5 Ways to grow a Responsive Email List

Stephanie Miller, Return Path, provides five strategies to keep your email lists strong and growing in the latest Email Survival Guide enewsletter.

1. Get permission and honor it
2. Optimize Organic Email Capture
3. Use Paid Email Acquisition
4. Make sure your lit stays clean and current
5. Email regularly

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Power Squeeze Site to Explode Opt-In Email Subscribers

Matt Bacak, self appointed ezine marketing guru, sheds some light on the use of “Power Squeeze” sites. What’s a “Power Squeeze” site? They are special websites with the sole purpose of having searchers sign up for you newsletter. Sounds like spam techniques to me.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Renting Email Lists: What to Ask Before the Send

Jeanne Jennings, The Jeanne Jennings Report, wrote an article on clickz.com about renting email lists. Jeanne points out three specific questions and shares some guidelines about the list manager’s responses you may get back.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

RSS Effect on Email Marketing

David Daniels, JupiterResearch, wrote an article on clickz.com about his recent research that looked at the effects RSS will have on email marketing. David states that RSS will not be immediately effective as an alternative to email marketing. He goes on to point out two main factors that RSS will have to cope with: RSS spam and Personalization. Since RSS is a low-cost medium with no significant economic or regulatory barriers that we will see spammers taking over the RSS channel like they did with the email channel. He also gives a couple points that RSS personalization is not as easy as personalization in email newsletters.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

How to Use Segmentation, Targeting, and Personalization to Deliver Relevant Email

ExactTarget recently released a new whitepaper, You’ve Got Permission, Now Be Relevant: How to Use Segmentation, Targeting, and Personalization to Deliver Relevant Email. This whitepaper is part one in a series. The whitepaper goes over why an email marketer should be using segmentation and the reasoning why marketers should get away from the batch-and-blast method of sending emails. The whitepaper also gives a couple of segmentation and targeting methodologies from several industry experts.

One of the best points that this whitepaper brings up, is that your customer base is not a resource to be exhausted, but an asset to be valued and maintained wisely. Your customer base is like oil; all oil is not the same (not a homogenous group), there will not always be more oil (customers), the well will run dry.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

How Not To Opt-Out

Derek Harding released an article on clickz.com that talks about some of the no-no’s when creating an opt-out process for your enewsletter.

• Don’t ask for unnecessary information
• Don’t be a nit-picker. Your system should be smart enough to figure out if I misspelled “unsubscribe” as “unsiscribe”.
• Don’t erect roadblocks (i.e. require someone to log in before they can unsubscribe).
• Don’t need a double confirmation when unsubscribing.
• Let the recipient choose which enewsletter to unsubscribe too. Also give the recipient a choice on how frequent they would like to be contacted.
• Handle the removal in real time.
• If an error occurs during the unsubscribe process… fail gracefully.
• Send a confirmation notice with a link so that the recipient can resubscribe in the future.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Ways to Build Up our Ezine List

Suzanne Falter-Barns released an article on her Email Marketing Tips blog about ways to build up your ezine list. Suzanne points to eleven examples from her own experience as an email marketer.

1. Offer practical freebies.
2. Put a subscription box on every page of your site.
3. Exchange plugs for your ezine with another website.
4. Plug your ezine in the thank you page of a comparable website.
5. Give away a bonus (downloadable PDF-based ebook, best ezine essay) for other sites to use, based on your ezine.
6. Announce ezine ‘events’ on PRweb.com and other PR sites.
7. Use discussion boards or groups. Offer some genuinely helpful information. Then use a signature line that includes ezine and subscriber info.
8. Sponsor other people’s contests.
9. Run quality content.
10. Allow any newsletter that wants to reprint your articles.
11. Create a survey or contest. Make it a fun, relevant question that you really develop a, newsy story from.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

RSS Adoption Not Really Simple

DMNews reports that JupiterResearch claims that RSS will not have a significant effect as a supplemental alternative to email marketing. Just remember the invention of the telephone did not stop people from mailing letters.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Blocking & Filtering Report, March 2005

ReturnPath released their 2004 year-end email deliverability report. In the report they found two big trends:

• The false positive (non-spam ending up in the junk mailbox) is getting worse.
• Companies that work on understanding, measuring, and solving the root causes of weak deliverability can raise their inbox rate dramatically in a short time.

ReturnPath also gives a nice chart that shows which of the top ISP rank in non-delivery issues. They found EarthLink with the lowest non-delivery rate and Road Runner with the highest.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Video E-mail Goes Corporate

Kathy Chin Leong, Computerworld, published an article about how video emails are beginning to be adopted by large companies. Kathy notes that corporations are relying on video emails for ad campaigns, internal announcements, market survey, sales training, and public relations.

