exists a List Warranty scheme with a focus on offline media; perhaps it’s time to introduce an online equivalent?

Simon Jeffs
Head of Data
www.tmnmedia.com

1. Are clear on the target audience; who do you want to receive your email. Look at the profile of your existing client base in relation to what you are promoting in order to ascertain this
2. Have a clear communication strategy. Are you just promoting your product or service on emails; will the same message be reflected in other marketing mediums; or will the email be followed up by a phone call? In most cases the marketing message you send to your new prospects needs to be different to the  one you send to your own customers.
3. Be clear on what you are monitoring. Don’t make the mistake of just looking at the number of people who open or click on the email – the monitoring needs to be related to your key business aims. E.g. people who purchase something or are active on the areas of the website where you need them to be active.
4. Always follow the DMA best practice guidelines (www.dma.org.uk/bpg) and be fully  aware of where the data you are using has come from, how it has been collected and that the data owners’ privacy policies and data collection statements are clear and legal.

Two of the most effective ways of expanding email marketing from simply using your own data to using 3rd party data are List Rental and Data Capture are:

• List rental – where you send a one off mailing (or if agreed a series of emails) to a selection of people who have given permission on another company’s website to receive emails from selected 3rd parties. This is typically priced at a cost per thousand (CPM)
• 3rd party Data Acquisition – where individuals give their details and sign up to become a member of your company’s mailings on a 3rd party’s website or through an off line medium. This is normally priced at a cost per record where the price will vary depending on the amount of information you require, what the user is signing up for and what criteria of people you want to make the offer to.

Which one to use?

There are several factors which will determine which option will work best for your company. Including

+ What your key business aims are

+ The type of product or service you are selling

+ How regularly you intend to communicate with your prospects/customers.

+ How quickly you need any marketing activity to pay for itself.

As long as the data you use is of the same quality, a small test for 3^rd party list rental will quickly give you an accurate indication of your basic cost per sale (remember to also take into account the additional longer term benefits of brand awareness and increased impacts on other advertising mediums).

Data acquisition has a higher upfront cost but the returns continue over a longer period of time as you can communicate with the individual on more than one occasion. If you continue to make the marketing message effective and the volume and timing of the email sends appropriate, then you will continue to see a more intense return on investment over a longer period of time.

This can be proved by looking at an example of a (theoretical) company who pay £80 per thousand for list rental and £1 per record for data acquisition. Their weekly email to the data acquisition customers produces open rates of 30%, bounce rate of 1% and a conversation rate of 2%.

Cost per sale from list rental is static at £40 per thousand whereas cost per sale from data acquisition starts above £100.  However, over time this will decrease. By week 14 it has decreased to £61, and by week 25 it matches list rental at £40 per thousand. By the end of the year the cost per sale in this example has dropped to below £20.

This hypothetical example shows that data acquisition incurs a higher upfront cost which takes a longer time to pay for itself, however over a longer period of time the value is greater.

This means that some companies, particularly those which need a quick return on investment or where the product or service will be either relevant to an individual or not (and this will not change over time,) will be better off using list rental. When using list rental make sure that the landing page you are sending the recipient to has a clear option to sign up to receive more information from you even if they don’t want what you have to offer right now.

For other companies where the return does not need to be so immediate and customers are more likely to buy into the product or service once a relationship is built up, data acquisition is going to be more effective.

In many cases both methods will work for a company if the targeting and creative are correct. The best thing to do when getting started is to run small tests of both list rental and data acquisition, and continually monitor the return on investment by looking at both the source and type of data. This will help to not only determine which method works best for you but will also help to continually improve the campaigns thus maximising revenue and profit.

Sara Watts
Managing Director Data Division
Data Media and Research Ltd www.dmri.co.uk

In essence it's all to do with permissions. If a consumer has given permission, in words opted-in, that their data may be shared with third parties, then you're allowed to do it.

Once you've clarified this position, it is best practice to either:

• Send an email from the data owner (the organisation that collected the consumer's data at the outset) explaining that their email address will be passed onto an end user. It's essential that the individual is given the chance to opt-out of this happening; or,
• For the end user, who is going to receive the email address to explain to the individual where they got their email address from, and once again give them the opportunity to opt-out of future communications.

It is worth noting that the same should be undertaken for business-to-business email appending.

Make sure before you undertake any email appending, that you know the following information:

• How and when the list was built;
• If it's a data pool of different data sources, satisfy yourself that the data protection notices and privacy policies were in place when the data was originally collected; and,
• How unsubscribes and relevant addresses are suppressed.

