No man is an iland

Adding social links to emails: what and where?

2008-10-09T12:11:00.000+02:00

One of the ways to combine the email and Web 2.0 worlds is to encourage subscribers to redistribute email content via social sites (like Facebook or Digg), as discussed recently in this post and Loren McDonald's thoughtful article.

This makes intrinsic sense, but (as so often) it's easier to say what we should do than to say how we should do it.

If you put links to social sites in your email, which sites/tools do you link to? And where do you put them?

Which social links do you feature?

Every extra link in an email or web page is another distraction from the core message and another piece of screen real estate occupied. So the link has to justify its existence.

There are hundreds of websites built to allow users to repost content for others to find. Hundreds. Which ones deserve the space?

You're probably most interested in getting people to share content on social news sites, social bookmarking sites and, particularly, social networks. Here some factors to bear in mind when choosing the right ones to feature...

1. What sites are most popular?

In the absence of official statistics, only educated guesses are possible on the reach of different sites. Even published account numbers can be misleading since popularity is as much about user activity as about registered users.

Some helpful resources and suggestions:

SEOmoz has a nice overview of the "best" Web 2.0 sites in numerous categories, which you might use as a proxy for popularity.
In terms of social networks, comScore published recent figures suggesting Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 as the three most popular.
Wikipedia also has a list of social network sites, together with user estimates (most of which are based on Alexa, which I would find hard to recommend for such purposes).
The same site has a list of social bookmarking sites, of which the two biggest are (my opinion) Delicious and StumbleUpon.
Top social news sites (again, my opinion) include Slashdot (especially IT stuff), Fark, Digg and reddit.

2. What's realistic?

Ask yourself if the material you are suggesting people share elsewhere is truly suited to each potential venue.

Digg is a hugely popular social news site which tends to get included automatically in any collection of "share this" links. But is your content really likely to warrant attention from Digg users? Probably not.

I've written over 2000 blog posts, many of which have received much positive coverage from those in the email marketing space. Total number of posts that ever got significant coverage on Digg? One. And it wasn't even about email marketing.

Would it make more sense to replace Digg links with a smaller social news site better targeted to your niche?

3. What suits my audience and topic?

According to comScore, the most popular social network in France is the Skyrock Network. More popular than Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 combined.

If you know your audience, you'll know which sites they use. If you're selling financial software systems to CFOs, do you really want MySpace links in your emails?

A similar point applies to the nature of the content/offer you want shared.

Want to spread a recipe? Consider Im Cooked.

Want to spread a search marketing article? Consider Sphinn.

Want to spread news of your latest stroller? Consider MothersClick.

Where do you put the links?

Even when you know which "share this on..." links to use, where do you put them? I've seen them everywhere but in the subject line.

Do you put them in the email or on your landing pages? In both? Top of the email? Bottom? Next to the content? Next to each article snippet?

How prominent do you make the links compared to your main links? How many "share this" links do you include? Do you use text-only links or funky little graphics like those you often see under blog posts (or both)?

And what language do you use? "Share this at Facebook," "Post at Facebook," "Facebook" etc. etc.?

Like any call to action, this is something you're going to have to test. Unless anybody has some experience they'd like to share in the comments?

An alternative of course is to have a single "share this with others" link in your email which takes people to a landing page containing many more social site options than you'd put in your email.

You can also put your "forward to a friend" email tools in there as well, or any other links and copy encouraging word of mouth.

This is all largely new territory for the email marketing world. What say you?

New email marketing benchmark statistics report

2008-10-08T19:52:00.001+02:00

Just a quick heads up that MarketingSherpa today released the long-awaited 2009 edition of their Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. You can download the executive summary for free.

I haven't read through a copy yet, but as soon as I do a full review will appear here (the page currently shows a review of the 2008 edition).

(Disclaimer: I have all sorts of relationships with the publisher, who I used to work for. They even sent me flowers once.)

Email marketing search engine updated

2008-10-08T08:32:00.000+02:00

OnlineMarketing.info launched last year as a custom search engine featuring handpicked (by me), authoritative sites and services with decent information on email marketing.

Another major update yesterday saw the coverage expand to around 400,000 indexed pages on over 330 specialist websites.

Take a look and use the comments to suggest new sites for review at the next update.

Among the latest additions: the Box of Meat blog, LyrisHQ, various postmaster pages, Deliverability.com, Email Yogi, ISIPP, Sender Score Certified, and many more...

Holiday Email Marketing I: Getting ready and role models

2008-10-07T13:57:00.002+02:00

The end-of-year "holiday" season is a time of promise and challenge for email marketers. Wallets open up and inboxes fill up: the competition for attention affects us all, whether retailer or not.

I picked the brains of four email and ecommerce experts to come up with advice on how to get the best out of year-end messages. You'll get their insights in four posts over the coming week or two.

Today's first installment looks at your holiday email preparations and some good campaign examples from last year.

What should you do now for holiday sales success?

1. Get everything else ready now

The holiday season is not the time to make changes to basic designs and processes. That all needs to be done in advance. The prospect of holiday sales should provide enough incentive to get all those little improvements done before October is over.

Chad White, Director of Retail Insights at the Email Experience Council and author of the Retail Email blog says, "You should certainly wrap up any big bang email redesigns by mid-October or so, as well as put together any holiday-themed email template designs."

Luc Vezina, head of marketing for email service provider Campaigner (disclosure: a sponsor) adds:

"Now is also the time for software and creative retooling or to conduct any testing that might be too risky to perform during the peak season."

