Email Experience Blog

Meeting the SAME Challenge

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:00:00 PDT

I'm new here, but I've been around a long time. I've seen the confusion and frustration that non-uniform report metrics can cause, both for marketers and for agencies and vendors providing email services and technology.

Email marketers are almost universally judged based on program performance. For them, every click, open, delivered, bounced and sent matters. So when there are multiple email systems in play or marketers are considering a new email solution from a different vendor, there are always headaches around what the report metrics are and why they don't match.

The marketer gets mad because things are different and there's no way to compare apples to apples. The vendor gets mad because some performance metric in their system is not coming out as well as some other vendor's, so they look bad. The marketer's boss gets mad because the numbers don't match up between systems, so they lose confidence in ALL of the metrics.

It's all around bad for everyone.

I volunteered for the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable because I believe that accurate and consistent reporting is key to improving not only email marketing programs, but all marketing programs. Metrics that marketers have faith in and trust provide the data they need to do more advanced targeting and segmentation, which creates a unique and more engaging experience for recipients.

Isn't that what email marketing has promised all along?

Accurate and consistent metrics give marketers the confidence to add bold elements to their programs because they can count on the data on which they make their decisions. Reporting data that is consistent across programs and providers lets businesses make informed decisions about which solutions best serve their needs, not just which one has the most forgiving formulas in their reports.

But now I put on my vendor hat and say, "Why should I do this? It's not a competitive differentiator. I haven't seen this on any RFP. What's in it for me?"

On the surface, nothing, but underneath, it says a lot about what's important: the email marketer. Your customers. Your users. Your industry.

Sure, as a vendor, there are a ton of new features, enhancements, and fixes that need to be added to the application, but this one is not just about your current users or prospects. It's about the email community. It's about making A = A. It's about fixing something that is broken with our industry.

What will you do for your industry? Will you join us in helping fix a long-time issue that affects all email marketers? Together, we can do it!

- Ivan Chalif
Director of Email Product Marketing
Alterian

Read Fred Tabsharami's post on the SAME project.

U.S. Congress Planning Broader Email & Digital Marketing Enforcement and Regulatory Power for the FTC

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:39:00 PDT

The recession has made citizens more attentive to scams, especially those that promise easy money or frighten people about the banking system. This accelerates the already large regulatory agenda of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), whose role as a “civil prosecutor” includes regulating and enforcing protections from online offers, advertising and email marketing. Congress is also stepping up, and two major initiatives around privacy protection and the role of the FTC are in active play.

Partnering with all of us in the email industry and watching to make sure we properly self-regulate remains a key component of the FTC’s plans, says Lois Greisman, Director, Division of Marketing Practices for the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, who joined our annual Email Experience Council legislative update webinar on May 19th. “Our goal is to stop fraud and scams as quickly as possible, to shut down offenders, and, where appropriate, seize assets and reimburse consumers,” she said in the webinar.

The recording of the full event is available in the eec Research Store and is free for eec members.

The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which regulates permission practices for email marketing, continues to be a key anti-fraud tool for the FTC. Greisman noted several successes in prosecuting spammers and other deceptive practices and said enforcement continues to be a major priority. “CAN-SPAM has worked well to level the playing field among legitimate online marketers,” she said. She also added that she was not aware of any active proposal by the FTC or Congress to expand or change the law.

However, there are two active proposals of new legislation that could have significant impact on email marketing and the email industry as a whole.

Online Privacy Protection Bill: A “Discussion Draft” of a bill to require notice and consent to any individual PRIOR to collecting or using personal information was released in early May in the US House of Representatives from Representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Cliff Stearns (R-FL). Industry and consumer groups alike are not happy with the draft, including the DMA. Although it may seem at first that the so-called Boucher Bill was just about online behavioral advertising conducted by large marketers; it turns out that it’s very broad and far-reaching on privacy and data security. During the webinar, Jerry Cerasale, VP, Government Relations for the DMA, gave a very good overview of coverage, exceptions and terms of notice. Basically, it impacts nearly all kinds of “first party” senders as well as any other company that has access to that data as a “third party.” It proposes coverage of an extensive list of “unique and persistent” personal data on consumers.

