A few years ago, in a different life, I was privileged to work with the folks that first developed reputation engines for spam filtering. I spent 2 years before we rolled it out banging on the drum, warning marketers that Reputation Was Coming And It Would Change Everything. When it did finally arrive, it did change everything, very fast, and most email marketers were left scrambling to adapt or have their email programs fail. For a while, Reputation was enough to stem the tide, but predictably enough, spam evolved and so the spam-fighting systems needed to evolve as well. Enter stage left: Engagement, or how ISPs measure their customer’s interest in the email they get. They measure it any number of ways, some of which are known -including opens, clicks, if mail is moved to or out of the spam folder, if a mailbox is logged into in X amount of time, etc. Of course, there is also the Secret Sauce – ISPs certainly do not reveal more than a fraction of how they do what they do.

Ken Magill wrote an excellent article about the state of email marketing at the moment. He points out that ISPs that do not control their email interfaces the way AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo do, are increasingly turning to blocklist and filter vendors such as Spamhaus and Cloudmark to help control their incoming spam problem, and as Laura Atkins writes, Spamhaus has become increasingly effective in the last year. They and other filter vendors are able to do stuff with their data that wasn’t even imaginable when the reputation engines first came out, allowing for better insight into the email streams, and a decreased ability for bad and marginal mailers to fly under the radar. Better tools mean faster work, which leaves time to pay attention to new classes of email, including ESP marketing mail. Along with this development, ISPs are looking increasingly at content and engagement…and if your content and engagement levels are not acceptable to them, your carefully nurtured brand that once had a good reputation will suddenly lose it and your mail will start getting spamfoldered or blocked outright. Getting that good reputation back is a non-trivial task, as some marketers who ignored best practices over the holiday season are now finding out the hard way.

Marketing mail is increasing steadily in volume, for lots of reasons – maybe the recession is causing people to decide that “best practices” are optional and only matter when the economy is not tanking? If so, they are wrong! There are also a lot of companies getting into email marketing for the first time, who mean well but do not know what the best practices are and so they blunder along until something bad happens that encourages them to find out!

A direct side effect of these things is subscriber fatigue. People are just heartily sick of getting so much email and instead of taking less brutal actions such as choosing to only get mail once a week instead of once a day – assuming that the email marketer that has upset them even offers such an option! – they just unsubscribe. And they don’t look back. There’s an article on Reddit about one guy’s experience with an online petition site which neatly underscores what I just said. If there’s such a thing as “spam rage”, I think it’s in full bloom now. People are just overwhelmed by the amount of mail in their inboxes, and are resorting to slash-and-burn methods to make it stop.

According to Magill’s article, spam complaints are on the rise, ISP filtering is getting tighter, relying on being a big household brand to get by is becoming fruitless, and ISPs are becoming much less responsive to requests for assistance or remediation. Gmail does not offer any avenues of appeal whatsoever, for example.

List hygiene, clean data acquisition practices and analytics are becoming ever more important. Just removing bounces and complainants is not enough to protect your program from engagement based filtering. My observations from where I am sitting these days agree with Magill, as do many of the industry experts that blog. I’ve had some conversations with the folks that pull the triggers at the ISPs and blocklists and they agree, too. This is a dicey environment, it always has been and it’s just getting more so.

Scary business! So what can you do?

There are a lot of things that you can do to help maximize your email marketing program’s effectiveness, beyond using an opt-in program, removing invalid addresses and spam complaints immediately.

Putting “best practice theory” into “best practice reality” is made much easier when you have the right tools to hand. Tools within IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management suite (EMM, comprising Unica Campaign, and eMessage) enable the marketing analyst to add customer identifiers to a global suppression list, to ensure that customers who shouldn’t be contacted, never are. Not even by accident. In addition, analysts can build re-usable lists of customers, known as “strategic segments”, that can be used across marketing campaigns to save time in rebuilding campaign selection logic.

Powerful segmentation functionality is nothing without the power to access data from disparate databases and files in the first place. The reason IBM EMM software is so successful is that your data can stay in situ in your Marketing Data Mart or Data Warehouse, rather than being loaded into another tool before you can work with it. IBM eMessage can draw your data directly from your existing databases.

These features allow the user to create segments that represent individual ISPs and manage their reputation at an ISP level, as well as allowing you to offer products and services to the right selection of people. This helps create positive reactions in your recipients. Careful segmentation is critical for engagement – if you’re a 15 year old girl, you don’t want email about health concerns affecting older men, do you? How many of you folks reading this have gotten mail that is completely irrelevant to you, even offensively so? What is your reaction? At least an eye-roll, and depending on your mood, anything from the eye-roll, up to and including deciding you don’t want mail from that company anymore – you get enough of it from everywhere anyway!

If the worst happens and your reputation takes a dive, then segmentation by ISP can also be a useful tool in damage control – for example, if you’re having trouble with Gmail, you can separate out Gmail customers from the rest of your mailable universe and treat them differently until your reputation with that ISP improves. Ideally, you won’t ever need to do this because you are putting best practices in effect across all ISPs you send to.

It was accepted a long time ago that personalization is a good thing. With IBM EMM eMessage, we now commonly see customers’ PII driving conditional content. If you are willing to go to these lengths to ensure that the customer gets the right message, then why not segment and target carefully? This would allow you to make sure that not only are you maintaining your reputation, but also maximizing your reach. It is also absolutely crucial to your program’s success that you respect your customers by not over-mailing them, keeping content relevant to their desires, and honoring their unsubscribe requests immediately. Failing to respect your customer base drives subscriber fatigue and contributes heavily to decreased IP reputation and inbox placement.

Very often, we find that marketing departments are at best skeptical. and at worst appalled at the suggestion that they remove non-responsive customers from their mailing lists in order to improve their reputation. Yes, at first it seems counter-intuitive…but isn’t this what marketers are supposed to be good at? Segmenting, sampling and splitting?

IBM EMM has a team of people at hand that have broad-ranging and long standing experience in the email marketing world; these folks are available to give expert advice on many of the problems that the evolving anti-spam measures create for marketers.

Old fashioned email marketing programs are becoming increasingly ineffective. We are happy to be able to provide our customers with the tools and advice needed to succeed in navigating the more stringent rules of the new email world.