2. Step up email address acquisition efforts

List growth is good any time of year, but holiday promotions are great for conversions and for attracting new subscribers. Luc notes:

"Entice new subscribers with the promise of additional discounts and advance notification of holiday promotions."

3. Plan your holiday campaign calendar

4. Start building and testing seasonal emails

According to DJ Waldow, email marketing account manager at email service provider Bronto, while you might not be able to test holiday creative and subject lines directly, there's nothing to prevent you beginning the process internally...for example, "with your family and friends."

It's particularly important to ensure that offers are immediately clear to recipients, as attention spans are challenged by retailer email overload. Linda Bustos, ecommerce consultant at Elastic Path Software and author of the Get Elastic ecommerce blog says:

"Make sure your emails are always optimized for images off and maximize the power of the pre-header. No matter how fabulous your creative and offers are, if they're not "in your face" enough, the message may never get through."

5. Review your previous efforts

Chad says, "I'd recommend doing a full post-mortem on your holiday campaigns last year and note what worked and didn't and work that into your planned campaigns for this year."

6. Review other people's efforts

There's no shame in drawing inspiration from others. DJ suggests we wear a consumer hat and review the email that hit our inbox last holiday season:

"What did YOU like? What emails did you open? Click? Convert? Which ones did you delete without reading? Which ones annoyed you?"

So what are our experts' favorites from 2007?

Winning holiday email campaigns

Linda picked out a post-Christmas email from Drugstore.com with a "New Year Resolution" theme. Here's an extract:

She cites three key points that help the email work...

1. "December is typically a time when you focus on buying for others, and January when you shift gears to focus on yourself: your fitness, weight, health, appearance and breaking bad habits."

2. "It's also a time when you're typically broke. So Drugstore.com's up-to 40% off sale on personal necessities was very relevant."

3. "It also speaks customer language like Look My Best and Be Healthy rather than linking to Beauty and Health categories."

DJ Waldow is a fan of Nascar's "12 days, 12 deals" holiday campaign. He and fellow Brontonian Julie Waite explain why in this video review, with DJ saying:

"A theme-based or series campaign where I know for the next 11 days, the first thing I do when I get in in the morning is I'm going to be looking for that Nascar email to kind of get my fix."

Chad White has a few good examples for us...

"TigerDirect's Pink Friday campaign, which donated a portion of sales to help fight breast cancer, really caught my attention."

Why?

"I'm sure it was in part all the pink in their design, rather than all the red and green being used by others. But the charity tie-in made sense given that Christmas is a time of giving and that Breast Cancer Awareness Month had been the month before."

Chad also highlights a couple of sweepstakes that stood out...

"Old Navy's wish list sweepstakes campaign was innovative in that it encouraged customers to browse and create wish lists in exchange for a chance to win all the items on their wish list. That's a sweepstakes that really drives product and brand engagement."

"The other sweeps was Neiman Marcus's clickthrough sweeps, where they gave you a sweeps entry just for clicking through the email to look at their Big 100 Gifts List. While it didn't drive deep engagement like Old Navy's sweeps, it was super easy...just clickthrough and you're entered to win. No forms to fill out."

And he also puts in a vote for Harry & David's Mr. Pear Head emails: "They made me smile every time I saw them."

Next installment: How can you stand out and should you really send more emails in Q4?

More on holiday email | Tags: holiday email marketing, seasonal marketing, holiday ecommerce

Is the email discussion list still relevant?

2008-10-06T17:31:00.000+02:00

One email marketing tactic you hear little of is the email discussion list (definition). Back when Flickr was just a spelling mistake, discussion lists were an established online marketing tactic.

The list offered many benefits to its owners. For example:

it built community (very Web 2.0)
it provided a vehicle for ads, promotions and branding efforts
it helped establish expertise and reputation

[Discussion lists also had marketing value for participants. Contributors could highlight their own expertise and build a reputation through useful posts, with email signatures promoting each author's business.]

All the big online marketing discussion lists I used to participate in have faded away. It seems people now prefer to interact on forums, blogs, social networks and similar.

Or do they?

Zappos is a poster child for online business success and customer service excellence. And they have a flourishing email discussion list: the Shoe Digest.

So is the discussion list still relevant? Here's my take...

People want meaningful interactions and simply seek out the vehicle and venue that allows that to happen most easily.

Email discussion lists suffer from the overload problem: there's a limit to how many discussion posts people will read through in their inbox, even in digest form.

So they migrate to forums and social networks, which are big enough and accessible enough to accommodate a large number of topics/discussions, while making it relatively easy for users to filter out those discussions they don't want to see.

However, email still has the age-old advantage that led to broadcast email initiatives in the first place: the messages go to the users, the users don't have to go to the messages.

To keep that benefit and overcome the overload problem, the best email discussion lists are now small, highly targeted lists, often invitation-only*. This keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high and the volume of posts under control.

So, for example, one model that might work well is a private discussion list for your most evangelical customers. Let them interact exclusively with each other and with your experts and executives.

Nobody talks about discussion lists anymore. What do you think: do they still have a place in the marketing toolbox or are they now just for collaborative groups without a commercial agenda?

*Zappos' list is large and public! The exception that proves the rule?

Tags: email marketing, discussion lists

The new email marketing: 22 ways to build trust

2008-10-03T18:19:00.000+02:00

Part 16 of an ongoing series...

[We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.]

We all intuitively know that trust is important. It doesn't need explanation. We want and need recipients to trust us and our messages.

It's true of all marketing, but especially so for email marketing: spammers and other denizens of the dark side of online life have taught people to be circumspect about commercial messages that arrive by email.