“One potentially bad impact this could have on the email industry concerns the scope of covered data, including email address, IP address, and other unique, persistent identifiers,” says panelist Tom Bartel, CIPP, VP, Receiver Services at Return Path. “If the exceptions for transactional and operational purposes and for service providers are not effective and clear, this bill could interfere with many industry collaborations. This includes IP-based reputation systems – data that determines if email messages reach the inbox or not. It may also impact the operation of Feedback Loops provided to email senders by mailbox providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail. These feedback loops are a key component in how the industry keeps bad actors out of the email ecosystem."

Both Representatives Boucher and Stearns have indicated a willingness to work with industry and have requested comments on the bill, due by June 4th. Cerasale said the DMA will be commenting.
Expansion of FTC Powers: Congress is also considering significantly expanding the powers of the FTC as part of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (HR 4173). There is not a corresponding bill in the Senate, although Cerasale said in the webinar that one may be introduced later this year.

Part of the proposed regulation would give the FTC “unbridled authority” to create rules around “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” for many industry sectors. Cerasale expressed concern about this, and said that more checks and balances are needed. It is also unclear how this expansion will impact emerging technologies like social or mobile, he said.

Another part of the proposed bill increases the FTC’s enforcement powers to seek civil penalties. “That may be helpful in catching spammers and other abusers of email marketing,” said Rick Buck, CIPP and VP, ISP Relations and Privacy at e-Dialog. “Marketers who feel they are exempt from prosecution because they are legal under CAN-SPAM may be following the letter of the law, but not the spirit. I encourage everyone to go beyond the legal requirements and aim to provide email experiences that are welcome and engaging to subscribers.”

The FTC’s Greisman said only that, “We welcome any support from Congress that helps the agency be more effective and efficient.” There are some “tools that we lack which Congress may grant us the power to use,” she said.

A third element to this proposed legislation is on responsibility/liability of the delivery provider (broadcast vendor, ESP, MTA Vendor) if their clients do not follow CAN-SPAM or other regulations. “This aiding and abetting aspect is very concerning,” said webinar panelist, Dennis Dayman, VP, Privacy & Online Security at Eloqua. “Blurring the lines between purveyor and sender may place an undue penalty on others in the ‘chain of responsibility’ for all brands involved in online advertising or other online acquisition efforts, like third party email senders and publishers,” Dayman said.

Greisman also reported in the webinar that there is no significant update on the behavioral targeting protection guidelines that the FTC has had out for comment for over a year. “Nothing will happen without input from industry,” she said. Since the mandate from the FTC has been, “self regulate or else,” the webinar panelists Buck, Bartel and Dayman had a number of suggestions for marketers to follow best practices, including:

Ensure transparency in disclosure and notice of permission and use of data.
Be very clear about opt out vs. opt in. CAN-SPAM requires only an opt-out, but that is the “bare minimum,” Buck advises.
Update your Privacy Policy and provide prominent links.
Audit your data usage practices.
Be clear on use of data in all web forms and at the point of collection/sign up.

Marketers and everyone in the email industry can support the FTC, Greisman said. She suggests:

File a complaint. When those complaints are also referred by the DMA, they are particularly helpful, Greisman said.
Make sure your opt out mechanisms are working. (e-Dialog’s Buck recommends checking this at least annually, and preferably monthly.)
Be clear about the sender and the advertiser relationships. (Return Path’s Bartel recommends first party senders consider “framing” the content from third parties or advertisers and clearly distinguish between editorial (original content) and advertising.)
Keep data clean, particularly around new sources. (Eloqua’s Dayman also recommends care around affiliates’ use of data.)

The legislative update webinar was sponsored by Eloqua, e-Dialog and Return Path, with technology sponsor GoToWebinar. The recording of the full event is free for eec members. More details on these and other legislative issues important to digital and direct marketers is in the DMA’s quarterly government affairs newsletter, Politically Direct.

