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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MediaPost Publications Measurement By Averages 04/25/2011

MediaPost Publications Measurement By Averages 04/25/2011

Three statisticians went hunting in the woods. Before long, one of them pointed to a plump pigeon in a tree, and the three of them stopped and took aim. The first fired, missing the bird by a couple of inches to the left. Immediately afterwards the second fired, but also missed, a couple of inches to the right. The third put down his gun, exclaiming, "Great shooting lads, on average I reckon we got it!"  

Averages are designed, in general, to help assess past behavior in hopes of predicting future consequences.   If we were Vegas odds brokers, what type of odds would we have on the future growth of email marketing in 2015 vs. other emerging channels?

I've said for years that email is not dead.  Several trends and observations that will shift how we hedge bets on the channels:

-      The emergence of socially networked communities is creating new cultures among young and old (how connected you are, how you connect, how you sustain communities, how you behave in your professional career vs. personal and the intersection of the two). 51% of online consumers belong to one or more social network sites.

-      Cell phone/smartphone penetration with an unprecedented adoption rate (75% of Adults). Not just the adoption rate, but the sheer amount of time spent on a cell phone is increasing twofold with the emergence of applications.  The average adult sends 10 text messages a day, while a teen sends over 50.

-      74% of consumers will use a mobile app 11X before discarding it, indicating that engagement through apps and geo-location is still not as pervasive outside of episodic intervals.

-      The future of loyalty will be redemption and convenience at the POS, and geo-location-based.

Consumers are homogenous by nature; we flock, we have like tendencies and we have this inner sense of community that devices and social marketing enable.  Does email also enable this trait as it did in the past? Email, while still a staple in the mix, much like print, will be challenged as "in-home" becomes a synchronous method of integrating web with Interactive TV experiences (where we spend the vast majority of our time today). 

Email has four great values to the consumer: notification, informational/educational, promotional and social value. I believe it will lose some of its luster as a conduit to a few of these values.   With the real-time nature of devices, there will ultimately be more efficient means of notifying consumers of brand events or customer service exchanges.  Email will still be convenient for service-oriented response, but the marketing value of those interactions will diminish over time. 

Apps will be pervasive to the experience, and the device will be the conduit.  I think this will challenge email notification as a front-end engagement tool, a sustaining element to the lifecycle and the persistence with which people answer commercial email.    

While email has always been the conduit to "information," as in newsletters, all the trends indicate people are consuming content in so many other forms. So I believe email's value as the driver of traffic will diminish over time as the sources of content will be driven through apps.  (News, social updates), I believe email will struggle to remain persistent the way newsletters are designed and syndicated today, causing a ripple effect in the way newsletters are monetized.

I believe from a promotional perspective we will still have viable use of email. The commercial inbox will become more interactive, and marketers will still pour their energy into this area.  The challenge will be to integrate it with a mobile shopping effort where it is real-time enabled at the point of sale.   We covet traffic, we love browsers, but we get paid on conversion. Email has always struggled to secure a significant portion of the budget shift to online and will continue in the future. 

Lastly, email is a social vehicle from a consumer and business perspective.  We leverage it in our daily lives, yet we are beginning to communicate differently in fragmented ways that are more convenient than email.   Is it the viral tool of the future?  NO!   It never has been.   As consumers shift from the inbox to the app, from the web to the mobile web, from the device to the interactive store display, from the loyalty card to the electronic currency wallet, email will become less important as a marketer's dream viral tool and more as a driver of persistence to other experiences.  

Email will will still continue to grow for the next few years, but as I said before, budget will flow where attribution can be proven and the consumer experience is most visible.   The emerging experiences will soon be capitalizing on the consumer's wallet, maximizing convenience that I believe will shift where conversion and transactions happen.  I believe the engagement vehicle will be so interconnected it will be difficult to operate email at the pace you'll need to be relevant.  The linear world of email marketing will have to shift to near real-time thinking and optimization, and carve out a new place in the engagement pecking order 

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MediaPost Publications Email Decision-Making: Beyond Revenue Or Best Practices 04/21/2011

MediaPost Publications Email Decision-Making: Beyond Revenue Or Best Practices 04/21/2011

"Where should I put the unsubscribe link?" "Should I use a prechecked box to increase opt-ins?" "Should I send email to the addresses we collected via business cards gathered at trade shows three years ago?"

Whenever someone asks questions like these about email marketing, the answer has seemingly been pretty easy: "It depends, so test it. When in doubt, follow the generally accepted best practice." 

But, like everything else in the email world, I believe the conversation has become much more complex, and the easy answer often isn't the right one.