So just how do you build trust through an email program?

Fortunately, many of the elements that make up the new email marketing also enhance trust. Think of the relationship focus, ethics or subscriber empowerment.

But what else can you do?

Um, you have to be trustworthy

Not to get all preachy on you, but you can't establish trust by saying you are trustworthy. Not in today's cynical world with its empowered consumers.

You have to live it and you have to prove it through your actions.

1. You have to be trustworthy

This concept is a precondition for all the following suggestions. Trying to maintain an illusion of trustworthiness without following through on the promise backfires. You raise expectations only to shatter them.

Appearance

The appearance of your email builds trust where it helps with recognition (of the sender) and projects quality (through the design).

Spam is spam partly because it, well, looks like spam: rough and ready with little care and attention paid to design details.

There is much you can do to help with recognition and you'll find many suggestions in this post. But some basics are...

2. Ensure a recognizable sender appears in the from and/or subject line

The sender is usually a person, organization, brand or product line and is normally chosen according to what recipients are most likely to recognize and respond to. See this article for more detail.

3. Brand the preview pane

Aside from the subject / sender headers, many people's first encounter with your email is what they see in the preview pane. So that needs to support recognition, too, by including identifiers such as a masthead or logo.

4. Put full contact details in the email's footer

Include your organization's name, postal address and a contact email address. The reply-to address should also be a working address that is monitored. Consider putting the name of an actual contact person in the email, too.

Tips 2, 3 and 4 are not about complying with email disclosure laws.

They're about the willingness to stand up and be counted. To clearly state who you are and accept accountability for your emails.

5. Encourage and respond to feedback and contact

Encourage recipients to contact you with suggestions and queries. Respond quickly, meaningfully and personally to incoming email. Human interaction breeds trust.

6. Show a sample at sign up

Give people access to a sample email when they sign-up to your list. This lets them know what to expect so they recognize it when it does arrive.

(Incidentally, Chad White reports that offering a sample like this can increase subsequent open rates.)

7. Use a failsafe design

Obviously there's a lot to email design. But in terms of trust, you want a design that works. In the sense that it never appears broken. It may not always be pretty, but it's at least functional.

This means designing your emails so they render acceptably across all the major webmail interfaces and email clients. Use a design testing tool.

It's especially important to minimize the impact of blocked images, with judicious use of alt attributes.

What about mobile email design?

There are no hard and fast rules yet for "safe" design for mobile email users. There may not even be a safe design for such devices.

But you have a little leeway here, as expectations are low based on the myriad of HTML design disasters everyone sees on their Blackberry. See these articles for tips on designing for mobile email.

8. Match design to brand expectations

If you're Apple, your email design needs to be slim, sleek and cutting edge. People trust what they know and don't like disconnects between what they expect and what they get.

Your design also needs to reflect your website. Not necessarily by cloning the look of the site, but by using shared elements (logos, colors, imagery etc.) that project a common "experience" and allow your emails to exploit the trust you create with your other online activities.

Recommendations

People are more likely to trust your emails if they come recommended by independent third parties. So...

9. Put in testimonials on your sign-up pages

You don't hesitate to post testimonials for your products, services or other offerings. So don't be shy about putting up testimonials for your emails, either. I do it.

10. Encourage readers to share your emails

The easier you make it for people to refer your emails to others, the more likely they are to do so.

These days, links or tools allowing subscribers to post content to social network and media sites are replacing the traditional forward-to-a-friend link, as this post explains.

Don't just put in links to sites like Facebook: actively encourage people to spread the word with appropriate calls to action. You'll find some advice and examples here.

Respect

The importance of respect materializes when you think of an email address as a physical object entrusted to your care. Note the word "entrusted." So your trustworthiness depends greatly on what you do with that address.

It helps to see the email address (and the permission to send emails to it) not as a gift, but as a loan.

Permission is given on a rolling contractual basis. The contract renews only for as long as you continue to deliver relevant, valuable content at acceptable intervals. And only for as long as you take care of that permission by not abusing it.

11. Apply the highest permission standards

You can argue all you like about which form of permission is best for your program. But people trust those who respect their privacy most. Which means obtaining clear and explicit permission. For example:

No misleading text (e.g. "do not check this box if you do not want...") or pre-checked please-opt-me-in boxes
Requiring a second action to confirm the opt-in (like clicking on a link in a confirmation email)
Clear information on what people are signing up for (email type and frequency)

12. Be open about privacy policies

Don't hide behind legal speak, small print and hard-to-find terms and conditions. Make it easy for people to find out and understand what you intend to do with their data.

13. Respect permission even more than you have to

You may have good reasons for renting your list to third parties. You may have good reasons for using your list to promote other parts of the business, sister brands etc.

You may even have got a check mark in the right place "allowing" you to do all these things.

But fact is, people have their own expectations. And that usually means they don't expect ads from a new sender or promoting a new business initiative or company acquisition or partner brand.

If you want to do this, tread carefully. Linda Bustos, for example, has some advice on how to introduce a sister brand without suffering the pitfalls of implied permission.

Technical factors

Anything that helps your emails get delivered to inboxes helps build trust. It doesn't look good when your emails don't arrive or land in junk folders. And building trust across a series of relevant, decent-looking emails only happens if people see the actual messages.

More specifically...

14. Authenticate your emails

Apart from the deliverability benefits, authentication stops certain email clients and webmail services from adding "we're not sure the sender is who they say they are" alerts to your messages.

15. Consider certifying your emails

Again, there are indirect benefits through potential deliverability improvements. Beyond that, certification may also mean images work, links work and trust seals are displayed with your emails.