(This blog post written in collaboration with IBM EMM’s Gordon Patchett, Technical Account Manager extraordinaire. Many thanks for your time, Gordon!)

I spent the better part of the morning reading Altimeter Group’s report, “Make an App for That: Mobile Strategies for Retailers” [http://goo.gl/77JaT]. Chris Silva [http://www.altimetergroup.com/about/team/chris-silva], the analyst who published the report, makes some thought-provoking points about the approaches that many retailers are taking toward engaging people on mobile devices. If you haven’t read the report yet, you should; the report is available to everyone as open research and I suspect it will inform your thinking.

Here’s what stood out for me: the retail business is among the first to experience rapid and permanent change thanks in large part to the ways in which consumers from all walks of life are willingly loading shopping apps on their phones. People want to use their phones to research goods and services, complete a purchase and engage with brands when and how it’s convenient to them. And that leads to mobile.

Here’s an analogy: unless it’s Super Bowl Sunday, you probably don’t enjoy ads when you’re watching TV. That’s because you turned the TV on to watch a show, not to watch ads that may not be remotely relevant to you. But now think about online search. When you’re surfing the web, you’re often looking for commercial information: where to get those new sneakers for your kid, or whether that handbag your wife wants for Valentine’s Day is worth it, what other people thought of that hotel. Search ads, therefore, are not intrusive, but (hopefully) relevant and helpful.

The same holds true on mobile, where people are actively rewarding those brands whose mobile strategies are focused on consumer needs—the need to complete a transaction more quickly, to locate merchandise, to compare prices across multiple shopping apps. As Chris shows in his report, mobile has now become the primary way in which many consumers engage with a brand. That means that what many retailers once considered a nice-to-have has actually become fundamental to their business. If I flip that around, then it’s safe to say that if you haven’t developed a substantive, customer-centric approach to mobile commerce, you’re risking not just your career, but your business.

The brand implications are profound. Consumers expect a consistent brand experience regardless of channel. That seems obvious. But according to Chris and his report, not many brands have cracked the multi-channel nut. Consumers aren’t just using their devices to research an isolated product or two from the privacy of their homes: they’re walking into stores armed with their smart phones and tablets, ready to use their devices to augment their in-store information gathering, research other retailers that carry similar items, and even to discover related merchandise they hadn’t considered. Who knows, these informed consumers may even be teaching your sales teams a thing or two.

When I was a kid growing up in California’s Central Valley (the “Big Valley” made famous by the eponymous 1960s TV show [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058791/] with Barbara Stanwyck, Lee Majors and Linda Evans), I loved watching television. And despite the reference to a “western” show in the preceding sentence, I was actually a sucker for every sci-fi show known to humanity. I suppose you could say that westerns held little thrill for a kid growing up around ranches and farms. But robots and space? Now we’re talking.

In particular, I loved Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078579/], a cheesy camp-fest of a show that I used to watch with my dad. One of my favorite characters was Dr. Theopolis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Theopolis], a large, plate-shaped “super” computer carried around by a robot named Twiki [But it turns out that the reality of the 21^st century far outstrips an imagined 25^th century. How? Because where Dr. Theopolis was presented as a rare and precious (and let’s face it, cumbersome) computer, Smart Phones are all around us. We carry more computing power in our pockets than prior generations could even imagine.

Today, Altimeter Group’s [http://www.altimetergroup.com/] Chris Silva [http://www.altimetergroup.com/about/team/chris-silva] published his report, “Make an App for That: Mobile Strategies for Retailers” [http://goo.gl/77JaT]. Chris argues—and quite correctly, in my experience—that consumer shopping behavior has been forever changed thanks to the explosive adoption of mobile devices. In fact, as his report makes clear, mobile is quickly becoming the primary means by which people interact with a brand. Chris cites data from IBM Benchmark [http://www.coremetrics.com/solutions/benchmark-report-black-friday-cyber-monday-2011.php] data to make the case that retailers need to expand or rethink their mobile strategies to meet changing consumer shopping needs and demands.

So I’m taking it to the street: how do you use your mobile device? And do you think retailers are doing a good job? Let’s get the conversation started.

Recently, a new standard was published, called DMARC. It has caused a lot of discussion and excitement, and people have been asking whether or not they need it.

In short, DMARC is an expansion on the existing DKIM and SPF specifications, designed to increase the effectiveness of anti-phishing programs. It standardizes the use of SPF and DKIM, allowing senders to experience a more consistent result of their authentication programs from ISPs that use DMARC, as mailbox providers will have a reliable set of guidelines on what to do with mail that fails authentication – bounce it, or spamfolder it.

Furthermore, DMARC allows a domain owner to request aggregated and anonymized data from ISPs about email that claims to be from their domain…and creates a way for mailbox providers to supply that data. This data provides some crucial insight into the severity of a given domain’s phishing problem, enabling its administrators to make decisions based on real data rather than informed guesswork. It also allows an entity to have insight into whether or not there is legitimate mail being sent without authentication from somewhere in its organization, which is valuable information.

DMARC allows its users to publish a policy that creates a single point of reference for receivers when deciding what to do about unsigned or badly signed mail. Until now, senders had to contact each ISP in turn and make an agreement as to what would be done in specific cases. DMARC allows the senders to specify their desires in a publishable policy, thus negating the necessity of the non-scaling “call the ISPs and organize what happens with each domain” dance.

This anti-phishing technique greatly simplifies a complex problem, removing a lot of the uncertainty for both senders and receivers, as well as for end-users, who will get exposed to less quantities of dangerous email because the ISPs have a much clearer directive regarding what to do with email that fails DKIM or SPF authentication.

Mike Adkins, one of the contributors in the creation of this new framework, wrote an excellent overview of DMARC, which you can find on the Facebook Engineering Blog.

Do you need it? It depends on what you’re expecting it to do. If you expect it to allow your mail to bypass spam filters – that is not what it will do, so if you’re looking for better inbox placement only, you don’t need it. All it does is give a greater level of confidence that the email is actually from where it claims to be from. If you have a phishing problem, want to tell receivers what to do with mail that claims to come from your domain, that is either not signed or is badly signed, or want feedback on how your authentication programs are working, you need it.

How do you set it up?

