MediaPost Publications Say What?! Bad Advice From Email Experts 05/24/2011

MediaPost Publications Say What?! Bad Advice From Email Experts 05/24/2011

The email marketing industry is blessed with an active community that shares advice and tips freely and is very welcoming to new practitioners. You can find tons of free information on blogs and social media sites -- but not all that information is up-to-date and completely accurate. Sometimes it's completely wrong. Occasionally I even see unsound advice from some of the experts that I revere and look to for guidance.

But perhaps I'm the one who has it wrong. Lord knows I've said some silly things myself. So I thought I would bring to light some of the questionable advice I've heard recently.

"Free" is a four-letter word. I continue to hear experts say that you can avoid being marked as spam by avoiding words like "free," "order," "congratulations" and "prices"; not using all caps; and staying away from punctuation like dollar signs and exclamation marks. They say these are especially dangerous to use in subject lines.

This advice is a relic of the early to mid-2000s when content scoring was much more prevalent. Now sender reputation and engagement metrics are key. "Content is not a main reputation factor," Return Path said recently.

But this advice also fails the smell test: Just look in your personal inbox any morning and you'll see emails that break these "rules." Probably about a third of the retail emails I receive contain the word "free" in the subject line -- and during the holiday season when ISPs are getting slammed, the percentage is even higher. Heck, last week I got an email from Sierra Trading Post with the subject line "EXTRA 20% OFF & FREE SHIPPING + EXTRA 20-25% OFF Apparel Blowout!" If that doesn't set off a spam filter, then nothing will.

No open, no value. Another expert claimed that an unopened email has zero value. While every marketer wants their emails opened, there's still value when they go unopened since a subscriber likely saw who it was from. The brand impression from the friendly marketer has value on its own. Plus, there's also value in the subject line's call-to-action, even if it's not enough to entice an open. For instance, a subject line about summer apparel might serve as a general reminder for the subscriber to stop by their local store to refresh their summer gear.

Also consider looking at your subject lines from the perspective of your subscriber trying to manage their inbox. A well-written subject line can help subscribers determine whether opening a particular email is worth their time. Groupon's subject lines are a great example of this. They tell you the name of the brand or type of service the deal is for right in the subject line, so if you're not interested in that brand or service you can delete the email right there. A good subject line respects subscribers' time, making subscribers less likely to tune you out and more likely to stay subscribed.

Is the value of an unopened email soft and difficult to measure? Yes. But that doesn't mean that there's no value.

Don't fear dead addresses. Inactive subscribers have become a bit of a hot topic lately, mainly because of ISPs changing their filters to take into consideration engagement metrics. While this is a fairly new consideration, the danger of spam traps and honey pots is very old news. So I was floored to hear one expert say that there is no documented financial downside to emailing dead addresses.

I can think of a half-dozen major brands that have had major deliverability issues because of dirty lists -- and deliverability is not an area that I pay much attention to. For instance, 1-800-Flowers.com recently came to Spamhaus's attention for mailing to old addresses, some of which hadn't responded in more than five years. 1-800-Flowers was able to remove that block - and I'm sure they did so because of the financial impact the block was having on their program.

If you have an old dirty list full of inactives and don't see the financial downside, it's because you're not measuring the right things or you have poor visibility into your deliverability metrics.

Relevance trumps permission. A little while back there was a discussion about whether relevance or permission was more important, with some experts seemingly bending over backward to argue for those rare instances where emails would be so relevant that consumers wouldn't care that they didn't sign up to receive the emails.

My thinking is in line with that of Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise, who responded on her blog: "Sure, really good marketers can probably collect, purchase, beg, borrow and steal enough information to know that their unsolicited email is relevant. My experience suggests that most marketers aren't that good. They don't segment their permission-based lists to send relevant mail. They're certainly not going to segment their non-permission based lists to send relevant mail."

Even if consumers didn't routinely junk emails from unknown senders and brands they didn't give permission to, it also seems much more likely that you'd be able to collect the data necessary to create relevant emails from someone who has opted in than from someone who hasn't.

So that's my take on these issues, but again perhaps I'm off base. Please let me know if I'm out of the loop.

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MediaPost Publications Top Customer Data Tips 05/17/2011

MediaPost Publications Top Customer Data Tips 05/17/2011

Earlier this month at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit, a group of professionals gathered to discuss knowledge and insights on customer data. I thought this would be a good place to share the great information that came out of that roundtable. So here are the top-six customer data tips, straight from our peers:

1.  Partner better with IT. It's easy to fall into the trap of avoiding IT (after all, don't they say "no" an awful lot?), but eventually you will need them on board to accomplish a critical goal. Thinking long term, see if you can get annual goals set in a way that ensures joint accountability. In the short term, share results with your IT counterparts when you share them with your boss. So few colleagues remember to do this, that IT often feels left out of the loop with no real understanding of how their hard work impacts the company overall. You'll be surprised how a little bit of sharing can go a long way toward creating strong partnerships.