Certification also forces you to implement other trust-building practices in order to qualify for accreditation.

16. Ensure the technology is responsive

All the technology behind your email system should - doh! - be in good working order.

Two points as far as trust goes: systems should work quickly (send welcome messages immediately, process unsubscribes immediately) and the language used in technical messages to subscribers should be clear. Uncertainty breeds distrust.

17. Give control to the subscriber

Trust comes through openness and what could be more open than letting people control what they receive?

For those who can afford the functionality, build a preference center that lets subscribers go to your website and manage their subscriptions, update email addresses, modify content interests and other preferences etc.

Content

18. Deliver more than just "value"

While trust is certainly improved by delivering valuable, engaging content, have you ever considered delivering value without expecting any in return?

A main premise of email marketing is a value exchange with subscribers. You give them valuable information or offers and they give you money, clicks, attention, pageviews, etc. Everyone's a winner.

But there is always the potential for the nagging doubt that the only reason you're being nice is because you want something in return. "You can't trust them, they're only after your money."

How about doing something for subscribers that has no direct benefit to you? A free gift just for being subscribed? Timely information without any obvious call to action? For example, a bank might reassure subscribers about the current financial turmoil.

Of course it's not really altruistic because it helps trust, loyalty etc. etc. Hence a definition of altruism as enlightened self-interest.

19. Don't break your promises

There are two aspects to this. First, you have a promise built up as a result of who you are. A promise based on what people expect of your organization or brand. Which goes back to the Apple email design example above. If you're a fun-lovin', zany, edgy business, your emails should reflect that.

Second, during the sign-up process and in your welcome email(s) you set expectations for the future: the type, content and frequency of the emails you send. Stay true to that.

20. Avoid grammar and spelling errors

No comment necessary.

21. Check email functionality

Again, part and parcel of email marketing. Do the links work? Do they even exist? A reader just sent me a newsletter from an ESP announcing a new white paper on subject lines, but which had no link to the white paper in it.

22. Use a human voice

As I said earlier, (positive) human interaction breeds trust. Temper your use of jargon, corporate speak, marketing speak, IT department speak and consider adding a human voice where appropriate.

Replace the ESP's template welcome message with one of your own. Replace IT's "Your email has been received" customer service autoresponse with one of your own. Etc. etc.

These suggestions and links will get you started. For more ideas, try this detailed 2004 article from EmailLabs which is as relevant now as it was then.

And if that's not enough, use your comments to share some more ideas. Trust me, all feedback is welcome.

Part 17 coming soon...

Forward to a friend 2.0

2008-10-01T11:14:00.001+02:00

Back when email marketing was new and shiny, a forward-to-a-friend tool was exciting, cutting-edge technology. Everybody wanted one.

And so the "send to a friend" link was born and became a part of the email furniture. You probably have one in your emails.

Do they work? Not often.

Can they work? Most definitely.

But the furniture needs dusting down and a fresh coat of varnish.

It's hard to find people who report much success with a send to a friend link. People discovered that hitting the forward button in their email software was a lot easier than clumsily copying and pasting addresses into online forms.

Send-to-a-friend became a relic, whose purpose is more to remind people to forward an email than serve as a medium for doing so.

Make email forwarding easier

One obvious option is to improve the cumbersome forwarding process. You might mirror the "be my friend" invitation technology used by Web 2.0 applications like LinkedIn to let forwarders import or select addresses directly from their webmail or Outlook accounts.

One vendor has reported up to 15-fold increases in forwards as a result of using such a tool.

Replace it with something better

Sharing content online is now more than forwarding emails. It's Facebook and MySpace and Digg and blogs etc.

So another option is to upgrade "forward to a friend" to "share with others," by replacing the "forward this" link with new links or tools that let recipients re-post content to their favorite social media sites.

The ever-excellent Loren McDonald agrees, noting that such a share facility solves many of the weaknesses of email forwarding. And he has some good suggestions on how to implement the concept.

Loren also cites a case study where one sender saw their message exposed to a much wider audience as a result of incorporating Facebook and MySpace functionality into an email.

It's another super example of how email and Web 2.0 technologies can complement each other (more examples here).

The dangers of sharing

In all the excitement over things like Facebook and Digg, don't forget that there are many folk who never heard of Web 2.0 or don't care to set up a Facebook account or share content on Digg.

Be careful not to annoy or alienate the large "Web 1.0 is enough for me" generation. And don't focus on the sharing mechanisms at the expense of the email's actual content and message.

When the social media links take up more space than the actual content, it's time to reassess both.

The best way to get people to spread your message is to create messages worth spreading. Obvious, but often forgotten in the Web 2.0 frenzy. We're back (again) to the idea of value. As I wrote in an earlier article on Web 2.0:

"All these new tools and technologies, like email itself, are conduits for content. Not an end in themselves."

Also be careful to keep your objectives in mind (another case of "obvious but often forgotten").

The content and messages that are shared most frequently aren't necessarily those that contribute best to your objectives. You are likely looking for more than just "reach." At the very least you want greater reach among your target audience.

Case in point: the most viral content on this blog was a short skit I did on the Internet in Ancient Rome. It hit Digg's front page but contributed a big fat zero to any significant measures of success (subscribers, feed readers, long-term pageview trends etc.)

So by all means track which types of messages are shared most widely. But don't use that as the only guide to planning future messages. Look at all the metrics before picking out "winning" offers, messaging or content.

P.S. If you like this post, consider putting it on Facebook, bookmarking it at del.icio.us, blogging it or running through the office with a copy in your hand shouting "Eureka! Eureka!"