Implementation of DMARC is very similar to setting up SPF.  It consists of adding a TXT type DNS record for the domain that you use in the “From” field of your messages (not the Mail From or envelope from address).  So for example, if your messages come from “support@greenapple.com”, you would create a TXT type DNS entry for the following domain:  _dmarc.greenapple.com.
Here is an example DMARC entry:
_dmarc.greenapple.com  TXT  “v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:spoofreports@greenapple.com ruf=mailto:spoofreports@greenapple.com”

This entry would tell the receiver:  “for every message that fails authentication, don’t reject it, but do send reports of the spoofing to spoofreports@greenapple.com.”

If you want receivers to reject your mail, then you would use the policy attribute ‘p=reject’.

If you want receivers to not necessarily reject spoofed mail, but treat it with more suspicion, then you would use the policy attribute ‘p=quarantine’.

All three policy attribute values (none, reject, quarantine) result in reports getting sent to the addresses you specify with the “rua” and “ruf” attributes.  These reports will be sent in a new format AFRF, which is similar to ARF, so that you can build automated handling around it.

Many thanks to the people who put so much time and effort into making email safer!

IBM Named a Leader in Cross-Channel Campaign Management by Independent Research Firm

IBM was once again named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q1 2012.  The report states that “IBM’s acquisition of both Unica and Coremetrics was a clear signal to many marketers that the technology giant intended to dominate the enterprise marketing technology landscape.” In fact, IBM had the highest score in the areas of campaign design, campaign execution and data management.

Click here for the full report.

One of the most dramatic NFL games ever played was Super Bowl XLII pitting the undefeated (18–0) New England Patriots led by record-setting quarterback Tom Brady against the surprising NY Giants with young, unproven Eli Manning at the helm.   A thrilling, some say shocking victory for the Giants ended the Patriots’ bid to be the only 19–0 undefeated champion in league history.   And now Super Bowl XLVI –  The Rematch —   anticipated to be the most watched American television show in history, promises to take social media to a whole new level.

As my colleague, and former NFL player Kevin Nosbusch posted on Wednesday, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab are conducting the first sentiment analysis of the two Super Bowl quarterbacks to illustrate how new analytics technologies make it possible to quickly assess the positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared by fans.

Why is this sentiment analysis important to IBM? In addition to being a longtime partner of the NFL, IBM recognizes that its clients, just like football players, are closely connected to their brand presence.

Using advances in analytics companies, academics, journalists can gain new insights into consumer perceptions via social media on endless topics from football and baseball to movies and retailing. Technologies can even distinguish irony and figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.

Branding Upset on the Digital Playing Field

The Super Bowl analysis shows us that today the two quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Eli Manning are in statistical dead heat:  Brady earning 65% positive sentiment and Eli Manning earning 62% positive sentiment.  That actually represents a big branding upset on the digital playing field. Most sports and marketing followers would assume that Brady should be far ahead given his lofty status as an elite QB for many years and three championship rings.

Other noteworthy findings show that wide receivers have upstaged the quarterbacks, who are being positioned in the news media as the chief protagonists — Wes Welker is #1 in positive sentiment and Victor Cruz is a close 2nd.  Interestingly Brady leads by 3% points, exactly the point spread Las Vegas oddsmakers have favored the Patriots.

So while it looks like Tom Brady is going into the game as the Social MVP, now is not the time to get cocky.  Eli Manning is holding his own against the more experienced Brady in terms of positive sentiment.

The IBM USC analysis illustrates the potential insight and benefits that social media analytics can deliver to a brand — whether you’re a professional football player or a global enterprise. Businesses that ignore the impact of social media will be stuck on the sidelines.

Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

See the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKJR6oTJsmw&feature=player_embedded

I feel compelled to say that I’m an avid reader of EaterSF; the recommendations have fueled numerous food adventures in and around San Francisco. That being said let me also state this is not meant to lambast or endorse the editors of this newsletter, only as a vehicle for creative analysis.

As you can see it’s a fairly straightforward newsletter: a two column design with clear branding at the top of the email. Looks good, right? Right, but a web preview is not the experience a reader has across email clients and platforms.

Email is a core channel for establishing and growing customer loyalty, increasing sales and driving activity across social networks. For an email to be successful and address the reading habits of the connected consumer it has to be accessible and readable across a wide variety of platforms. To be cross-channel and email has to be built according to best practices for cross channel design.

The template for this newsletter is set to 830 pixels; this is too wide when you take into account the viewable dimensions of mobile handsets. Even if you don’t take into consideration a mobile handset and you want to code for the 1990’s, a screen resolution of 800×600 would mean the recipient is forced to scroll left to right to see the full text of the email.

What should the width be?

There are generally two ways of approaching this: 1) either set the width to FULL in which case it gains a little elasticity and adjusts the dimensions of whatever device it’s viewed on. 2) Try shrinking the physical dimensions to 620 pixels or less.

Common formats for today’s newsletters are strikingly thin, many of them favor a single column layout. The less-is-more paradigm forces marketers two do a couple things: be selective about your graphics as they eat both vertical and horizontal space. More importantly, be selective with the information in the email as you don’t want to over power the recipients ever shrinking attention span.

Even in a webmail client like Yahoo! recipients are forced to scroll left to right when viewing this at 1024×768 pixels as seen through IBM Unica Email Optimization’s eDesign Optimizer.

One thing EaterSF’s designers should consider is shrinking this to a single column layout and using smaller images. But how do you know if eliminating a column would help or hurt the campaign? In a word: Data! Track each link and test varying versions of the email to random splits. If you are driving significant traffic from one column versus another then perhaps that should be the main column, or the content of that column is more appealing. Don’t take the plunge until you know the temperature of the water.

Another thing to keep in mind…

Width isn’t the only problem with this creative; the email has no left-right margins. When the email is rendered it comes to the very edge of the email client/device. Why is this a problem you ask? Words at the edge of a mobile device tend to be harder to read. Users are often forced to shrink or enlarge an email because black device borders tend to make black text abutting the border illegible.

Build your email templates with a little padding by either putting a DIV around it that gives you 5-10 pixels of breathing room on either side. If you’re thinking “well there’s so little room already with mobile devices” then you’re right. There is less space, but the space on a mobile device is incredibly precious, if your recipient can’t read the email quickly without having to use two fingers to interact with the message vs. 1 to scroll down to read more, you’re “leaving clicks on the phone.”