- Stephanie Miller
Return Path & eec

7 B2B Trends in Strategies and Spending

Sun, 02 May 2010 22:00:00 PDT

While each B2B marketer must consider its unique situation – products, purchasers, sales cycle, etc. – there is ample evidence of a shift from traditional media to digital tactics to facilitate growth for business marketers. In fact, there are, in my analysis, seven trends in B2B marketing strategies and spending starting with …

The Internet has become the premier resource of information amongst C-Suite executives with search engine first for information.
Digital marketing – in its myriad forms – along with email marketing, form an important part of B2B marketing outreach to generate leads and facilitate sales growth.
Online social networking is emerging as an important tool in business-to-business marketing.
Usage of blogs, microblogs, and RSS Feeds – currently segregated by generation – may eventually become essential contact points in maintaining B2B brands.
Mobile marketing or the “mobile web” seems to be in its genesis amongst B2B marketers.
B2B branding is growing in importance and directly correlated with increases in top-line revenue and market cap.
Accountability is predominant – from analytics and front-end campaign tracking to back-end lead nurturing.

Developing campaigns that account for these seven trends is of especial importance now – in order to foster sales growth and profitability – and perhaps even a necessity in a hypercompetitive world. Read the full report in the Research Store.

- Lynne Nigro
Direct & Digital Marketing Consultant
Lynne is accepting new consulting assignments.

After the Click: Improving Campaign Performance With Web Analytics

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:00:00 PDT

What happens after you send out that carefully crafted email campaign? What do you look for beyond open rates and click throughs? What do people actually do when they get to your landing page or website? And are you able to not only track that information, but put it to use in your next campaign?

To really understand the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, you need to keep tracking your customers’ behavior beyond your email, even beyond your landing page. How else can you know your real success if you don’t know your real results? Plus you can learn from knowing what people do at your website. Where else do they click? Which other pages do they visit? Do they sign up for your emails? How long do they hang around? At what point do they bail? To gather this data, your email must be integrated with your web analytics. It’s the only way to carry your tracking through comprehensively.

And on the other side of that information gathering is what you do with that data to improve your email marketing. Ideally it’s a closed loop process, with the ESP and web analytics both feeding information to each other.

By integrating your email with your web analytics, you can track behavior and better understand your conversion rates, improve your campaigns, respond to individual behavior in near real-time, and ultimately increase your email marketing ROI. You can learn, tweak and improve, and even segment your email marketing messages in the future.

Integrating email with web analytics gives you real-life data, but it’s not as easy as it seems. However, the payoff is worth it. If you’re ready to take on—and profit from—this kind of integration, here are some things to consider, both when choosing an analytics provider and when setting up the integration:

How often data is flowing from the analytics provider to your ESP and how quickly do you need to make decisions based on that data? If you can wait 24 hours to get data back, then a batch process is fine. However, if you’re looking at shopping cart abandonment, and you need to react right away to a behavior, you need something more real-time so you’ll want an inline process that allows immediate reaction, without the delay of a batch process.
What segments are important, and what information do you need in order to allocate or define the segments?
What is your internal availability for building an API now plus supporting it later? Do you want your IT team to take this on, working with your marketing team? Do they know the ESP well enough, and can they support the integration when something goes wrong? Or should you outsource this?
How easy is it to migrate if you switch ESPs? You have to make sure your new ESP can tag links to where your analytics package can easily identify the same information for a person, and for a campaign. That new ESP is also going to need to be able to consume data from the analytics company, send and consume data back and forth from the analytics package.
As a preventive measure, your marketing department needs to acid test the solution. You have two separate systems operating relatively independent of each other, but you need to regularly make sure the information going back into both systems is accurate.

When your email and web analytics are integrated as a closed-loop process, it should be seamless. Your ESP sends an email and links within the email include identifiers of who that recipient is and the campaign they’re being sent. When they click on a link, the ESP feeds that information over to the analytics provider on a batch basis. You’ll learn about the campaign performance, but also specific metrics about who did what individually once on the site. But that’s not the end of it. The web analytics can also feed information back to your ESP, enabling automated responses or other email messages appropriate to a customer’s particular actions. Then you take all you’ve learned and tweak your next campaign accordingly.

If you’re tracking email and web analytics separately, you’re missing the big picture. If you have them integrated, you’re ahead of the game…and the competition.

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Update From the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:00:00 PDT

For the past few years, the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable has been conscientiously working to standardize email metrics. Standardizing these metrics is crucial to improving the quality of reporting and to enhance the creditability of the email industry. As part of the standardization goal, the Roundtable seeks congruent email reporting across existing Email Service Providers.