So why do it?

It allows you to open up a new communication channel with your customers, many of whom may prefer to be contacted via email than through other methods. As a result you will reduce your communication costs and be able to tailor the message more effectively.

Haven Holiday’s interesting case study on their recent video in email campaign has been cropping up, and throwing out as many questions as it answers. So... right on cue, here is my soapbox shout on using video in email.

Of course it’s not surprising that email marketers are keen to get in on the online video revolution. The website visiting public can’t get enough of streaming video.

But video in email is not reliable in the way that website based video is. It won’t work for all your recipients, and those it does work for, may well not be happy it did.

Extensive inbox testing is essential if you are embedding video. Some Microsoft email clients for example, use HTML tags that allow video to be played in emails. But others don’t. Only by testing your creative in all relevant email clients can you get a clear picture of how effectively your campaign will be delivered.

If your testing works well and you know clearly which domains will support your video and which won’t, you could then filter your campaign send by domain name, to control its successful delivery. But wait – what about email forwards? You can’t control them by domain, so the valuable viral element of your campaign could be lost, simply because of the unreliability of video.

As ever in digital marketing, the opportunities and developments are dynamic and exciting. I’ve heard of movements in the industry to let you insert java script into emails that will enable video to play. But again, this is likely to be specific to certain ISPs and not supported by all – so the need to test will remain paramount.

Animations in emails can also cause rendering problems. For example, Outlook 2007 won’t support animated gifs. Remember when using animations to have your key message or call to action on the first frame – however briefly it is shown – as Outlook 2007 will display this as the static image.

Beware too, the potential intrusiveness of video in email – particularly when sending to B2B lists where your recipients are at work. In a quiet office with the Boss hovering, who really wants to be seen watching videos at their desk?

The most reliable solution to all of these issues and complications is to use your email campaign as a teaser to drive recipients to a campaign micro site where they can click to view your video clip, at their leisure.

By including a ‘play video clip’ button in your email you can have can a powerful call to action. It’s practically a human reflex now to click ‘play’ when it looks like there is a video to watch. So marketers and ESPs who are wisely cautious but click-through hungry, can reap the benefits of the pull of video in their emails, without actually embedding any.

A campaign micro site with video can become the centre of your integrated marketing campaign, so you can drive traffic to it from a series of on and offline channels and really maximise your return.

The report is well written and supported by a case study from within the retail sector and many charts and very useful nuggets of information spread over its’ 25 pages.

The report can be accessed free of charge until 29^th August 2008, here.

In the article Craig promotes a Call to Action for all brands to be authenticated before November 1st, 2008 in readiness for the Holiday Season. As a Council of the DMA we have decided to support this Call to Action by releasing a whitepaper as well as holding a webinar in September and running an event in late October.

To register your interest in either or both of these events, please send an email to Catherine Gibbon and we will keep you informed.

You can read more about Authentication at the AOTA's website: www.aotalliance.org/

In my inbox this week were campaigns from major UK brands in the Travel sector, Financial Services sector and Leisure sector.  On each occasion, the domain name of the sender was a website that simply does not exist.  To compound things further, the small print detailed, “We only practice true permission based emailing. To view our privacy policy please visit the website you originally opted into or contact us.”  Sounds OK in principle doesn’t it? Err…no.  The recipient has no way of knowing where their data has come from let alone being able to figure out which website they originally gave their permission on.  The email industry has really cleaned up it’s act in the past few years and there are more than enough reputable email marketing companies out there to ensure that your communications hit the mark.  I suspect that some of these campaigns may be coming through affiliates who are using cheap inventory to achieve required CPA deals.  There’s a great article on the DMA’s Email marketing blog which explores this further - www.dmaemailblog.org.uk. Every email marketer needs to ensure that they are aware of what inventory is being used to fulfil their campaigns, as ultimately the brand advertiser is responsible even if they are using 3rd party opted in data.  While these campaigns still make money for the advertiser, what is the cost of the potential damage to the brand image amongst consumers?