Make it readable!

There’s a reason webkit has a minimum font size, so your customers can read your messages. Sure, sometimes overriding the minim font size of 13 pixels will ensure layout integrity. However, if you’re protecting your layout at the detriment of the readability of the message then you should re-examine your layout and consider not shrinking your font to easily readable proportions.

So to summarize…

1. Keep your layout to 620 pixels or less to ensure the ability of your emails to be read on more devices and in more email clients.
2. Give your text and email contents a chance to breath and build your template with borders to keep text away from the edge of the template
3. Make it readable and if you have to override the default text size, but truly, use your judgment: if you have to squint to read it, so do your customers!

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Product Marketing Mgr.
IBM Enterprise Marketing Management

It’s January and the beginning of a bright, shiny new year. I like to start the new year thinking about what happened over the last year—those things that stayed with me and that are likely to continue to affect my life in some way.

Like most people, when I heard that Steve Jobs had passed away late last year, my first thoughts were for his grieving family. But then I started to think about the many ways in which Jobs had shaped our lives, changing our culture and our collective frame of reference with his innumerable, ingenious devices. It struck me that the genius of iTunes—the first game changer that ushered in the Smart Phone era—was that it recognized for the very first time that people want to have total control over their music: where they listen to it, when, on what device. It sounds simple now, but it was far from obvious then.

This same notion that we as consumers are exerting greater control over the media that surrounds us is also playing out in a very real and compelling way in ecommerce. Consider that for the entire month of December 2011 [http://ibm.co/xCMtko], 14.6 percent of consumers used a mobile device, not a PC, to access an online retail site. That’s more than double the rate of 5.6 percent over this same period in 2010. Also in December 2011, 11 percent of online sales came through a mobile device, versus December 2010 when only 5.5 percent of sales came from mobile devices.

The fact is that consumers today are exerting greater and greater control not just over their media (if the iTunes example didn’t convince you, consider that we have collectively all-but obliterated Prime Time TV thanks to the time-shifting wonders of Netflix, Roku, Hulu, etc.), but over the brands that matter to them. Using an arsenal of social media tools combined with a dynamic and utterly transparent wisdom-of-the-crowds approach to evaluating the goods and services offered to them, consumers have turned commerce on its head.

Many consumers believe that they have the right to voice their opinions about a brand or good or service on any of a number of channels from Twitter to YouTube. They also believe their opinions to be as valid as anyone else’s, up to and including the top executives behind the brand or good or service under discussion. Their fellow consumers share this perspective, trusting in the opinions of complete strangers much more so than in advertising. It’s a dynamic we see over and over again across social networks.

The gotcha is that while consumers may believe that they’re now firmly in control of their relationships with brands, many brands have been slow to embrace this change. And by the way, this change is not in the process of happening. It has already happened. Or as my colleague, Steve Cowley, put it, “it starts on the street.” See Video.

Let me start by saying happy New Year! We hope that the final days of 2011 were spent relaxing with friends and family and that whatever final marketing pushes you might’ve been engaged with went off smoothly and effortlessly. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way: welcome to 2012! What better way to start 2012 than by reviewing the last quarter of 2011? High points, low points, let’s soak up the learnings from the entire year; let’s take it all in and hope that it helps us steer the ship into smoother waters in the year to come.

Overall Deliverability

Sometimes no news is good news, or so the saying goes. In this case the news is the same as the quarter before: overall deliverability held firm at approximately 83.25%.

I don’t mean to sound despondent about it, and really I’m not. Given micro trends we witnessed with certain ISPs around the all important Black Friday and Cyber Monday retail events, overall deliverability holding firm is a good thing. We don’t have to brace ourselves for a cataclysmic shockwave; rather we can spend the opening months reviewing what’s worked and what hasn’t worked as a means of constant self-improvement.

What can you do with this information?

• Prioritize your efforts. Not every problem is mission critical. Deliverability is fluid and constantly evolving. Knowing that your overall deliverability is ahead of the average positions problems into perspective as they arise.
• Set your goals. If your overall deliverability is below average, then there’s an endemic problem in either your list or content or both and you should stop, take a long hard look at what you’re doing and make changes that will positively impact not only your deliverability rate, but your ultimate bottom line.
• Give yourself a pat on the back. If you’ve made it this far and found yourself capable of delivering at a sustained rate that meets your business needs, then you deserve a pat on the back. But don’t rest on your laurels; emerging channels have their own needs and nuances. You need to experiment in order to stay ahead. Take some chances. Be creative. Stagnation is the fast road to failure.

Deliverability Across Major ISPs

Delivery rates to AOL, Yahoo! and Gmail follow the trend of overall industry deliverability I mention above. In some cases one ISP is a little bit better than another. Hotmail continues to be a problem for numerous marketers with average inbox placement 10% or lower than other ISPs.

Remediating Hotmail Deliverability

Although Microsoft’s policies appear to make consistent inbox deliverability more difficult they do provide marketers with a significant number of tools to help them.

• JMRPP – The Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program is Microsoft’s feedback loop. Marketers that apply and qualify for this program will receive complaints generated by individuals who clicked the ubiquitous spam button to a preselected address. This is a critical mechanism to help sustain ongoing list health. Its important to establish feedback loops where possible and ensure whatever mechanism processes the complaints is constantly operational. Checks and balances make the difference.
• SNDS – Smart Network Data Services is a monitoring tool that yields valuable information about your IPs and domains, how many traps you may have hit in the course of normal operations, and how the smart screen filters have reacted to your mailing. Data is provided one day in arrears. Cross-referencing the data from SNDS with your own targeting and delivery data will yield valuable insight on the perceived health of your chosen segment or campaign at the domain or ISP level.
• SIDF Cache – To ensure a minimal latency between publishing your SPF/SenderID records and Hotmail picking them up, Microsoft has setup a manual method for you to submit those records to a cache. If you aren’t using SPF/SenderID well it’s a new year and you should resolve to add those records. If you are, then it never hurts to ensure all the records are properly submitted to the right places.
• List Unsubscribe Header – Help your customers help you by giving them an option to unsubscribe directly in the webmail header of Hotmail. By publishing a List Unsubscribe header (see RFC 2369) your emails will automatically appear with an Unsubscribe option as part of the Hotmail interface. Customers who no longer wish to receive your emails will not have to scroll to the bottom to find that carefully hidden link (which consequently you should make plain as day) but rather have the option, there at the top, to click the Unsubscribe link rather than the spam button.
• Adjust your targeting – One of the major reasons marketing email winds up in Hotmail’s spam folder has to do with overzealous targeting. Don’t send everyone the same message all the time. By sending emails to old, inactive addresses you’re setting yourself up for either a bounce or click of the spam button. Too many of either is potentially disastrous to the entire campaign. Chose your recipients based on recent activity and modulate your deliveries. By trimming the oldest and worst performing 5% of your list you give the other 95% a strong chance at the inbox.
• If all else fails contact the Hotmail Postmaster team using their online form.