The email industry operates in a dynamic environment, and, like every major industry, it has its shortcomings. But, one thing that has remained constant over the years is the ambiguity that faces marketers because of differences in how email metrics are calculated from one ESP to another. When these reporting variances occur, marketers get anxious, and it adds to the already toxic elements that challenge the industry every day. Currently, the biggest issue that the industry faces are the ever-increasing levels of spam, but other inconsistencies also pose a challenge.

For example, when email marketers shift from one ESP to another, reporting of metrics can cause a headache, due in part to the method that certain ESPs use to calculate reporting metrics. By standardizing metrics, both ESPs and marketers will benefit, as standardization radically improves benchmarking and further enhances credibility. The “common denominator” created by standardized email metrics gives marketers an even playing field when choosing ESPs.

On the other side of the equation, ESPs are faced with challenges of their own. They must systematically convey to their existing clients that changes in reporting are imminent and industry-wide. They must make changes to dashboards and publish new calculations to alleviate any irregularity from one ESP to another. Furthermore, ESPs must demonstrate the value of these changes through a series of well-defined communications which explain why a standardized method is a benefit for all. These transitioning steps may cause clients to feel alienated. To maintain a good relationship, ESPs will need to formulate a plan to minimize client inconvenience during the transition process.

One of the benefits for ESPs who shift to the new standards will be their ability to apply for an adoption seal program. This seal can be placed conspicuously throughout their online properties, informing potential clients that this ESP supports and has adopted the new standards of email metrics. This will quell any uncertainty that the marketer might face when trying to discern between ESPs. In essence, the seal provides reassurance to clients that switching to a new ESP will be relatively painless.

Finally, ESPs must ask themselves the proverbial question; will making changes to their existing reporting infrastructure help the industry in the long run? If so, ESPs must make standardization of email metrics a priority. However, moving toward standardization too quickly can stifle growth and innovation. Therefore, we must use this time wisely and collaborate with industry colleagues to develop congruency across the majority of ESPs. These innovations have the ability to help email marketers better discern email metrics, especially if or when they switch providers. These changes will increase clients’ satisfaction when choosing a provider and, ultimately, brighten the future of the entire industry.

Learn more and join our efforts.

If you are interested in joining the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, please contact Ali Swerdlow.

- Fred Tabsharani
Marketing | Industry Relations
Port25 Solutions, Inc.

When's My Baby Due?

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:00:00 PDT

First a disclosure: I love Target with a passion. I will drive past the local Super Walmart and go 10 miles out of my way to go to Target. As a result, I signed up for Target’s email program approximately four years ago. At the time, I filled out a profile with demographic data and provided my zip code when I signed up. I began to receive specials and personalized content based on my location for my local Target.

Fast-forward four years: I no longer live in that city or near the local Target. However, I am still receiving special email offers for my (old) local Target (see below):

While I applaud Target for sending geo-targeted content to subscribers to increase relevancy, they have never once, in four years, asked me if my profile data is still accurate. Boat, missed. As I’m still committed to my long-term relationship with Target, I decided to scroll to the very bottom of the email.

If I were the average subscriber, would I know that behind the “My Account” link I could also update my profile data? Tip for marketers: Have a loved one or friend not affiliated with your brand “secret shop” your emails and site to ensure the average user understands your terminology.

I clicked through and was taken to a page to sign in.

Another opportunity missed to reduce the barriers for subscribers to update their profiles. Listen: Your subscribers are constantly evolving and making lifestyle changes (more on that in a moment), so you have to be sure you are still providing targeted, relevant, valuable content that hits them at the right time. For now, I’m either going to continue to receive no longer relevant content based on profile data from four years ago, or I’m going to unsubscribe.

On a side note, in addition to localized emails, Target has begun sending me messages targeted to new parents.

Now, when I signed up, I believe I provided my birth date and maybe Target decided now is the time in my life when I should/would be having a baby. However, this is not the case. Granted, I am going in with the assumption that they only send targeted and segmented emails. An email entirely focused on babies, again with no option to tell Target that these emails are not relevant, may cause many subscribers to hit the “spam” button (because remember, spam could also mean “not relevant”), unsubscribe or disengage from their emails. Don’t miss the boat on ensuring you’re hitting the right audience with the right, most valuable and relevant message, at the right time.