At one time, we might have cited the best practice as the only way to answer questions like these or to plan out an email program. That might be the right answer if you work in an optimal situation, with an understanding management, a clean list, a healthy budget and so on. 

But let's say the client is a start-up with a one-person marketing department where every penny is counted, and the goal is to get more people to buy its products at the highest margin possible, while successfully landing another round of venture capital financing.  

The supposed best practice may not necessarily be the right answer. I'm not condoning short cuts or shady practices, of course. However, there are many more factors to consider when coming up with the right answer in real-world situations.

Many email thought leaders and Email Insider columnists contend that the concept of "best practices" is dead, that there are no longer right answers that apply broadly. While I don't really disagree, I do believe there are directional best practices - or principles that work broadly. However, best practices alone won't always solve a problem or get your email program where it needs to be.  

Essentially, the question has evolved from "Can I do it?" to "Should I do it, and what could happen if I do?" 

Example: The Prechecked Opt-In Box 

Should you use an opt-in form with the permission box already checked? This should be a simple question. But you'd be surprised how much emotion one little checkmark can stir up among marketers.

The list below outlines just some of the factors that might go into your decision-making process on this or other email marketing questions:

1. What do other marketers do? If the majority of your competitors use prechecked boxes, then you might consider it the default practice that would be expected by consumers opting into your program. Or you might take a contrarian view and decide to focus on quality, using the higher level of permission as part of your positioning.

2. What are you trying to accomplish? If your goal is list growth, using a prechecked box is the likely answer. If your goal is engaged and responsive customers with a high lifetime customer value, you might opt for unchecked.

3. What's the best practice? Here, the "best practice" depends on where you sit. Marketers under revenue pressure contend that a transparent prechecked box is the best practice, as it leads to greater opt-ins and conversions. Those with a strict permission/consumer choice bent will argue that gaining affirmative consent via checking a box is the best practice.

4. What's legal? In the United State, CAN-SPAM doesn't prohibit use of a prechecked box, but does define its use as not being "affirmative consent" -- which then requires use of special language in emails. In other countries around the world, the email laws may apply very differently. So your decision-making approach needs to consider a global versus localized answer.

5. What's ethical? How visible is your prechecked box? If you bury the box somewhere, you are likely going to gain more opt-ins -- but you also haven't been transparent and will likely generate a higher number of spam complaints and the wrath of some customers.

6. What do your numbers show? Have you used both unchecked and prechecked boxes in the past or conducted an A/B test? Do the higher number of subscribers from a prechecked box lead to greater conversion and revenue than the unchecked approach?

7. What does management want? You might be under pressure to deliver a specific list size or show a certain growth percentage in order to preserve your share of the marketing budget.  

8. What do ISPs/accreditation providers require? Whitelisting or other trusted-sender services might frown on prechecked boxes or make issue resolution more difficult with ISPs.

9. What are the trade-offs? In this example, general consensus is that prechecked boxes lead to more opt-ins -- but whether subscribers that actively check a box are more engaged and responsive, is a point frequently debated. Regardless, almost every email decision involves trade-offs around something like quality versus quantity. 

10. Impact on brand and trust? Brand perception and trust has become paramount in marketing decisions. If we deploy a marketing approach not favored by a sizable number of prospects and customers, will that impact their trust when we ask them to buy something? Depending on your audience, a prechecked box may have no effect, or it could lead to a public attack on Twitter. 

This seemingly simple prechecked versus unchecked box decision reveals that there can perhaps a dozen or more factors to consider -- not simply what is best practice or which approach generates more revenue. 

What do you think? Not about the prechecked box issue -- I use that merely as an illustration -- but about the things marketers must consider when choosing the best course for their email programs? Let me know what I've left out and keep the conversation going.

Until next time, take it up a notch!

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MediaPost Publications Four Things You Can Do Now About Privacy 04/18/2011

MediaPost Publications Four Things You Can Do Now About Privacy 04/18/2011

The specter of privacy legislation looms over our industry (and others). For a while now, we've anticipated it with a sense of dread otherwise reserved for the four horsemen of the apocalypse, under the assumption that any regulation attempted by Congress will likely be more harmful than helpful.

That may be inaccurate. Industry groups are bringing together insights into customer behavior alongside the latest in data protection protocols to help guide any legislation down a path that should help rather than harm. In the meantime, here are four things that we can do now:

1.     Nail down the basics. It's a boring and thankless task, but you should be paying more attention to basic security. Make sure you change your passwords regularly. Make sure every individual has his or her own access; stop sharing passwords and logins. More importantly, when people move on and no longer need access, remove it. Ask your ESP if they have a CSO. Find out if your company does, and enlist their support. Yup, boring. But it could save you from a lot of trouble.