Creatures of Habit vs. Creatures of Opportunity

Opportunity lurks around every corner, but in order to take advantage of that opportunity we have to get out of our old habits and adopt some new ones. For years I’ve been saying that the tribally accepted wisdom of Tuesday and Thursday as the best days for delivering email are based on assumptions and technologies that are dated.

Based on our data Thursday – Sunday trend higher than the first half of the week. Ok, so you have to change half your habits, not quite all of them. The point here is that tribal wisdom was based on limited mobility. Our audience is incredibly mobile wielding smart phones and shooting off texts and mobile emails with agile thumb work. Take into account today’s platform and device landscape and use your intuition tempered with good data to establish your mailing days. Business as usual may be leaving dollars on the table.

Ask yourself this as you ponder the possibility of shifting your chosen weekly delivery day: which day do you see the most number of your competitors’ emails in your inbox? If you’re mailing on the same day then congratulations, you’re following the cattle call. If you’ve spent time to isolate mobile users, determine when you’re seeing the most mobile traffic on your site, track high rates of web purchases, then you’ve a pretty good grasp on the opportunities that lay outside of what everyone else is doing.

The same rules apply to finding key opportunities by hour for delivering email. Ample delivery windows during high peaks of deliverability exist during the evening. Most marketers front load the day assuming that email will be digested as people arrive to the office. The truth is that email is consumed from the moment someone wakes up to the moment they go to sleep thanks to smart phones, I know you’re blushing, but seriously, I do the same thing! The optimal delivery window is the one you find based on the browsing and purchasing habits of your customers. Assume that delivery times are as fluid as days and should be established based on behavioral data.

The Mobile Year In Review

By now mobile marketing is old hat. There’s no news in the fact that mobile, as a channel and platform, is not only viable but also red hot! If you read our Holiday Benchmark you know that mobile devices played a major role in the success of this holiday season. Here’s another look at how mobile grew over 2011 and more importantly how it soared around the holidays!

Mobile is more than just a boon to retailers during holiday peaks; mobile connects people in ways never before imagined and empowers creative thinkers to come up with exciting new possibilities like the QR code driven grocery store in Korea. Mobile is an inbox in every user’s pocket and that liberates you from thinking of your campaigns, calls to action and content as something to be experienced seated in front of a monitor. What does this mean? It means be succinct, be timely, be selective and be direct in your communications. Always assume that they are being viewed and consumed on mobile devices.

Global Deliverability

However much excitement we may find in the possibilities surrounding mobile marketing and more importantly, mobile email, we have to keep in mind that different markets, just like ISPs in North America, have very different requirements surrounding email.

If you thought that living with an average deliverability rate in the low 80’s was difficult in North America then chances are that the delivery rates in the APAC region will leave you completely dismayed.

It should come as no surprise that delivering email to China is no easy task because Chinese ISPs have to comply with censorship laws and have added filtering and security in place to mitigate unwanted email traffic. Marketers would be well served to read Article 57 of the Regulations on Telecommunications of the People’s Republic of China and consult with their legal counsel.

Germany has some of the strictest privacy laws in the EU limiting the ability of German ISPs to offer feedback loops without end recipient permission. Marketers have to be aware of these nuanced situations and take into consideration local custom and law when deciding on how to approach digital messaging in a particular market.

Setting Your Sights On 2012

As I said before, resting on your laurels isn’t allowed. You may want to start 2012 by dissecting your successes and failures, capitalizing on what worked and adjusting what didn’t. But don’t stop there. Have you been monitoring your social presence and are you leveraging content that is driving traffic across channels? No? Do you know who your social influencers are? Well then you have your homework cut out for you.

• Re-examine your opt-in and registration pages. Do you really need someone’s Fax number for your records? I don’t think that today’s teenagers even know how to use a fax machine. Why not ask potential subscribers what their twitter handle is, or if they’d like SMS delivered to their mobile phones.
• Connect the dots. You have data in all kinds of places and you should find ways of not only merging data silos, draw unique conclusions based on multi-sourced data. Make your data paint a more thorough picture of your customers by tying these data sources to unique profiles thereby creating more customer centric profiles.
• Send smarter communications, not more of them. I regularly unsubscribe from newsletters and companies that think sending me 2-3 promotions a day is a good idea. I bet you do the same thing. If you you’ve done your homework and acquired more actionable data about your customers then you know you can reach them on Facebook (assuming you setup a welcoming company page), send them a tweet or an App message (if you have a dedicated mobile app).

In today’s world there are numerous means to reach customers; you don’t have to exhaust your customer’s inboxes in order to meet your bottom line. Staying relevant means cross-channel optimization and that doesn’t mean creating the same cadence across all channels but rather modulating them.

Personally I’m excited about 2012. With so many options and platforms to choose from the only thing holding you back is you. Go ahead, get creative, for every failure you will have two or three ground breaking successes. Experimentation will ensure that you remain relevant & in lock step with the opportunities of tomorrow.

Cheers!
Len Shneyder
Product Marketing Mgr. | @LenShneyder
IBM | Enterprise Marketing Management

Today IBM announced its intent to acquire DemandTec, Inc., one of the leaders in cloud-based pricing, promotion, and merchandising analytics. This deal, which is of course subject to DemandTec shareholder approval and all of the usual closing conditions, will allow our Smarter Commerce customers to better define and deliver the best prices and product mix based on consumer buying trends.