Target, I love you, but let's take this baby thing one step at a time, okay? Give your preference center a little TLC and your subscribers will love you that much more.

Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto Software
@KNLorenz

Successfully Working Remotely is A Shared Responsibility

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:47:00 PDT

Email marketing, like any career, is likely to include working and collaborating with people who are not in the same physical office. If you are the remote person, you probably have concerns about keeping in touch with others on the marketing team or in your department, and if you are managing people who are remote, you have to pay special attention to keeping them in touch with the rest of the group.

In an eec Member Initiatives Advisory Committee meeting on the Career Paths project last month, we discussed the impact of this dispersed workforce, and how it affects an email marketing team.

Angela Baldonero, VP, People of Return Path, reviewed four broad trends for career development among the diaspora:

Technology keeps us connected, and enables a broad dispersion of the workforce. However, it also causes some practical issues. For example, we have an employee in Berlin reporting to a manager in California. It raises the question: Is Skype enough?
Social interaction is good for the business. Bringing on people in new geographies can be challenging for on-boarding as well as collaboration. It’s harder for new people to be remote. However, people who have already built relationships in a core office and then move away can be successful in a remote environment.
Dispersion affects the talent development lifecycle. For example, the key needs of top talent are relationships and recognition and it’s hard for people to build relationships if they are not there. Lots of good work happens when you are in the same room – including discussing the creative for the email campaign while you look over my shoulder, or brainstorming subject lines by the coffee machine. Plus, it’s hard to “make your mark” if you do not have access to casual interaction, and the only time you “see” colleagues is in formal business meeting situations.
It is easy to confuse connections with relationships. It’s easy to have connections. It’s harder to build relationships. However, it’s relationships that drive recruitment as well as career advancement. Geography supports or inhibits relationship depth and meaning.

As the group discussed these ideas, we realized that these are challenges for workforce, but also for proving the value of email marketing within the organization. We can’t earn the respect we need for resources and a seat at the table just from the numbers; the relationships matter, too.

Other impact areas:

Geographic dispersion and even business unit silos within the same geography also affect the collaboration and governance of different brand/business unit email programs.
Participation in eec meetings is a way for geographically or functionally isolated professionals to network and be educated. It’s also always helpful to hear that other marketers have the same challenges!
Remote employees don’t have access to impromptu conversations which can help your career and move your projects forward. Baldonero quoted, “A lot of work gets done when you talk about nothing.” Relationships are not built just talking about business and trust is built when you know the whole person. If you just talk business, you may actually have less trust, because you only know one aspect of that person.
Sometimes there is a perception that if you are working at home you are not working as hard. Jennifer Carmichael of Tenet Healthcare noted, “Some remote employees work harder or longer hours because they're ‘always on.’”
Relationships drive loyalty and the extra effort needed to get something done. If I need help with a project or getting something run up the flagpole, it’s a lot more successful to stand in that person’s office, than to IM them.

In all this, we discussed that building relationships is a shared responsibility. If you work remotely, you need to make time for making these connections since they don’t happen organically. This is both the responsibility of the individual and the organization. If a business hires people remotely for email marketing or any task, there needs to be a commitment to support this relationship building.

Some ways to build your own long distance relationships or help make it easier for remote employees to engage:

Stay an extra day when you do visit the office. Make time for coffee and hello’s.
Corporate social networks can help facilitate information across offices.
Seek out similarities – find the connections outside the office with your colleagues. This might mean taking a bit of extra time on the phone or in an email to get to know the person.
Managers can facilitate team building prior to the business meetings. Build time into the weekly phone calls or hold quarterly in-person meetings that have time for socializing. “This is a great idea that I can implement tomorrow,” Carmichael said.
Conferences like the Email Evolution Conference are a good way to meet new people. However, we are all busy; we have to make time for establishing these connections. Nancy Atwood of Anchor Computer said, “In some ways, we are victims of technology – we can work all the time and we are always connected. So the “doing the work” is taking priority over “building a network.” We invest our time in replying electronically rather than establishing a personal connection.”
Corporate HR or someone needs to accept some level of administrative support and education, as well as the remote employees themselves. Be proactive. If no one is reaching out to you, reach out to your manager or the HR team, Baldonero recommends.
Working long distance is a reality for most email vendor/marketer relationships. Many of these same principles apply to good account management and client service. “Think of your colleagues as clients, and that might change the way you relate to them,” Atwood said.

