Tip: Getting Your Email Invited to the Dance

Chip House, Chip’s Deliverability Tips, wrote an blog making an analogy to “A Night at the Roxbury” boys trying to dance up on every girl in the bar and being rejected to getting permission from your recipients to receive your emails. Chip goes on to provide three quick tips on email deliverability.

• Add a note to the subscription “thank you” page asking your subscribers to add your email address to their address book
• At the top of each email you send, remind subscribers to add your email address to their “address book or safe sender list”
• Always capture an opt-in for every subscriber and pay attention to click data to ensure your email content is driving interest with your readers

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

Webinar: ExactTarget’s Segmentation, Targeting, & Personalization

ExtactTarget has archived their latest email marketing webinar, “Segmentation, Targeting, & Personalization”. The webinar is about 48 minutes in length. View the email marketing webinar.

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

Webinar: eROI’s Advanced Email and Database Marketing

eROI has archived their latest email marketing webinar, “Advanced Email and Database Marketing”. The webinar is one hour in length. View the email marketing webinar (no recording key necessary).

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

Debating In-House Email Marketing

David Baker, MediaPost, authored an article that looks at whether a company should bring the email marketing system in-house or out-source it. David goes through a couple of “points” companies may want to think about before they venture into this age old dilemma.

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

Tip: Making Promotional Emails Worth Reading

Nick Usborne, ExcessVoice.com, writes a guest article in the latest Constant Contact enewsletter talking about a couple of different approaches to boost open rates and responses for promotional emails. Here is a couple of highlights from the article:

• Three approaches to email content creation
  o Purely Promotional
  o Informative and Promotional
  o Entertaining and Promotional
• Suggests combining approaches
• Make sure it all feels “true” to your brand and voice online
• Let people know what to expect when they sign up – deliver on those promises
• The more interesting, useful and valuable – the more they will open, share and respond to your emails

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

Case Study: Using Spam Content Checkers To Improve Email Deliverability

Kristie Tamsevicius, BrandingontheNet.com, released a case study on MarketingProfs.com about how she used a spam content checker to help improve “The 1 Minute Climb to Success” newsletter. The article gives you a before and after shot of the newsletter. The only take away from this case study is the free content checker tool she references, www.e-zinecheck.com.

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

MSN Postmaster Site is Launched

From the MSN Postmaster site:
“This site has been developed to give bulk e-mailers/senders, ISPs, e-mail service providers (ESPs), postmasters, and domain administrators a location to learn more about issues and solutions related to sending communications to MSN Hotmail consumers.”

I was amazed at the number of filters (four) a mailing will go through before reaching the recipient’s inbox. The only negative is that this site is really geared for ISPs and ESPs.

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

Best Practices: Guideline for Mobile Marketers

The Mobile Marketing Association released a best practice guideline. The mobile marketing guidelines can be accessed at http://mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.

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

Study: Retail Email Marketing

Silverpop released part one of the company's "Retail Email Marketing Study". Here are some of the interesting findings that study produced:

• Three-fourths of retailers don't respond to prospect's requests with
  even simple personalization like the recipient's name
• One-quarter of the companies studied failed to offer even a simple
  explanation of benefits to the visitor to sign up for emails.
• 23 percent of companies failed to include email registration requests
  on the home page.
• 8 out of 10 companies offered only one choice of communication.
• 43 percent of the companies studied sent a registration confirmation
  message

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

White Paper: How to Get the Most Out of Third Party Email List Rental

ReturnPath just released a new white paper, "How to Get the Most Out of Third Party Email List Rental", that goes over some of the basics when
choosing an email list rental vendor. It also includes a vendor checklist with guidelines to make your effort in list rental successful. Check out
http://www.returnpath.biz/pdf/listrental.pdf.

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

eMarketing Association to Host Conference

The 6th Annual eMarketing Association Conference will be held in Boston on October 18-19, 2005. Some of the key topics that will be covered:

- Legal Issues of Internet Marketing
- eMail Marketing
- Pay for Performance Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Search Marketing
- Spam
- Metrics and best Practices

For more information visit http://emarketingassociation.com/2005/boston/index.htm.

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

How to View Email Traffic Sent to Hotmail/MSN Users

Tom Kulzer, DeliveryMonitor.com, points out that MSN recently
released a free utility to enable 3rd parties to view email traffic
sent from IP addresses they own to Hotmail/MSN users.

• http://postmaster.msn.com
• http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/
• http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/FAQ.aspx

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

Static or Dynamic. Coke or Pepsi?