The thinking behind the acquisition is simple: to help our clients succeed in a world of highly empowered customers. This means that we aim to be the key partner to help our customers be both relevant and consistent in their engagements with their own customers across all channels—while still competing against all other companies who are trying to do the exact same thing.

Furthermore, rapidly shifting customer and business trends require companies to be highly responsive to changes in demand. By extension, setting and executing the right pricing strategy and the ability to automatically adjust it based on online and offline data is a key competitive advantage for businesses. That’s where DemandTec comes in. DemandTec delivers science and agility to help organizations optimize their price, promotion, and product mix within the broad context of enterprise commerce: retail, B2C, and consumer goods.

Our proposed acquisition of DemandTec will extend IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions by enabling companies to use cloud computing services to gain broader insights about customer merchandising and pricing preferences to better market, sell and deliver the right product at the right time, at the right place, and at the right price. DemandTec will enrich our market-leading Smarter Commerce portfolio, which includes Websphere Commerce and solutions acquired from other technology visionaries, including Sterling Commerce, Unica and Coremetrics. DemandTec will also expand IBM’s SaaS strategy by adding new, subscription-based offerings to our SaaS solutions portfolio and will deepen our suite of offerings targeted at merchandising, sales, and marketing professionals.

Of course until the deal closes, we’ll continue to operate as two separate businesses. In the meantime, my team and I will look forward to welcoming DemandTec’s employees, clients, and partners to IBM.

Thanksgiving has always fascinated me. It’s the one day a year that every American family is eating basically the same meal (with a few variations, of course) and watching football and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The entire country stops and collectively does the same thing.

Now we can add one more national activity to Thanksgiving Day: shopping. Who would have thought that Americans would actually want to shop on a national holiday? Actually, my team and I don’t just think that people want to shop: we know it. We use IBM digital analytics to track—in real time—what’s happening in online retail across the U.S. every day of the year. We know that this year, for example, online retailers will bring in record Thanksgiving Day sales.

Americans want to shop on Thanksgiving, but the way they shop has changed dramatically. If you’ve heard me speak at the IBM Marketing Innovations Summit, you’ll know that I’ve long said that the traditional, funnel-based approach to marketing is broken. Consumers are smarter and more sophisticated about the many ways they can use technology to redefine the shopping experience on their terms. Want to save a buck? Look for promo codes online (you might also be able to redeem them in store).  Worried about in-store inventory levels for that game your son absolutely has to have? Hop online to see if your local store has it in stock or skip the worry altogether and just buy it online.

The point is that consumers today have a technology arsenal that they can use to research online and then channel hop at will. That’s a game changer. It places tremendous pressure on businesses to offer a consistent, engaging, brand-relevant multi-channel experience.  At the same time, it turns the concept of brand loyalty on its head. People are now only as loyal as their last experience was satisfying. I call this “experiential loyalty,” and it forces businesses to center themselves on their customers and what these customers consider important. What you think is important doesn’t matter: act on what your customers tell you is important.

I don’t mean to underplay how difficult it can be to consistently deliver marketing so relevant that your customers consider it a service. Marketing in the age of the empowered consumer can be challenging.  As my colleague, Annalivia Ford, has so eloquently said, no one wants to be the guy who annoys a customer into abandoning a brand they used to love.

IBM is on a mission to fix marketing for the benefit of the consumer. We call our approach Smarter Commerce and we believe this market represents a $70 billion opportunity. My former Unica team has been combined with Coremetrics to deliver the broadest range of enterprise marketing management solutions available anywhere.

We’re up to the challenge of redefining marketing. Are you?

A couple of weeks ago when I wrote about online shopping trends and predictions for this holiday season, I focused largely on the rise of the mobile shopper. Today in honor of Black Friday, I’d like to focus instead on social shopping.

Social shopping, as I’m sure most of you know, refers to those people who turn to their social networks for advice or research when they’re considering a purchase. Seems like a pretty intuitive concept. But the fact is that I’ve spoken to far too many retailers who have either discounted the notion that social shopping will ever make significant contributions to their bottom lines or who throw up their hands in frustration and say something along the lines of “I just don’t understand how to use it to drive revenue.”

These are the kinds of perspectives that drive retailers out of business. Here’s why. IBM data shows that people who arrive at a retailer’s site from Facebook are nearly twice as likely to buy something than other people. Put another way, social media’s ability to influence consumer behavior far outstrips that of other channels.

The reason lies in the very nature of social media. Social media is built on the premise that one person’s opinion is not only as valid as anyone else’s, but that it’s authentic and therefore trustworthy. People tend to trust someone (even a perfect stranger) who has taken the time to post an opinion on a Facebook page much more than they trust an ad. More to the point, IBM data shows that people are willing to act on the opinions of strangers. It turns out that even on the Internet, it’s the human relationship that matters.

What we’re talking about is the evolution of the Internet from a click-based experience to a people-based experience. Rather than clicking through pages and pages of Google search results, people are turning to their social networks for advice. Consumers have the ability to exert influence over brands in ways that weren’t possible before the rise of social media. What’s more, they know it. IBM’s Yuchun Lee has often said that social media is like “truth serum” for businesses. Use that to your advantage.

The implications for retailers (or any business) are clear: you must identify, nurture and promote brand advocates, ratings and reviews, and social conversations. These are the people whose opinions will influence your sales across a network of people everywhere. Social shopping matters for one achingly simple reason: in the age of the empowered consumer, you are marketing and selling your goods and services to people who have a multitude of ways to broadcast their opinions to thousands upon thousands of other people (and potential customers).

If you don’t care about social shoppers, you’re in the wrong business.

With the holiday week upon us marketers are kicking their programs into high in hopes of achieving maximum inbox placement, clicks and ultimately, conversion.  The economy has made the battle for holiday dollars fierce. Consumers are looking for the best deals and marketers are eager to pack their inboxes with as many relevant offers as they can.

It’s understandable that sending a volley of emails detailing fantastic products, promotions, specials, exclusive savings, buy one get one, two for the price of one, discontinued stock discounts and other offers seems like a really good idea. And in essence it is a good idea when you consider how important it is for you to make sales and impressions ahead of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday super retail events.