Lastly, we discussed some things that the DMA/eec can be doing to help facilitate career growth and help us all build these relationships internally and around the industry:

A member directory of names, company, industry, geography. Restricted access and “no sales calls.”
Local events for members to meet and network and learn from each other. Perhaps in cooperation with local DMA groups.
Ensure there are strong networking opportunities prior to and during the main DMA conferences.

What are you doing to build relationships with remote colleagues, clients and employees? What else would you like the DMA/eec to do to help the industry? Please leave your comments below or email Stephanie Miller at the Member Initiatives Advisory Committee.

A Click is a Click by Any Other Name, But Click-Through Rates Are Not the Same

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:00:00 PST

Research done by the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable shows that ESPs use several different methods of measurement for the Click-Through Rate (CTR) metric. During our discussions we identified several methodologies for calculating the CTR. Two methods, delivered-based and open-based, emerged as the most common based on an online poll conducted by the Roundtable. Here are the poll results:

The majority of respondents calculated the CTR using clicks divided by delivered, similar to how direct mail calculates its response rates. Clicks divided by open was the second most common method and is similar to other online advertising methods that are impression-based such as banner ads and search sponsor links. Companies often use more than one tool and therefore choose the methodology that makes the most sense for their media mix. Having to normalize their data may create additional work for IT or marketing departments when they want to report and analyze results of their email program overall or roll up information into higher level reporting and analytics dashboards.

What can email marketers in the field take away from this survey?

First, it reminds us to check with our ESP to determine how they calculate metrics in their reporting to help maintain comparability and consistency while comparing results across or within email campaigns.
Second, we should also check how metrics are being calculated in other systems that email impacts, such as web analytics, to determine any necessary adjustments to normalize our reporting for cross-media analysis.
Third, it demonstrates the need for email marketers and ESPs to come together to standardize metrics.

For the past two years, the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable has been working to standardize email metrics to improve the quality of reporting for the email industry and provide more uniformity in reporting for email marketers and email service providers alike. You can learn more on this blog or show your support for the program on the Roundtable’s online petition.

Special thanks to Peter Roebuck of AllWebEmail for contributing to this post and to all the Roundtable members for their participation.

Luke Glasner
Co-Chair
eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable

Win Back Programs: Smart Marketing or Failure of Strategy?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:30:00 PST

Building programs to re-engage dormant leads is a necessity for many email marketers, particularly those that have not had buttoned-up strategy for segmentation and targeted communications in the past. List re-engagement and “win-back” program strategy was the open forum discussion topic at the February meeting of the Email Experience Council’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable.

“If you need to do re-engagement after a long period of subscriber inactivity, that is a failure of strategy,” suggested Stephanie Miller, VP, Return Path and Vice Chair of the eec. “Marketers who are trying to catch up have a steep road. Rather, win-backs should be a consistent part of your segmentation strategy.”

Bottom line, Stephanie pointed out, effective email marketers reach out early in the cycle and “shouldn’t have a situation in which someone hasn’t responded in a long time.”

Ultimately, the question of glass half-empty or half-full regarding re-engagement may boil down to the buyer. In BtoB, noted Bulldog Solutions’ Amy Bills, list re-engagement can be an effective way to generate more ROI from an existing database. “A lot of time and money has probably been spent putting together that list. Marketers are looking at making the most of it.”

Yael Penn of i360 Marketing reframed the concept of re-engagement as an ongoing effort. “In BtoB we’re always thinking about reengagement strategies. We’re planning re-engagement from the start. BtoB purchases are more complex and the sales cycle is much longer. Sometimes a company is only doing the research now and they are not ready to make the purchase decision for six months. In BtoC, the reason to buy is impulse; in BtoB, because the sales cycle is different, re-engagement can be more effective."