Another reason to think about trust issues

2008-09-29T23:20:00.000+02:00

My never-ending search for email marketing insights sent me to Lehigh University and their study of deceptive behavior online.

The link has the details, but MBA students were much more willing to lie (about small amounts of money) when communicating via email than when using pen and paper.

Email seemingly makes people feel less accountable for what they write.

If we take the study at face value (people lie more when using email), what lessons are there for email marketing?

1. Does the transient nature of email lull you into stretching the truth more than you should? Making commitments you won't keep? Neither help build trust: accountability is the New Email Marketing.

2. Does this concept work in reverse? Are people less trusting of email than the same message in direct mail or other media? What can you do to enhance trust in your messages?

3. Is an additional benefit of sending a combined email/direct mail campaign a trust boost for the email?

4. Whether you think the survey is fascinating insight, self-evident or misguided, it's a reminder that trust matters. (Spammers and phishers have already made this an issue for email marketers.)

5. If MBA students are so willing to lie over what were trivial dollar amounts, is it any wonder the financial system is FUBAR? In email marketing, good ethics is a practical and industry must.

12 questions to ask about your email marketing

2008-09-25T17:03:00.001+02:00

Facing a few days of travel, I jotted down twelve honest questions to ask myself about my own email marketing efforts while away.

You may find value in tackling these yourself. And perhaps you have others to help keep us all away from the black hole of mediocrity (if you do, let me know in the comments).

So...

1. Are you sending out email just because it's scheduled or because it makes sense to do so (for both recipient and sender)?

2. Can you still explain why you send out the emails you do? When was the last time you reviewed your email strategy? How else could you use email to your advantage?

3. Is your email marketing budget based on how much you (don't) want to spend or on how much you want to make?

4. We all agree that you need to do something about inactive addresses on your list. How do you define "inactive"? Have you looked for patterns in the data suggesting critical timeframes or triggers that turn people into inactives? Can you use that insight to develop a preemptive "reactivation" program?

5. What about "actives"? Have you considered rewarding those who have stayed loyal and responsive over a long period of time?

6. Do you worry more about what ISPs think about your email than what subscribers think about your email? If you take care of the latter, won't the former take care of itself?

7. Why are you not testing more? And is the reason a valid one or an excuse? Is it because you're worried you might discover you've left money on the table? Are you afraid to change something just in case it temporarily makes things worse?

8. Are you doing things because it best serves your objectives or because it's what everyone else in your market does?

9. Are you evaluating your program using the numbers produced by your ESP or software? Or are you using this data to produce other numbers that are more meaningful in terms of what you're actually trying to achieve?

10. Why are you happy with your "open" and clickthrough rates? What are you doing about the majority who aren't "opening" or clicking?

11. When was the last time you actively solicited feedback from subscribers? Are you afraid of what they might tell you? Don't you see feedback as valuable intelligence and a conversation starter?

12. Is each email you send out really the best you can do?

Personalization the old-fashioned way

2008-09-24T23:08:00.000+02:00

In her post on beginner mistakes, Anna Billstrom suggests that owners of small lists might apply advanced tactics "by hand": personalizing marketing email with individual notes, etc.

It's a concept that deserves expansion to a wider context.

A lot of winning email tactics are effectively an attempt to automate and reproduce a traditional human exchange of communication.

If you go into a small store and buy a product, you (should) get a kind word and acknowledgment of your purchase.

So we set up order confirmations and thank you emails to reproduce that "real life" process automatically and digitally.

If we hand someone a business card at a meeting asking them to send more details about their product, we expect an immediate response.

The supplier won't take the card wordlessly and walk away: they'll likely express thanks for our interest and maybe talk a little about what we can expect to receive.

So whenever someone signs up to a list, we reproduce that offline experience by triggering a welcome message, about which much has been written (most recently by Dylan Boyd and Justin Premick).

But in the rush to automate, have we forgotten the opportunity to connect the old-fashioned way? With an email "handwritten" by someone?

Now, writing individual notes to each of your 2 million subscribers might be a little resource intensive and raise some ROI issues. That's not what I mean.

There are also clever tools out there that pull content together from different sources to create unique emails based on what you know about the subscriber. So it looks like a "just for you" email. I don't mean that either.

But suppose we think for a moment about how we might react if a particular online interaction took place offline. And use that to decide whether that interaction might justify a more personal email intervention.

Here's what that might mean in practice...

1. Can your system or staff flag customers who make an online purchase that is more than X times the average?

The CEO / sales manager / customer service rep can then send a personal email to that buyer. One that goes beyond the standard platitudes you find in the automated order confirmation that "normal" buyers get.

If you owned a jewelry store, you wouldn't go out front when people buy the $40 friendship ring. But when someone wants the $10,000 diamond engagement ring, wouldn't you be out like a flash to give some personal attention?

2. What about flagging those who buy X times more often than the average customer? Or have been on your list for X years and are still responding?

3. What if someone on your database is blogging about your products and sending you heaps of prospects? Would they deserve a personal email?

4. If sign-ups come from an offline source, how about a field in the welcome message for the "owner" of that source to insert a personal message up top?

"Hi Tom, here's the official welcome to our newsletter. Thanks for signing up for it at the store. If you ever need anything, just call in or you can reach me on jim@bigretailer.com"
- Jim Smith, Manager, Vienna branch.

"Hi Jane, thanks for stopping by our booth at the ACME show last week. Here's the official welcome to the newsletter you asked for. If I can help in any other way, drop me an email at susan@bigb2bsupplier.com"
- Susan Johnson, Sales Manager, NW division.