However, I would urge caution before letting lose your creative advertising talent without first thoroughly vetting the deliverability of those efforts. You see your competition is doing the exact same thing. In order for you to succeed you have to differentiate yourself from every offer in the inbox, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First you have to actually reach the inbox and let me caution you by saying, not all inboxes are created equally.

As we start the holiday week it appears as though 3 of the 4 major global ISPs, AOL, Gmail & Yahoo! all show deliverability in what we commonly accept as the industry standard range: approximately 80% inbox. As you can see there are fairly broad variations with AOL at times slipping below 80%, while Gmail appears to offer the best deliverability with a peak of over 90% inbox placement.

If we accept that 1 in 5 emails never reaches the intended inbox, and winds up either blocked or in the spam folder then Hotmail appears to be doubling that metric with deliverability averaging just over 66%. This means that almost 2 in every 5 emails lands in the spam folder or doesn’t reach the intended recipient.

By now your lists have been pulled and your segments readied with offers and digital collateral to engage your customers across any and all channels simultaneously.  However, it’s never too late to spend a few minutes and consider tactics and methods for ensuring your messages actually reach your customers.

• Less is more – email is not a volume sport where you deliver every message to every person who ever signed up for an email. Quite the contrary, the less you send, and the more targeted your messages are, the more likely you will build a positive reputation at the receiving ISPs.
• Email only active users – consumers change email address, close accounts and ISPs routinely turn closed or inactive accounts into spam traps or honey pots. If you email every one on your list since the dawn of time you will invariably deliver messages to spam traps that will cause the rest of your wanted mail not to arrive.
• Find your optimal delivery window – track your competition’s emails, see when they send them, most marketers believe that Tuesday and Thursday AM are the best times to deliver email, look for opportunities where your brand can stand out from the crowd because you’re not launching your emails during the thickest marketing pushes. Remember, the first email to reach the inbox is often the message at the bottom of the list.
• Authentication is key – test your domains and IPs, ensure that you have the proper and valid SPF/SenderID, DK & DKIM records for all outbound email traffic. Help the ISPs by differentiating your email traffic from the vast volumes of SPAM lobbed at ISPs on a daily basis.
• Send constant volume – in keeping with the paradigm of less is more, less more often is often better than more at one time. By sending constant manageable volumes you will establish and build a strong reputation, given you’re emailing people who want to receive your messages, rather than that one final push where you launch a major campaign across IPs that irregular amounts of traffic sent across them. Active IPs with positive reputation have more chances of delivering email to the inbox than inactive IPs that suddenly show volume spikes.
• Test your email templates – creativity abounds around the holidays, but keep in mind you have a brand to protect. Make sure whatever special templates you use are single column, include a text part if you’re sending multi-part mime, and that you’ve thoroughly tested the content to ensure deliverability at the major ISPs before going to market with one-off designs.
• Stand out from the crowd – leverage data across channels to make smarter decisions as to where and when your customers are engaging with your brand. If you can track activity and link shares across social networks instead of sending social fans emails, try and communicate with them through social media.

By taking a few basic steps marketers can help ensure that they will stay at the top of their customer’s inboxes rather than at the bottom of their spam folders.  As the week goes on we will be providing you key information to help you see and contextualize your efforts. We’re tracking deliverability and other metrics across mailers and ISPs around the globe. Look for updates as we get closer to Cyber Monday and then a post-mortem analysis the day after.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder | @lenshneyder
IBM EMM Product Marketing MGr.

As clocks roll back and the days grow shorter, we’re going to pause and review last quarter’s (Q3) deliverability across email, mobile and social messaging to get our bearings as we head into this holiday season. It’s more important than ever to mine data, extrapolate trends and make strategic decisions based on good tactical analysis as many marketers prepare for their most crucial marketing pushes of the year.

Deliverability Holds Strong in Q3

On average, 1 in 5 emails wind up in either the spam folder or is blocked outright. This has been a long held statistic to describe average deliverability across industries—this continues to be the case Q3 of 2011.

However, the average is not reflective of all industries and verticals out there. Across different retail sectors we’ve seen deliverability as high as 95% on average and as low as 75%. Travel and hospitality remain strong with an average 92% deliverability, while Publishing has languished at 73%. It’s important to recognize how the industry as a whole is performing in order to set realistic goals for the coming quarters.

Weekly Deliverability

As has been the case for a long time, Tuesdays and Thursdays are still the strongest days for marketers to deliver their emails. Email marketing appears to follow the workweek in lock step. On average, since Q1 2011, we’ve seen deliverability improve on an average of 2-5% for Monday-Thursday. In Q1 deliverability to the inbox on Mondays averaged 78.6% while in Q3 it’s risen to just over 83%. This is good news for marketers and probably gives many of them justification to not make any changes moving into the holiday season.

It’s hard to justify experimentation during crucial periods of the year. However, opportunity does exist outside of the traditionally coveted days of Tuesdays and Thursdays for intrepid marketers. Weekends show much higher deliverability and the added bonus of less competition. If we think about this logically then we can assume that patterns of engagement that relied on consumers being present either at work or at home in front of their PCs no longer paint an accurate picture. Because of this, weekends are fertile ground for ongoing campaigns.

If you don’t take my word on it, just see how many of your competitors are experimenting with weekend driven campaigns. Test small portions of your house file and see if they respond to offers on weekends only vs. those that receive them during the week. This will help you determine of weekend campaigning is right for your brand and consumer demographics.

Human Behavior Drives Mobile & Social

Reliably, human beings are creatures of habit. Their habits in regard to mobile engagement have remained relatively similar over the last three quarters. Mornings show less mobile engagement but it grows rapidly as we approach the noon hour, after which it remains high but tapering off as we move into the evening.

Consumers are no longer tied to a desk; smart phones have enabled them to stay connected everywhere. To take advantage of your consumer’s mobility and their new patterns of cross-channel engagement, it’s important to track and understand who is using what kind of device and where.

Use this keen information to selectively deliver optimized messages during strong hours of mobile engagement, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM. By doing so you give your emails the best chance to grab the consumer’s attention and be at the top of their inbox.