Kathy cites many barriers that have inhibited the adoption of video email. But she goes on to say that with the adoption of broadband that more companies are looking into this technology.

According to a new study conducted by Osterman Research Inc., more than 50% of corporate users surveyed said they would view a video email if it was sent by someone they knew. Over 38% said they would view video emails from people they do business with.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Segment Home/Work Emails to Improve Results

MarketingSherpa released an email marketing case study from Pacific Shaving Company. Pacific Shaving Company decided to segment their lists by work and home email addresses to help improve their conversion rates. They found by targeting each segment during different days of the week (weekend vs. week day) that they saw their conversions increase. Aricle open until March 27th.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

eMarketer’s Email Marketing Report

eMarketer will be releasing their Email Marketing report in April. You can sign up here to receive notification from eMarketer.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Dirty Secret of Publishing a Blog vs. an HTML e-Newsletter

Debbie Weil, of BlogWrite for CEOs, writes about the amount of time to create a blog entry versus a HTML enewsletter. Debbie goes on to say that it is much faster to create a blog entry then it is to create a HTML enewsletter. She suggests that marketers should look at creating a blog versus a HTML enewsletter.

With only 5% of Internet users having RSS readers the use of both a HTML enewsletter and a RSS feed would be most beneficial. Why limit the channel in which your customers would like to communicate with you?

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

How HTML Code Affects Email Deliverability

The EmailLab boys, Kirill and Loren, have released an email marketing article on Clickz.com about how HTML code can cause your message to be blocked or filtered to the spam/bulk folder. They provide a couple of tested tips to help with this situation.

They also reference a stat from Pivotal Veracity stating that Pivotal Veracity estimates nearly 100 percent of all HTML email doesn’t comply with World Wide Consortium (W3C) standards. I poked around Pivotal Veracity web site without any luck in finding reference to this stat.

W3C has a HTML validator that you can check your HTML emails against to see if they comply with the W3C standards.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Six Email Marketing Reminders

MarketingProfs.com released an email marketing article given some helpful reminders to reevaluate your email marketing efforts.

• Don’t let compliance with anti-spam legislation distract you from other key marketing issues.
• Every email contact with a prospect or customer is a marketing opportunity. Not always an opportunity in a direct marketing/sales sense, but certainly in a brand-building or relationship marketing sense.
• The email marketing environment changes so quickly that you need to be flexible enough to respond to new challenges and exploit new opportunities.
• Things that which held true yesterday don’t necessarily hold true today (i.e. best day to send)
• Email marketing is getting more sophisticated and challenging. There is no more low-hanging fruit.
• Just because email marketing is alive and well doesn’t mean you should stop investigating new forms of content delivery.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

DoubleClick Q4 2004 Email Trend Report

DoubleClick released their Q4 2004 Email Trend Report. Here are some of the findings from this report:

• Bounce rates (hard and soft) were down to an all-time low of 9.4%
• Open rates have declined modestly 38.1% Q1 to 32.6% Q4. Thought to be brought on by more email applications blocking images.
• Click-to-Purchase rates rose from 3.3% Q1 to 4.8% Q4.
• Orders per emailed delivered were up from 0.22% Q1 to 0.35% Q4
• Revenue-per-email rose from $0.23 Q1 to $0.26 Q4 despite average order sizes falling to an all-time low of $89.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Blogads Report on Blog Readers

If you are contemplating as to whether you will create a RSS feed for your email newsletters you may want to check out Blogads annual blog reader survey that was released this week.

Even though the survey is based on people who read blogs, it has been stated that blog readers resemble those who read RSS feeds. This survey can give you some helpful information on some of the demographic qualities for readers of blogs and RSS feeds.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

E-mail Frequency and List Control

Jeanne Jennings released an article on Clickz.com about email frequency and how to control your list within your organization. Jeanne describes some rough guidelines to determine the right frequency for your organization:

• Mail at least once a month or else you may be forgotten.
• Analyze how often the information changes and how quickly readers must receive it to act on it.
• Work within your resources.
• Don’t assume if your unsubscribe rate is stable you’re OK. Watch for trends.

Jeanne also goes into some tips on how to control your list when you have several business units within your organization accessing your in-house list. Jeanne also has a monthly newsletter called The Jennings Report.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Top Five Frustrations for Email Marketers

MarketingSherpa ask attendees at the Bigfoot Interactive Email Summit what their biggest concerns were.

1. Frequency wars – list burn out and ruining the relationship.
2. Database hell – handling multiple divisions, locations, and companies and how to bring them together.
3. Name quality versus quality education – more pressure to acquire new names then to improve communication with the names they already have.
4. Content resources – producing enough highly-targeted offers and/or newsletter articles to suit each different name in the list
5. Respect – treating email with he same respect as other marketing tools.