2.  Work on your lobbying skills. Getting budget and resources can be next-to-impossible. A few of the roundtable participants likened the process to Washington D.C. lobbying efforts. Learn how colleagues get things done within your organization so that you can imitate them and get your goals met as well. It's almost always easier to gain forgiveness than permission -- almost. Sometimes, knowing what not to do can be more important than knowing what you should do.

3.  Make touchpoints play nicely. Email doesn't work alone. Make sure you get all touchpoints working together. How? See tips 4 and 5. The payoff can be excellent. One roundtable participant pointed out that just making links between Web analytics and email could lead to some significant remarketing opportunities.

4.  Create a marketing datamart. Customer data belongs in your customer database. But some of it can be shared with a marketing datamart. The point of the datamart is to create one place to find all the information you need for push marketing campaigns, so that you aren't waiting on the customer database for your list pulls. Since the design of each of these databases is very different from the other (which makes sense, since they have different purposes), a marketing datamart can be much faster at list pulls than your primary customer database.

5.  Capture everything. It's not just about opens and clicks anymore. Tag your content so that you can understand what types of information your customers are seeking. Backward append demographic data. Capture likes and follows on Facebook and Twitter and ask for the ability to email customers and access their profiles. Link profiles to social monitoring tools. Link your Web analytics database to your customer database. And don't forget: make sure all these data points are shared to the marketing datamart.

6.  Structure how you'll use the data. The point of having this data is to create value for both consumers and your company. Set up regular meetings with internal stakeholders as well as agency and vendor representatives to identify the smartest questions to answer with the data you have.

It's worth adding to this list two points that all summit attendees were aware of: use the data responsibly, and make sure it's secure. These points are far more critical than any other suggestions, and deserve far more attention than this column has room for today.

Do you have a data tip to share? Please comment below.

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MediaPost Publications Why Unstructured Data Will Mean Something Tomorrow 05/09/2011

MediaPost Publications Why Unstructured Data Will Mean Something Tomorrow 05/09/2011

Whether or not you believe in social data, you should recognize the value of unstructured data and how it will transform our world of marketing. Starting with the simple, social networking emerges as the elusive, yet coveted viral component all marketers hope to bag. Message to one person and the network effect carries the message. Controlled or not controlled, reach is the goal. For as long as marketing has been around, researchers have been striving to make sense of spoken, written and other observations of consumers, and in some forms we've done this efficiently. 

What is unstructured data in today's world?  It is images/objects, text and other data types that are not part of the typical database. An email is actually considered unstructured data -- although the message itself is part of a database system (Lotus, MS Exchange) - with the body of the message free form without any structure to it.  A raw document is another piece of unstructured data. Translated to components that mean something to marketers, sources of unstructured data include video, audio, blogs, Twitter, PowerPoint presentations, and more.

The unstructured vs. structured conversation within the context of marketing has two sides: 

1. Unstructured data is a consumer challenge that businesses must solve.  For years, we have searched through unstructured information to retrieve results. Recall the high school paper you wrote 20 years ago and how you searched for library books by typing in topical phrases. This has become second nature today through search engines. The technology has advanced dramatically, so that you can retrieve all sorts of content (from PowerPoints, video, audio, articles, etc.). 

Yet many studies indicate we only use simple methods to leverage search. The average search term is 1.5 -2.5 words, and only 10% of searces leverage Boolean operators ("and", "or" "not"). Sadly, according to research by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, when 2.5 search words are used, only 23-30% of documents returned are deemed relevant to the query. The challenge is that, while data is increasing significantly, search is typically considered an independent request rather than a contextual request. Younger consumers are much more sophisticated in efficient search, and will pressure businesses to keep pace.

You might be thinking: this doesn't mean much to me, I don't run search. Yet the symptoms have an effect on overall marketing. Consumers are talking, expressing and generating content in new forms at a much more rapid rate than in the past. The core platforms we have in place to capture these moments of truth and derive context to this information are becoming amazingly complex to make decisions around.  Businesses will be challenged to choose where in the enterprise they decide to solve the problem, in order to get the greatest return on the effort.  They will be challenged to understand which unstructured sources are valuable and which are just expenses. 