I'm sure you can come up with more and better examples.

One of my favorite authors on email newsletter issues is Michael Katz. In his latest newsletter, he put it best when he wrote:

"Technology is great, but it's no substitute for human interaction"

Indeed.

(P.S. This kind of personal intervention needn't always be an email, either. A real letter or a phone call might substitute. Remember letters?)

Tags: email marketing, personalization, trigger emails, welcome messages, customer service

Give me a T. Give me an H.

2008-09-24T23:07:00.001+02:00

An A, N, K and S.

Time to publicly thank the companies whose sponsorship support keeps this blog a free, independent, productive and public resource.

Campaigner, who are running a series of 100 daily tips to ensure your retail email program is ready and optimized for the critical sales period from Labor day to the New Year.

VerticalResponse, who have added surveys to their existing email and postcard marketing solutions.

StreamSend Email Marketing, whose deliverability webinar is now open to the public, not just to existing customers.

Listrak, who recently added a Geo Tracking Map feature to their email marketing solution.

EmailReach, who have a free trial of their delivery audit.

mobileStorm, who just released a new white paper on email deliverability.

Topica, who have a 14-day free trial of their email marketing and sales solution.

sendcube, who let you tag your email links to identify broader trends beyond per-link clickthrough data.

Call to what?

2008-09-23T20:17:00.000+02:00

Time for another introductory article for those learning the jargon of email marketing.

This one covers the call to action or CTA. What does it mean? What does a CTA look like? Why is it important? Where can you find more advice on the topic*?

So, um, CLICK HERE to learn more. (Or should that be "continue reading" or "Get it now, you've not a moment to lose!")

*Suggestions always welcome.

Tags: email marketing, call to action, CTA

Don't get too proud about technology

2008-09-22T20:11:00.001+02:00

At its heart, email is simply communicating with people.

I know that. You know that.

Which is why the new email marketing, for example, focuses on relationships and the subscriber as empowered individual.

All the super new tools and technologies developed by email marketing services help make that communication more effective.

Technology enables targeting, trigger emails, tailored content and lots of other tremendous things we'd be hard pressed to implement with Outlook and an abacus.

Technology helps us send more relevant email...but we need to take care how we "present" this relevancy.

If that concept seems a little strange or unclear, consider this example:

Suppose a funky integrated web/email system knows that I visited the digital camera section at your website several times, but never got as far as placing an order.

Technology whips into action, sending me an email with some featured offers from exactly that product group. Relevancy in action. Brilliant.

But is the email made more relevant if you add the words, "We noticed you were browsing the digital camera section, so thought you might like..."?

That approach works for a human-human interaction in a store, where an attentive sales person can helpfully point the bemused browser to the right product.

But when transferred to a digital (email) environment, does this "we noticed" approach come across the same way? I suspect not.

It doesn't add anything to the relevancy of the email, which is self-evident from the offers included. But it does encourage the Uncanny Valley effect. Or as Seth Godin puts it:

"When you get too good at faking it, people freak out."

You can make emails relevant by using what you observe about the recipient (their previous click behavior, their website browsing habits etc.).

You can make emails scary by telling people that you're observing them. Even when your privacy and communication practices are as ethical as they should be.

If you doubt the likelihood of negative reactions to email copy that essentially says "we're watching you," here are two real-world examples:

1. Mathew Patterson discusses the startled reactions of one Dell subscriber to a "You haven't opened our email" message.

2. And Sundeep Kapur describes the Big Brother reaction he felt when a sales rep called and told him what email links he'd clicked on.

It's OK to be pleased about the subscriber insights gained through technology. But it's probably best to be a little circumspect about communicating this fact directly. Agree?

The big image: alternatives

2008-09-18T14:19:00.000+02:00

Many marketing emails begin with a large image. Usually a delightful piece of creative art designed to engage, excite and drive response.

Thanks to image blocking, this visual feast often looks like this when viewed in a preview pane (this is a real example):

A minimalistic work of art commenting on the emptiness of an online existence? Certainly not an "engaging email experience."

So what are your alternatives?

The obvious one is to redesign the email so you do away with the big header image. Use smaller images, throw in some HTML text and effects, etc.. And that's probably your best choice.

But what if you want to keep that big image? What if you want to retain that big visual impact? How do you tackle the blocked image problem illustrated above?

Here are some approaches I've seen...

Alt text

Of course, the first thing you need to do is put in some alt text (see yesterday's article). Since there's plenty of space for it, you can be fairly creative in writing something that encourages people to pay closer attention, scroll down, click, activate images, etc.

Use a preheader

The impact of that beautiful image will not be lost on those who see it if it's preceded by a line or two of preheader text. And those who don't see the image have something to read in their preview pane.

Most preheaders are limited to links to web versions of the email and a plea to get added to an address book. Be more inventive and add in some teaser text that encourages people to pay attention, much like the alt text seeks to do.

Get some inspiration from Chad White's RetailEmail blog, which often features examples of innovative (pre)headers.

Send it to the image-friendly list segment

When I highlighted this idea a while back it got a mixed response. But I've seen it recommended elsewhere since.

How about sending the big image header just to those recipients who opened your last X emails. If they recorded, say, three opens recently, then they must have had images enabled (otherwise the tracking image would not have been triggered.)

This solves the image blocking problem by bypassing it.

Don't specify alt, height or width attributes

A bit experimental this one: you'll need to test it.

If you leave out the alt text and don't specify the height or width of the image, then a small icon-size block or square gets displayed by most clients and webmail services when images are blocked.