On the BtoC side, ExactTarget’s Nate Romance said, “There is risk to carrying a lot of dead weight. We’re hearing re-engagement as a drumbeat in reputation management and deliverability. If you’re beating on 60% of your list that is not responding, it’s costing you something.” (Some more on low engagement concerns here.)
A discussion of specific re-engagement strategies included:

Ideas for engagement tactics including changing the subject line format, adding interactive elements like polls or surveys, featuring a high-value offer and highlighting exclusive information. Sometimes just asking straight out can work, too. “We hate spam, too. Let us know if you want to stay on the file,” can be an effective approach, Stephanie noted.
Nate described test findings regarding language used to confirm a prospect’s interest and willingness to stay on a list. “We did some testing and found that inclusion of the 'No' option caused more 'Yes' responses,” he said.
The preference center tactic—asking people to “update their information” had not been found by the group to be a compelling re-engagement tool. “With a true re-engagement we typically encourage a strong call to action,” Nate said. “Not enough people do a good job of explaining what’s in it for the recipient to fill out preferences. It’s perceived by subscribers as the marketer’s tool, having little value to them, he said.

We hear a lot about engagement being effective and necessary – but the pressing need for re-engagement is a reminder that engagement must be earned with every message sent, Stephanie suggested. Nate agreed, “If you want to optimize the value of your email marketing asset, you must keep the file engaged and fresh. That is more than a one-time win back campaign, but an imperative for your content strategy.”

Place your comments below to tell us what you are doing to engage – and re-engage; we’d love to feature your efforts in a future blog post or as part of the Roundtable's discussions. Also, check out the List Growth & Engagement Roundtable’s 2010 Benchmark Guide to see how your list growth efforts stack up.

4 Things My Husband Doesn’t Like About Me (er, uh, email marketers) and 1 Thing He Does

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:00:00 PST

When you work in the email space, you take a different perspective on your inbox. I receive email for very different reasons than others in my life. I subscribe to just about any email I can, because I like to see what people are doing. More specifically, how marketers are targeting their customers, leveraging data, addressing rendering challenges and motivating recipients to open, among many other things.

But “normal” people just don’t do that. They subscribe to a specific email because they want it – at least they thought they did. So I thought I would ask the real email subscriber in my life, my husband, what he likes and doesn’t like about email – this is what he said (ok, I’ve paraphrased some, but this is almost what he said):

The Bait and Switch
So, apparently people actually subscribe to email because they expect or want something – go figure, huh? But once they get “it” do marketers continue to deliver value? So my hubby tells me that often times he subscribes for something specific, but if the subsequent emails don’t grab him right away then he unsubscribes. Yes, you heard me right, he actually does click the unsubscribe link.

The Fine Print
But he can’t click the unsubscribe link if he can’t find it – and he actually does look for it. This leads us to the second thing that annoys him about email – ok, it’s a life in general thing, but it’s prolific in email – the fine print. Now that we have kids, the closest he’s getting to Vegas are the emails he gets in his inbox – and nothing drives him more crazy than a great subject line and headline about getting free nights at a great hotel – only to open the message to find that there isn’t a snowball’s chance he can go. It would just take too long to filter through the legalese.

No Real Point
My better-half tells me that we email marketers have seconds to get to the point otherwise he closes the email. Which in and of itself isn’t news – but what surprised me was that he’s actually pretty fickle. If we don’t make our point quickly in this email – he isn’t opening the next one either – or the one after that, or the one after that. He’s stubborn…

No Images (Not our fault, but he doesn’t know that)
So this was the very first thing he said – and as long as we’ve been together and all the time I’ve been working in the space – I was sure he knew this, but he did not. AOL, take note, my husband does not like that you suppress his images by default. The funnier thing for me was that he couldn’t figure out why images rendered for Zappos, but not for Mandalay Bay. He has no recollection of adding Zappos to a safe-sender list, but clearly he did. So in his mind, the issue was with Mandalay Bay, not AOL.

But rest assured, he doesn’t dislike everything about us. There is one thing he loves about email and that is Zappos. He's an uber-fan of everything Zappos, but here’s a lesson to integrating your customer service calls with your email programs. After an issue he had with shoes he ordered for our son, he called and spoke with someone who was very friendly and helpful and took care of correcting the order issue. He was happy with the customer service he received, and he moved on to other things. A short hour later, he received a coupon for a discount off his next purchase – as a way to say “we’re sorry for the recent issue with your order.”

So learn from his man-crush on Zappos – sometimes doing something nice goes a long way.

- Kara Trivunovic
Senior Director of Strategic Services
StrongMail