2.     Test "relevant" marketing programs. Triggered or automated programs offer quantifiable wins -- which means you should be able to put together a business case to get these built. Start with these, and then use the results to build the case for testing propensity models with your larger program. Your goal is to give reasons for your email subscribers not only to share their information, but to also suggest to their friends that you are trustworthy and worth sharing with.

3.     Build disaster recovery plans. One thing we can say about the recent ESP break-ins, is that they showed how ill-prepared some companies are to dealing with this kind of news. Consumers were still receiving emails about the break five days later. The goal should be to inform people as quickly as possible -- preferably within 24 hours. Building a plan in advance, even one as simple as a flow chart to show which decisions get made and when, can speed the process and help those involved understand the level of urgency for communications.

4.     Create a privacy task force. No, you don't expect to get much done now with this group. But by assembling the stakeholders in your organization, you set yourself up as an owner of this issue, and therefore of the eventual solutions. You can also start pulling together a game plan, so that it will be more easily executed later -- again, with all stakeholders on board.

And here are two things to put on the priority list for later. Unless you're in a highly regulated industry, it's likely you won't get your company motivated to think about these now. But planning ahead could help bring a level of control over the eventual changes that privacy legislation will bring.

1.     Create (or revise) your preference & privacy center. These should merge eventually --and will cover more channels than email. Start writing down some ideas for what information you'll need to give customers control over, and how you will want to present those choices.

2.     Simplify your privacy language. Making privacy policies more easily understood will help with trust later. If you can't cut the legalese, see if you can add a sidebar with colloquial English summaries of each paragraph or section.

These aren't the most exciting things happening in email marketing, but they are the basic requirements for managing an email program today. Dedicate some time for management so that you keep control. Otherwise, as privacy legislation gets closer, you may find your programs being managed by others.

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MediaPost Publications Q: Email vs. Social? A: I'll Take Both 04/07/2011

MediaPost Publications Q: Email vs. Social? A: I'll Take Both 04/07/2011

What's more valuable, an email address in your database or a Facebook "Like?" Is it better to excel at email marketing or social-media marketing? Pick one: email or social media? Which would you rather have: a click on an email link or a Facebook Like?

Questions like these, which target the role, value and future of email marketing in an evolving digital universe, are popping up regularly these days on Q&A sites such as Focus, Quora and LinkedIn. They generate the kinds of vigorous discussions that you often get over cocktails at marketing conferences.

Not surprisingly, email people typically give email marketing their votes, while social-media types give thumbs up to "their" channel. While these discussions and debates certainly are entertaining, they get us nowhere.  

Maybe people offer these two extreme positions just to get conversations started, but for me, there is no "either-or" about email and social. You can and should include both of the channels as part of your digital marketing and communications strategy.

But it goes much further than that. We live in a multichannel world. Your customers might choose to interact with your brand and communications via radio, TV, newspaper, direct mail, catalogs, email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook pages, YouTube, mobile apps, telephone and more. 

How you allocate resources and money to each of these and other channels varies not only by your business lines and markets served but also by the goal of the communication and stage of the individual customer or prospect relationship.

Click versus Like 

These questions, which compare things such as the value of an email address with a Facebook Like, are missing the point, because they ask marketers to compare two wildly disparate things.

A Facebook action, such as a Like, is a public confirmation of the customer's affinity toward or past experience with your company, brand or product. It doesn't necessarily indicate a propensity to buy in the future.

Just because I "Like" the Ferrari Facebook Page doesn't mean you will be seeing a shiny red sports car in my driveway anytime soon.

In contrast, a click on an email message signals intent or interest. It might be just to finish reading an article on a website, to download a white paper, to check out the daily special being promoted -- or to make a purchase.

Once you clarify for yourself, your program and your company what roles email, social and mobile marketing will play and how they interplay, you can allocate the appropriate amount of resources for each.

Asking the Right Questions

All companies have finite resources, especially when it comes to marketing. So, while pitting one channel against another in the abstract is somewhat fruitless, marketing executives do have a responsibility to continually monitor and analyze which channels and combinations provide the best returns. 

Let's raise some of the current dialog up from schoolyard-level childishness and focus on the more meaningful and important questions.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, but here are a few to get you started:

·       What is the role of email vs. social, mobile, print and other channels in our company?

·       How do we make our emails more relevant by incorporating content, personality and lessons learned from social media?

·       How do we integrate email, social and mobile marketing activities with each other to drive greater ROI across all three channels?