Design Across Devices & Platforms

Marketing collateral design remains an important factor in today’s digital messaging. Based on our findings the full message view is beginning to hedge out the preview pane among consumers reading email across platforms, channels and devices. This may in part be due to smart phones and tablets which don’t employ a preview pane due to size constraints. Robust design in today’s world is one that can cross channels, devices and platforms, marketers have employed simple elastic formats to achieve the most uniform designs. When planning cross channel designs keep in mind a few basic rules:

• Use a single column design that renders across mobile, desktop and web email clients seamlessly.
• If the call to action is hard to read or press on your phone, then it’s just as hard on your customer’s handset. Keep it clear and straightforward and you’re likely see a higher conversion rate.
• Let your text breathe—use a 10 pixel border and keep content from the edges of your layout, as it can be difficult to read when text comes up to the very edges of a mobile screen.
• Don’t forget your ALT Tags. Although marketers enjoy the default image ON feature of devices such as the iPhone and iPad, you have to take measures to protect your brand in web email clients and desktop email clients where images may be off by default.
• Your landing pages are just as important as your emails; optimizing them is part of the overall cross-channel optimization design strategy. If you convinced someone to click a link in your email, imagine their surprise when the page isn’t optimized for their mobile device.
• Not all browsers are built the same; test your email across browsers and versions of those browsers. Given the fact that Microsoft is only now retiring Internet Explorer 6 (10 years later), there’s a wild mix of browser versions out there each with their own nuances. What works in one browser may not work very well in another. Compound that with how different and varied the rendering engines of webmail clients are and you have a cornucopia of design permutations for which to code and anticipate. If you’re uncertain what should be your lowest common denominator, then might I suggest you look no further than the World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML standard and test your code against their code validators for code compliance.

Users are increasingly cross channel in their media consumption habits and how they engage with brands. Marketers have to think similarly in order to anticipate and deliver high quality content to engage and sustain lasting conversations.

Social Continues to Grow

Social media and the growing social marketplace continue to make their mark on today’s marketing world. We examined a few dimensions related to the social marketplace to understand how email influences and drives content across channels and helps enforce a brand’s presence from one digital messaging stream to another. Mobile devices continue to feed the social media marketplace growing significantly, almost 50% (from 11.25%) in Q1 of 2011.

Compelling content is the foundation of social media. The two major social networks, Facebook & Twitter, attract fairly different levels of engagement and content. Tweeting appears to be more mechanical than posting to Facebook. The relative speed of tweets and audience makeup differs from the social networks of most users that can include family members and close friends. Posting to Facebook reaches a more personal audience than twitter and users seem to limit what they post to Facebook a bit more than what gets tweeted to the greater world audience. This means two things for marketers:

• Ensure your content has clear mechanisms allowing users to share it through their social networks
• Create engaging content that is likely to be shared among more trusted circles such as Facebook

Conclusion

Although the coming holidays may seem bleak with the current economic outlook, the potential for reaching today’s consumers and the avenues that marketers can take to do it are numerous. Smartphones have enabled consumers to take their inboxes on the road and creative marketers can take advantage of Location Based Services to truly deliver the right message at the right time to the right person.

Continue to build engagement among your customer base by ensuring you know and take advantage of their messaging habits. Correlate data across channels to find meaningful insights that will help you plan for future success. Hold back from blanket messaging everyone across every channel in your house file because the danger of message fatigue is real and can do irreparable harm to your overall marketing. Set realistic goals but allow room for experimentation that is tempered with good research and data rich decisions. The danger in today’s market place is to believe that yesterday’s approaches will yield tomorrow’s success, they may for a brief period of time, but if one thing is certain the world is changing faster and faster every day.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
IBM Product Marketing Mgr.

I recently got an email asking me if I thought ISPs tighten the rules during the holidays to be more strict on senders. It’s a question I got quite often when I was at AOL, also.

So…do they??

In my opinion the answer is no, they don’t! There are a many reasons for this thought, but it all boils down to the fact that the holidays are a nightmare for ISP staff, and the last thing I can imagine them doing is making their workload higher on purpose. Consider that:

• Malware infections jump during this season which means that help-center tickets increase dramatically as does inbound mail volume due to more computers being added to bot-nets.
• Marketing mail volumes go up in response to the retail frenzy which means that mail volume increases exponentially.
• All the additional strain on the inbound relays and spam-processing servers means things break more, which means that admins get no time to sleep because queueing mail causes more problems than it solves…
• Queueing mail has a domino effect that causes problems for other ISPs, and also means delays in mail reaching end users, which means another increase in help-center tickets.
• Along with all this, people get new technological toys over Christmas and want to get them online…
• … all of which means that help-centers are flooded.
• Help-center overload means tickets are not resolved in a timely fashion, which means that…ISP customers get angry, which is at minumum bad PR – folks complain on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, to their friends on the phone – and at worst means losing a customer (and possibly his friends!).
• Changing how the spam systems work means that production code changes get stress tested real-time, which over the holidays with lots of staff on vacation is unlikely to have a good outcome.
• ISP admins are people too. They want to have a nice holiday, eat a lot and drink more, and to relax and spend time with their loved ones just like everyone else. A relaxed holiday is a pipe-dream for most admins anyway, and making live changes to existing systems makes it even more unlikely to happen!

This is one big ugly stressball for ISP staff, who are thin on the ground and over-worked to begin with. I cannot imagine a scenario in which significant changes would be made to production anti-spam systems except in the case of dire emergency.

The perception that ISPs are deliberately throttling email or tightening things down over the holidays is entirely due to changes in the inbound mail stream – differences created by marketers who change their own behavior during the holidays. Anti-spam and reputation systems react to sudden spikes in volume, invalid users, and spam complaints, which are caused by the sender’s decisions to send to older segments, send more frequently, send across channels, send to purchased or rented lists. These are all things that many marketers typically do over the holidays. This spiky behavior is seen as outside the norm and treated accordingly – and rightly so! There is nothing unusual about this at all.

So…as I said in my previous post, the best thing marketers can do during the holidays is to follow best practices, to not make significant changes to their email programs that would result in additional poorly targeted mail being sent out, to treat their clients with the same respect they wish to get from companies they buy from themselves, and to be patient with the ISPs, who are doing the very best they can with ever-more-limited resources.

“Do unto others as you would wish they do unto you” is a very applicable idea, as well as “less is more”. Respect the email eco-system, keep the big picture in mind and it will pay off!