(Even Outlook, with its security warning text, will still give you a long thin box.)

This has the effect of lifting the text below the image up into view in the preview pane.

So if images are suppressed, the recipient gets to see what's below the image, rather than just the big blocked image. (Assuming you have some sensible copy, headlines or links below the image, too.)

Ignoring those image attributes is counterintuitive to normal best practices, but might make sense in this specialist case.

Thoughts? Other solutions that let you keep the big image?

Alt text: more thought needed

2008-09-17T12:17:00.000+02:00

We have many truisms in email marketing that seem simple at first, but get more complicated as you dig deeper.

Alt attributes (alt text / alt tags) are a good example. Everyone knows you should use them as part of your strategy for coping with image blocking.

I played around with alt attributes and various email clients and webmail services this week. With some surprising results.

Alt attributes can sometimes hurt your design more than they help. See the test results for details. Get ready to raise your eyebrows.

Tags: email design, alt attributes, image blocking, image suppression

The new email marketing: step back from the canvas

2008-09-16T15:17:00.001+02:00

Part 15 of an ongoing series...

[We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.]

Bullied into attending an exhibition of French [something]ism, the "aha!" moment came when a canvas full of apparently random blobs of paint morphed into a Provence garden when seen at a distance.

(Art lovers have permission to roll their eyes and go "duh!")

Many email marketers are like the myopic gallery visitor: they get too close to the canvas. They only focus on the detail. The next email. The individual blob of paint.

But the recipient of those emails also views the canvas from a distance, where each blob of paint...each email...is part of a bigger picture: the image, experience or brand projected by your organization.

So the new email marketing sees each email in three contexts.

First, it must work as a standalone message, achieving whatever goals are set for that message (driving an immediate sale, confirming an order, etc.).

This is what most of the email marketing literature focuses on.

Second, it must work as part of the total email experience you impose on recipients.

While each email is indeed an isolated experience, it's also part of a sequence of emails that gets delivered to the recipient. (And that sequence includes all the emails from your organization: marketing, transactional, personal...)

So the new email marketing considers how the design and impact of each new email is affected by what went out before. And considers how this design and impact affects what goes out in the future.

Which leads to such questions as:

Is your email output coordinated across the organization?
Are you accounting for all emails when you search for the optimal contact frequency?
Do you think only in terms of immediate response or can you use email to build towards other goals: nurturing prospects, creating long-term loyalty, building expectation, building a brand?

Third, each email must work as part of the wider brand or business. As a point of communication, interaction or information, each email influences how people regard your organization as a whole.

What good is a multi-million branding program when your email's administrative functions are a letdown?

What good is a multi-million branding program when the sender isn't clear?

What good is a multi-million branding program when your order confirmations are banal and uninspiring?

What good is a multi-million branding program when you don't transfer this brand and personality into your emails?

What good is a multi-million branding program when you only use email to offer coupons and discounts?

What good is a multi-million branding program when your local stores or offices are sending email without any guidance?

So...are you applying random blobs of paint or are you building a masterpiece?

In the words of Vincent Van Gogh, himself a dab hand with the paintbrush:

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."

Part 16 coming soon...

Why Hercules never made it past 12 tasks

2008-09-15T18:09:00.002+02:00

Got a cold, it's raining, it's late, so not a time for serious posts or articles...

More email marketing cartoons here.

Weekend challenge: what say you?

2008-09-12T12:38:00.002+02:00

MailChimp just published a report demonstrating how segmentation affects email marketing results.

In short, yep, segmentation boosts responses. But there was an exception...campaigns using list segmentation led to slightly higher unsubscribe rates.

Why do you think that might be?

One theory from MailChimp is "perhaps the segmented campaigns were sent in addition to normal batch-and-blast campaigns, which resulted in annoying duplicate messages."

Or possibly just email fatigue per se?

I wonder if more targeted email might lead to more trust in the sender. So people would be willing to use the unsubscribe link rather than set up a filter or repeatedly delete future emails. (Spam reports didn't increase with segmentation, just unsubscribes.)

Any other ideas?

Is relevant email alienating your subscribers?

2008-09-12T12:34:00.000+02:00

Offering sacrificial cups of tea to the Goddess of Creativity is my preferred option when staring at the blank piece of paper that is destined to be the next email or blog post.

If her absence, many experts would advise reviewing past content or previous sales offers, noting what got the best response, then using that as a guide for future content and new offers.

It makes intuitive sense: through their past clicking behavior, you let your audience self-select topics and offer types. Hurrah! More relevant emails!

Yes...and no.

The problem is that your audience may share certain characteristics, but not all. Allowing self-selection skews content and offers in favor of the group with the loudest voice, potentially alienating the rest and causing knock-on damage to your deliverability and brand.

Let's explore and explain the point...

The audience for my own newsletter consists of people with a shared interest in email marketing. But within that list are groups with different priorities. Some are focused on deliverability. Others on providing email marketing services. Others have a keen interest in design issues.

In fact, I know that I get the best open and clickthrough rates when I feature articles on email design. The temptation, then, is to put more and more design articles in the newsletter to keep response rates up.

But what that means is that the nature of the email newsletter drifts. It morphs from an email marketing newsletter into an email design newsletter.

The result?

Those folk not focused on design become increasingly alienated. They open less, respond less, delete more, unsubscribe more.

But the design folk are thrilled...they open more, respond more, delete less, unsubscribe less.

The average results spat out by the ESP could mask the fact that we now have list apartheid.

First, we've lost influence on a significant portion of the list.