OK, moving onto 3rd party email lists specifically.  I have seen numerous campaigns of late that have come through reputable email marketing companies.  The issue I have is that they contain a link to unsubscribe from the advertiser, but not from the 3rd party list being used.  I understand completely why list owners would want to do this.  They have spent time and money creating their lists and are understandably keen to ensure that they keep the volumes up and minimise unsubscribes.  Therefore, if I unsubscribe from one advertiser, they can still sell my data to a different advertiser.  My question is…is it better to have a large list of annoyed people, or a smaller list of people with a genuine interest in 3rd party offers?  I see two solutions.  Either the unsubscribe should remove the recipient from the source list – which I appreciate may result in more unsubscribes than necessary.  Otherwise, why not include two unsubscribes – one that is advertiser specific and one that relates to the 3rd party list being used.  This enables better targeting for the list buyer as you can remove people that you know are not interested in certain types of offer, while still giving them the flexibility to receive other types of offer.

Email is a fantastic channel that allows quick, instantly measurable, low cost results when done properly.  Let’s make sure that this continues to be the case and that we don’t end up inviting restrictive legislation by abusing it.

Rupert Harrison
Data Planner
News International Ltd
www.newsint.co.uk

Along with the activity metrics, look at measuring these metrics as well:

"Inactives" - Subscribers who have not been tagged as having opened, nor have they clicked on any links.

"Opened but did not click" - Subscribers who have been tagged as having opened issues, but never clicked.

"Links not clicked" - Include calls to actions, articles and links that haven’t been clicked at all (or very little).

The next step ...

Once you've begun to benchmark and trend this information, along with activity, assess what parts of your email marketing campaigns need to be improved.

Review - For inactives, take a look at your subject line and who the email is coming from. These most likely need to provide better branding, identification and a stronger enticement in the subject line. If it is links not clicked, take a look at your layout, synopsis text, and the strength of your call to actions.

Segment - Segmentation will allow you to separate out your subscribers based on actions and non-actions. Even if you simply segment out those subscribers who are tagged as inactive vs. active, you’ll be able to take a different approach in what you send the inactives.

Test - Taking all the above into consideration, plan to do some testing. The good news in analysing what’s not happening is that you will have a clearer picture of what needs improving.

Jennifer Curtin.
Head of Marketing, Newsweaver
www.newsweaver.co.uk

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read it yet the main findings of the research were pretty startling and run counter to conventional wisdom.

The research suggests that although subject lines with 60 characters or less make more people open your message (the traditional view) these people are less likely to then go on and click on content or offers within the message than people who open an email with a longer subject line. More opens = less clicks! There seems to be an inverse relationship between opens and both click and CTO rates.

As you might expect, we monitor a large number of UK email campaigns, from a cross-section of sectors and companies including British Airways, figleaves, Apple, Amazon JD Sports and Reuters; so I thought it might be interesting find out what subject line lengths email marketers are using and was astonished to find out just how are following conventional wisdom!

Out of 700 subject lines we monitored in the last 90 days, the vast majority—87% of them — were under 60 characters in length. A further 7% fell into the ‘dead zone’ between 60 and 70 character where neither opens nor the CTO rate is optimized, and only 6% of the subject lines were over 70 characters long and therefore likely to optimize click and CTO rates.

Does his mean that everybody out there is only interested in opens and doesn’t care about clicks?  Perhaps we could conclude that email marketers, having extensively and regularly tested longer subject lines, know for a fact that they don’t work?

Somehow I think not.

What’s more likely to be the case is that as an industry we’ve done such a fantastic job of believing the hype that we have stopped testing outside of the accepted norms.

Our whitepaper also found subject lines with a higher word count also optimize clicks and CTO rates. So how do the numbers break down when it came to word count?

The numbers are equally amazing. Only 13% of subject lines monitored contained above 10 words—where clicks and CTO are optimized. 60% fell into the ‘dead zone’ of between 6 and 10 words, where neither clicks nor opens are optimized; and 26% of the subject lines contained fewer than 6 words, and therefore optimized open rates.

What I have learned from this exercise and would like to share with you all is that email marketers need to completely overhaul their subject line test strategy:

● Subject line tests should be more granular—long and short just isn’t good enough. Subject lines need to be broken down into more character groupings (1-10, 11-20, ...91-100).

● Introduce word count testing. Words are a much better way of conveying meaning than characters.

● Assess the impact of the number of propositions contained in the subject line on your campaign performance.

● Finally, open rates are just a small part of the story. Your tests should assess the impact of subject lines on clicks, CTO rate and conversions, as well as sales.

My greatest fear is that the people reading the whitepaper will be looking for a simple answer such as “when it comes to email subject lines, short is best”, when in fact the central message is keep searching, keep optimising and keep on challenging assumptions.

Dela Quist
CEO
Alchemy Worx