Open access for article until March 20th.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Consumer Study: Perceptions of Spam and Internet Security

Bigfoot Interactive released results of a new nationwide survey of consumer perceptions of spam and Internet security. Here are some their findings:

• Majority of consumers say spam volume has decreased.
• Majority of consumers say they receive more relevant communications today than they did one year ago.
• Only 34% of consumers could identify or detect a fraudulent email.
• The use of anti-spam filtering or challenge response software is high
• False positives persist. 52% of consumers routinely check their spam/junk folder for legitimate messages.
• 82% of consumers are concerned about spyware.
• 89% of consumers indicated they would like their ISP/Email provider to include an icon to indicate email has been authenticated and is from a trusted source.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

FTC Guidance on Joint Permission Email Marketing

The Direct Marketing Association released a clarification from the Federal Trade Commission to help email marketers in determining who is the “sender” for certain email messages. Read more at DMNews.com.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Practices Hitting Plateau

Mickey Alam Khan, DmNews, writes about Jim Nail, an analyst at Forrester Research, presentation at Bigfoot Interactive’s Profile Email Summit. Jim mentions some specific ideas to get customers back involved with email marketing programs. Good read…good ideas.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Adding Labels to the Email Product

Michael Mayor, NetCreations, suggests affixing labels to the “email product”. What? Michael tries to convey that the “email product” needs a sell-by date, care instructions, and a warning label.

Sell-by date - all email lists go bad if they are not used.

Care Instructions - an email list is an asset and that it can depreciate if not taken care of. Messages need to be relevant, provide value, and request the recipient to take action.

Warning labels – infrequent use may cause complaints, blocking or poor results. Over use can cause excessive fatigue or churn.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Gmail Spam Filter Effectiveness

Spamfo.co.uk released a non-scientific report on the effectiveness of the Gmail spam filter. Here are some of the results from their February 7th to March 7th study:

• Total Emails for Time Period: 404
• Legit Emails: 66
• Total Spam Emails: 327
• Spam Correctly Identified: 312
• Spam Not Identified: 15
• Legit Mail Identified as Spam: 11

Of the 11 emails incorrectly identified as spam, they found that 9 of these were what most people would consider as “spammy” emails.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Mobile Email is Second Most Popular

M:Metrics released it’s first monthly benchmark report on US mobile subscribers. In the report they found that besides talking on the phone, 13.9% used mobile email. Mobile email was second behind sending and receiving text messages.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

The Best Day to Send Your Email is …

It has been determined that the best day to send your email newsletter is Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Here are a couple of recent articles that talk about the best day to send your emails:

• Myth Debunked: No Such Thing as a Best Day
• Study Questions Monday as Best E-mail Day
• New Research Data: How Seasonality Affects Best Day of Week to Send Email
• Accompanying slides
• Best Day For Opens Not Always Best Day for Clicks

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

EarthLink to Offer Flash-Based Web Mail

EarthLink plans to roll out a beta version of, Enhanced Webmail, their Flashed-based Web email in four weeks. EarthLink built the Enhanced Webmail on the Laszlo platform, which generates Flash-based applications. Enhanced Webmail will offer 100MB of storage for each mailbox, but plans to boost that to 1 GB by third quarter of this year. EarthLink is looking at possibly releasing Enhanced Webmail to non-members and move into the for-free Web-based mail market.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Saving Email Addresses That Have Bounced

How do you save bounced email addresses? Elaine O’Gorman of Silverpop states that you need to assess the customer’s value to your bottom line. Customer value will usually influence the method (appends, phone, direct mail) you use to save these email addresses that have bounced. Elaine gives three key messages in this article that you will need to convey to your customer when trying to reacquire their email address. Also remember timing is of the essence. The longer you wait, the more you risk permanent loss.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Exploring Viability of RSS to Supplement E-mail Marketing

JupiterResearch released a new report looking at RSS and email marketing. The report looks at:

• To what extent RSS can supplement email marketing?
• What are the primary drivers for adding RSS to the marketing mix?
• What effect will RSS have on volume of email marketing messages?

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Validate HTML Content and Avoid Using Scripts

EmailLabs released an article in their newsletter, Intevation Report, this week. In the newsletter they talk about the necessity to ensure that your HTML code is W3C HTML compliant. They go on to talk about how if your newsletter is not W3C HTML compliant, then you may see rendering issues as well as delivery issues.

The newsletter article goes on to suggest not using scripts within your newsletter. Some email systems reject messages outright if scripting is detected. The article recommends driving your customers to your Web site, where dynamic components are easily rendered.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

22 Imperatives for Email Marketing Success

EmailLabs released an article on 22 principles of email marketing. This article is a brief overview of a yet to be released whitepaper that will outline specific strategies and actions in greater details.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.