Second, we've changed the list audience to one that no longer matches the brand or target audience of the associated website or business. (Kevin Hillstrom cites a real-world example in this post.)

Third, we may now have a disconnect between the promises made on sign-up pages and what we actually send. So new subscribers will have false expectations. Which in turn leads to disappointment (bad for the brand), and potentially more spam reports (bad for deliverability).

(Yes, we could change the sign-up copy. But when was the last time you looked at yours? And the process of drift is often a subconscious and subtle one that you're not aware of until it's too late.)

The problem is a kind of negative segmentation. We did the right thing by "targeting" our emails, but we're only targeting one segment of the audience. We forgot to address the targeting needs of the other segments.

So what's the solution?

The cheap and easy one (so mine) is to continue to send a mix of content and offers. Enough variety to keep a majority of the audience happy and engaged in the long-term. (My open rates are not falling.)

The better solution is positive segmentation, where you identify these audience segments and then treat each as their own list, with their own stream of emails.

So I could pick out those subscribers who only click on design articles and send them "design" emails. And the rest of the list gets a more balanced mix of articles. Then everyone's happy.

Segmentation works, but needs thought.

Tags: email segmentation, targeting, email marketing

Personality and the pull of Planet Mediocrity

2008-09-10T20:09:00.000+02:00

The natural state of the universe is to gravitate toward chaos. The natural state of an email program is to gravitate toward mediocrity. It has a seductive pull.

One of the jobs of the email marketer is to avoid this mediocrity.

Through an awareness that production ruts are easy to get into, hard to get out of.

Through creativity.

Through a willingness to innovate.

Through quality.

And through inspiration from others.

Those who get the basics right are set fair for the future. But once you've established a quality program, what's next? Is being better than mediocre enough?

What keeps you top?

What's to stop someone else producing "quality content" and stealing your audience?

What makes your emails unique and irreplaceable? (Particularly if you don't have a unique niche or an irreplaceable brand behind you.)

What gives you the edge, so that subscribers would stick with you when they clean up their subscription list?

Developing unique content is a strong option. And Gary Levitt has some ideas on that. (The article inspired this post.)

What about personality?

Personality is how you say it (voice and style) and present it (creative design), rather than what you say and present (content).

Personality can make generic content unique. Personality can turn words and pictures into communication. And personality helps you avoid the natural drift to mediocrity that affects us all.

Quality content, permission, creative design, value, relevancy, timing, personalization, customization etc. are important factors that take your email marketing amplifier all the way up to 10.

But it may be personality that takes you up to 11.

What makes your emails irreplaceable?

Tags: email newsletters

Basics: image blocking, landing pages etc.

2008-09-09T23:36:00.001+02:00

Every now and then, I put up an article with detailed, but clear and jargon-free, explanations of some basic email marketing concepts. For those who don't live and breathe this stuff (which is most people).

The latest appeared today and covers the issue of image blocking. What is it? Why does it matter? What can you do about it?

Other articles in this occasional series include:

Video email update: can you embed them?

2008-09-08T12:43:00.001+02:00

There are three alternatives when it comes to putting videos in email: the embedded code, image and embedded file approaches.

Embedded code

In this approach, the email includes a few lines of HTML which calls or fetches the video file to display and run in the email itself. Much as you might embed a YouTube video in a blog post or web page.

Pros: People can view the video directly in the email. But since the video file is stored elsewhere, the email itself is still a small file: it downloads quickly and takes up no space.

Cons: Well, nearly all the major email clients and webmail services will typically block videos from playing this way. See, for example, these images showing how a Flash movie displays (or not) in Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail etc.

Image

The image approach is the current best practice:

You put the video up on a website.
Then you take a screenshot of the video player in action.
Then you code your HTML to fetch and display this screenshot image when the email is opened, and link it to the web page where the actual video is available.

Pros: This is much safer than the embedded code approach, since images are much more likely to be displayed than video files. You can also be fairly imaginative in how you present the video and encourage people to click on through.

Cons: Images get blocked, too. However, there are tried and trusted solutions to the image blocking problem, most notably adding a text link below the image and using alt attributes in the HTML. See here for more details.

[It's not clear if these two techniques can be applied in the case of "blocked videos," since blocked video content does not degrade gracefully or relatively uniformly in the same way that blocked images do.]

Embedded file

The third approach is to send the entire video file along with the email.

A while back, I reported skeptically on a case study which suggested that embedded video worked. Unfortunately, we didn't know what the author meant by "embedded." Embedded code or embedded file?

Reader Anna Yeaman from graphic design and photography studio Style Campaign kindly took the trouble to find out and report back. The answer was "embedded file."

In this post, she goes into detail describing how you might embed a video file directly in an outgoing email, and she catalogs the results.

As you might expect, some (but not all) important email clients and webmail providers don't support the embedded video Anna used. But when they don't, they still display an associated image and link.

Which suggests this approach offers the best of both worlds: in-email video, but a backup solution if the file won't play.

However, while this looks intriguing from a technical viewpoint, there are practical considerations to worry about. Anna draws out the many pros and cons of the approach herself in the above post. Some additional thoughts...

Sending huge video files might entail significant bandwidth costs for senders
Not to mention how recipients might react, especially when not on fast, desktop office connections
It's not clear how this might affect deliverability
If you're going to send massive emails, they have to be worth the wait for the recipient: there's a bigger onus to provide value with the video
Might this have most value for small B2B lists or more personal B2B messages?
There is some indication that embedded code will work more often in future for certain types of certified emails. In which case embedded files would lose their attraction.

But I'd be intrigued to hear your thoughts on the whole concept...

Tags: video emails