·       How do we better leverage email to drive increased engagement in social and mobile channels?

·       How do we grow our email database using social and mobile channels?

·       How do we measure the effectiveness of each channel relative to its level of reach, adoption and investment? 

How you frame your questions will determine whether you launch an interesting but ultimately fruitless discussion -- or spark a conversation that leads to the kind of insight we need to keep the email industry moving forward and realize its full potential. 

Until next time, take it up a notch! 

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If Your Email Were A Novel

MediaPost Publications If Your Email Were A Novel 04/06/2011

Writers embarking on a new work do not just sit down at a keyboard and start pecking out the great American novel. Storytelling is a craft, and the act of actually writing a novel is usually preceded by months of researching, planning, sketching and vetting. And after the writing the editing begins, a task as onerous and essential as the initial pen to paper -- er, pixel to screen. There is a lot of process and training required to elevate writing to art. Yes writers have a gift, but it's a gift akin to a runner's ability to tap out a marathon in just over 2 hours -- years of training go into recognizing that gift's true potential.
William Faulkner famously claimed that short stories were much more difficult to write than novels, because of how much restraint the author must exercise over what to include in such a restrictive form. Where does that leave email writers? Kids have to read sonnets to pass high school English. We have about the same real estate to work with ,but have to earn every word of attention. If any writing craft needs process, training and discipline, surely it's ours.

In fact, there is a lot we can learn from the novelist's craft when approaching our own, not the least of which is to think of email as a craft, and not some form of e-manual labor. If we think like writers instead of marketers, we may enjoy a wider audience for our work. Who knows? We may even find ourselves with a bestseller on our hands. So dust off your Hermes 3000, crack your knuckles, and let's create a real page-turner:
Genre: Novels are romances, mysteries, psychological thrillers or comedies. Emails also have a genre, ranging from newsletter to promotional message to announcement. The important thing about a genre is choosing one. You don't hear a novelist say, "Gotta get a book out" (OK, Stephen King probably says that, but he's an exception who proves the rule), but we say it about emails all the time. The emails we send also need to have a clear purpose, which their genre defines.
Plot: This is the story your email tells, whether it's about a 20%-off sale, or recommended products based on what you've bought in the past, or a webinar next week. But plot is also a narrative that can span through multiple installments, like the Harry Potter series or "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest." Your story doesn't begin and end with each email. How does each installment in your ongoing series draw your audience in deeper, and further develop your relationship with subscribers?
Theme: "The author is not trying to say anything, Mr. May," my 10^th grade English teacher said to me once. "He is saying something. You evidently just can't hear it." A layer deeper than the story about your spring sale or registration deadline, theme is the underlying message and carries the impact each email has on your brand development. Anyone can send an email. But if your company makes a point of sending only messages that it is uniquely qualified to send, then the theme starts to emerge and every message helps strengthen the brand. For example, "60% off - today only" is a message that defines Gilt Groupe  and Haute Look and The Clymb, but would positively ruin Neiman Marcus or the TED Conference. When the theme of emails is ignored, the messages start to compromise the rest of the work done to build a brand. There may be short-term gains, but the expenses hit the balance sheet later on.
Tone: Like genre, an email's tone should be a deliberate choice. An email that relies on humor or levity can be very successful for a brand similarly aligned, like Old Navy or The Onion. But a brand that trades on authority should have a very different tone in its emails: messages from The Economist or BMW should probably never include an exclamation point. A brand whose positioning is approachable and conversational might use a first-person voice to forge a personal connection.
Very often, I see messages where each of these elements is determined more by the individual message's objective than by brand positioning and continuity. Individual emails can enjoy some success by going maverick on the brand and focusing on the immediate business need and environment. But I believe that an email program is more successful when approached as a craft with a long view. Email artisans do not need a writer's gift, but could enjoy better results through some of a writer's process and discipline.

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E-mail Marketing Definations

e-mail marketing

Email Marketing - Definition of Email Marketing: 
Email marketing is a process of soliciting business prospects via email. It is essentially the same as direct mail except that instead of sending mail through the postal service, messages are sent electronically via email.


Email Marketing Definition - Email Marketing

The basic email marketing definition is the use of email to promote products and/or services. A better definition of email marketing is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers and/or clients

Email Marketing - definition, information, sites, articles.

The promotion of products or services via email.

email Marketing Definition – What is email Marketing? – Glossary of Web and Internet Terms: 

The term email Marketing refers to the process of sending targeted opt-in (permission-based) emails to your company mailing list.