2. Unstructured data will redefine research, product development, and many aspects of direct marketing.  Unstructured data won't solve anything for the entire marketing ecosystem anytime soon. The shear mass of data, decay rate of data, and applied context are critical to understanding what part of the data to use. One such area that will thrive is product research.  All observation-based research has bias, based on the shear nature of how research is administered. We now have focus groups that are unfiltered, unbiased, and that can't be influenced by structured field research methodology.

It took 10 years for online surveys to "arrive" as a viable method of field research.  I believe the future of unstructured data for marketers will drive up through research and through programs designed to aggregate comments, thoughts, opinions and expressions in a very contextual way  -- and will accelerate much faster than the adoption of online surveying.

Today, a lot of data (from documents to community forms) lives inside a company, and a great deal lives in the public and private domains of the social ecosystem.  I believe the brands that will emerge will harness the "private" domain concept and build their own research, customer service, and infrastructure that will leverage very context-oriented values for the consumer. They will have better search capabilities, more contextual interactions across the enterprise, and better migration from product to product through well-structured and timed product releases.  And they will tap into the billions of dollars companies spend in researching new product innovations -- with a more efficient methodology for the go-to-market process.  Companies will need to make sound decisions around data integration and what areas of unstructured data should be their core competencies.

We live in a linear world today. The dimensional enterprise had better get prepared for this soon, because it will be how we operate in the future.  If you are only thinking about unstructured data in terms of a Tweet and how you might leverage that for response-based or direct marketing efforts, take a step back and think about the future of how you will engage and sell in the future, and how content and context will drive that. Think video and documents, not "comments."   

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MediaPost Publications The Next Wave Affecting Email Design 04/26/2011

MediaPost Publications The Next Wave Affecting Email Design 04/26/2011

Email design is constantly changing, blown this way and that by the ever-evolving inbox environment and changes in consumer behavior. In past years, email design needed to adjust to images being blocked by default, the increasing use of preview panes, and the emergence of SWYN functionality, among other factors.

Our upcoming 25-page report, "Email Design & Coding Recommendations," addresses the current wave of changes affecting email design, including the rapid adoption of HTML-friendly smartphones, the exploding tablet market, and the launch of Facebook Messages. Here's a sneak peek:

Small screens. Sales of smartphones that render HTML email well are booming thanks to the iPhone and a mega-slew of Android-powered phones. Not only do these phones render HTML emails well, but smartphones are driving increased use of email. Most marketers will find that slightly more than 10% of their subscribers are viewing their emails using a smartphone, but teen-focused brands may have a much higher percentage.

While there are lots of smartphones out there, iPhones are still dominant, so we use that platform as the basis of our recommendation of limiting email width to 640 pixels or less. Very few of the top online retailers that I track currently meet this recommendation.

We also recommend that marketers: 

Avoid overly long subject lines because they push the body copy down. 

Reduce email file sizes so they load more quickly on mobile devices. 

Use call-to-action links and buttons that are at least 30 pixels large, with 10-15 pixels of padding -- and that's taking not taking into consideration that your emails will likely be zoomed out 25% to 50% depending on the width of your emails.

Touch-friendly. In addition to smartphones, the other platform explosion has been tablets, driven by the iPad. Providing more evidence that tablets have gone mainstream, the iPad 2 sold outits debut weekend, with 400,000 to 600,000 units sold.

The primary design concern with tablets is making links and buttons touch-friendly, following the same size and padding that we recommend to be smartphone-friendly. This is generally most effective in the design of navigation bars and recovery modules, where link density tends to be very high. Among the retailers I track, only B&H Photo Video has a touch-friendly nav bar. Link density will have to be re-thought as tablet usage increases.

Text only. B2C emails have been strongly HTML-oriented for a number of years now. While the text portion of a multipart email has been necessary for the small percentage of users who used BlackBerry phones and other HTML-unfriendly platforms to read email, it has gotten new life from Facebook Messages, which displays text only by default. While it's still too early to see where this platform is going, it's likely to find traction among teenagers and 20somethings. We recommend monitoring your list for new @facebook.com addresses to see how concerned you should be.

To create a strong text version of your emails, we recommend that you: 

Drop your navigation bar and submessages. 

Place the most important message first, even if that's not how the HTML version is laid out. 

Keep line length to 70 characters or less so the text breaks in a controlled manner. 

Use capitalization, line breaks, dashed lines and other devices to visually separate different messages.

We're guaranteed to see more big changes in the future that impact email design. With both Gmail and Hotmail experimenting with JavaScript in the inbox, will emails be much more like mobile apps in the future? How will more sophisticated unified inboxes affect design? Will inboxes add SWYN function?

What other changes on the horizon do you see shifting the way we design marketing emails?

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