Definition of Email Marketing | Tech Tips on Salon.com

With the continued growth of the Internet as a marketing tool, email marketing is a way for businesses to use the power of the Internet to market their products and services. Email marketing is simply the practice of sending out emails to obtain and retain customers. While email marketing offers a variety of benefits, it could result in severe consequences if not used properly.

Reference - http://www.scribd.com/doc/47092440/2011-Email-Marketing-Benchmark-Report-Excerpt

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Email marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Email marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
• sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
• adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers, and
• sending email messages over the Internet, as email did and does exist outside the Internet (e.g., network email and FIDO).

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $400 million on email marketing in 2006.

Contents

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• 1 Comparison to traditional mail
  • 1.1 Advantages
  • 1.2 Disadvantages
• 2 Opt-in email advertising
• 3 Legal requirements
• 4 See also
• 5 References

Comparison to traditional mail

There are both advantages and disadvantages to using email marketing in comparison to traditional advertising mail.

Advantages

Email marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.^[2]
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Over half of Internet users check or send email on a typical day.^[3]
• Email is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292m in the UK.

Disadvantages

A report issued by the email services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.^[5]

Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM),^[6] the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.

Opt-in email advertising

Opt-in email advertising, or permission marketing, is a method of advertising via email whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it. This method is one of several developed by marketers to eliminate the disadvantages of email marketing.^[7]

Opt-in email marketing may evolve into a technology that uses a handshake protocol between the sender and receiver.^[7]This system is intended to eventually result in a high degree of satisfaction between consumers and marketers. If opt-in email advertising is used, the material that is emailed to consumers will be "anticipated". It is assumed that the consumer wants to receive it, which makes it unlike unsolicited advertisements sent to the consumer. Ideally, opt-in email advertisements will be more personal and relevant to the consumer than untargeted advertisements.

A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm's customers. Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products.^[8] In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.

With a foundation of opted-in contact information stored in their database, marketers can send out promotional materials automatically—known as Drip Marketing. They can also segment their promotions to specific market segments.^[9]

Legal requirements

In 2002 the European Union introduced the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications. Article 13 of the Directive prohibits the use of email addresses for marketing purposes. The Directive establishes the opt-in regime, where unsolicited emails may be sent only with prior agreement of the recipient.

The directive has since been incorporated into the laws of member states. In the UK it is covered under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003^[10] and applies to all organisations that send out marketing by some form of electronic communication.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 authorizes a US $16,000 penalty per violation for spamming each individual recipient. Therefore, many commercial email marketers within the United States utilize a service or special software to ensure compliance with the Act. A variety of older systems exist that do not ensure compliance with the Act. To comply with the Act's regulation of commercial email, services typically require users to authenticate their return address and include a valid physical address, provide a one-click unsubscribe feature, and prohibit importing lists of purchased addresses that may not have given valid permission.

In addition to satisfying legal requirements, email service providers (ESPs) began to help customers establish and manage their own email marketing campaigns. The service providers supply email templates and general best practices, as well as methods for handling subscriptions and cancellations automatically. Some ESPs will provide insight/assistance with deliverability issues for major email providers. They also provide statistics pertaining to the number of messages received and opened, and whether the recipients clicked on any links within the messages.

The CAN-SPAM Act was updated with some new regulations including a no fee provision for opting out, further definition of "sender", post office or private mail boxes count as a "valid physical postal address" and definition of "person". These new provisions went into effect on July 7, 2008.^[11]

References

1. ^ DMA: "The Power of Direct Marketing: ROI, Sales, Expenditures and Employment in the U.S., 2006-2007 Edition", Direct Marketing Association, October 2006
2. ^ "New Survey Data: Email's ROI Makes Tactic Key for Marketers in 2009 ", MarketingSherpa, January 21, 2009
3. ^ Pew Internet & American Life Project, "Tracking surveys", March 2000 – March 2007
4. ^ MediaWeek: UK e-mail marketing predicted to rise 15% MediaWeek.co.uk
5. ^ Return Path's Reputation Benchmark Report: "5 ways to increase deliverability", BtoB Magazine, July 2008
6. ^ The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 online at ftc.gov or PDF Version
7. ^ ^a b Fairhead, N. (2003) “All hail the brave new world of permission marketing via email” (Media 16, August 2003)
8. ^ Dilworth, Dianna. (2007) Ruth's Chris Steak House sends sizzling e-mails for special occasions, DMNews retrieved on February 19, 2008
9. ^ O'Brian J. & Montazemia, A. (2004) Management Information Systems (Canada: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd.)
10. ^ Full text of Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations
11. ^ FTC Approves New Rule Provision Under The CAN-SPAM Act

Try to search "e-mail marketing" on Google Search

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