Derek Harding does a taste test of sorts between static and dynamic email response addresses. Derek points out the drawbacks to static versus dynamic reply addresses. He goes on to state that “it’s often impossible to determine which list member is responding”. Uh…would you not have their email address if they replied to you via email? Then he goes on to note that “it’s impossible to determine which campaign the response relates to”. More than likely most people will just hit the “reply” button in their email app, thus giving you the message subject. Any way he goes on to point out some drawbacks with dynamic reply addresses, such as; recipients can’t whitelist the address, get trapped in challenge/response systems, people are suspicious on any address they don’t recognize.

He ends up suggesting using a static sender address with a dynamic reply address. The funny thing is when I received this article today via email (from EmailLabs) it uses a dynamic from and reply address. Since they use a dynamic from address I can not have the email render the images automatically in Gmail and occasionally Gmail will push this into the Spam folder because of the dynamic addresses.

Off topic – I really do not understand how an email marketing newsletter from EmailLabs will not render correctly in Gmail. I still get some extraneous javascript, “'); document.write(var_ddd); } //-->” at the top of each newsletter they send. Unbelievable!”

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

No Way to Opt Out of Emails Sent By Hotmail Staff

The Email Wars blog points out a new policy from MSN.com Passport and Hotmail. So I went into my Hotmail account and took a look to if I was able to opt-out of messages being sent by the Hotmail Member Services (since the so gracefully opted me into their list). At the bottom of their emails Hotmail does allow me to unsubscribe:

Free Hotmail users: If you do not wish to receive Hotmail member letters, you may close your Hotmail account.

So if I wanted to “unsubscribe” I have to close my account. Seems a little drastic.

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

Search Engines Influence Email Advertising

Joe Pilotta, BIGresearch, released a new study that looked at how a consumer’s search engine preference influences an email advertising purchase decision. Here are some findings:

• For retail categories, Yahoo! users are more likely to be influenced by email advertising than users of Google or MSN.
• For all categories or products, Google users are more likely to be influenced by email advertising than the group as a whole.
• Google users are also more likely than MSN users to be influenced by electronics, automobile and pharmaceutical email advertising.
• MSN users are more likely than Google users to be influenced by email advertising home improvement, groceries and apparel.

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

AOL Launches Free Ad-Supported Email Service

AOL released a free, ad-supported email service tied to its instant-messaging platform. User will need the beta version of AIM 5.9, but ultimately will be bale to access the account through any Web browser (expected late summer). Each account will come with 2 Gigs of storage (similar to Gmail) and AIM mail will never expire.

Charlene Li, Forrester Research, features an article, “AOL Launches AIM Mail With 2GB of Storage”, on her blog.

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

“The Merchant Speaks” Survey Results

e-tailing group released some of its findings of their 4th Annual Merchant Survey. e-tailing group surveyed over 250 senior executives with responsibility for e-commerce. The survey found:

• 13% of total e-commerce demand comes from email
• 83% of emails contains “Sales and Specials”
• Use of email as a “Branding” vehicle has increased to 73% versus 40% last year
• Personalized messaging has a 24% penetration versus 28% last year
• Of those that use personalization, 17% base personalization on past customer behavior

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

Webinar - Maximizing Contribution From Email Marketing Initiatives

This one-hour event, sponsored by DoubleClick, will address the keys to maximizing contribution from email marketing initiatives:

• Which best practices are critical to a successful email marketing strategy?
• How can marketers find opportunity in a regulated email environment?
• What role should email play in building stronger relationships with customers?
• What is Return on Customer (sm) and how does it go beyond response rates to accurately quantify the success of email marketing initiatives?

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

Gmail - Always Display Images for Certain Senders.

Just noticed that Gmail is now giving you the option to always display images from certain senders. I always hated having to hit "display images below" every time I get an subscription email. Maybe this will help to increase the "Open Rates" that have been steadily declining. Hope other ESP hop on this bandwagon.

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

Email Webinar: Breaking Through InBox Clutter in the Spam Age

ReturnPath and SubscriberMail are presenting a free webinar on Wednesday, June 8 at 2pm EST. View the overview and sign up information on their website.

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

Study: Email Campaigns Lack Personal Touch

MediaPost Publications reports on a new Jupiter study, “Promotional E-mail: Driving Sales Through Behavioral Targeting”. The study found:

• 6 percent of customers said a personalized greeting or subject line influenced their decision to make a purchase.
• In the last year, 10 percent or respondents opened their email and immediately made a purchase
• 17 percent have opened email and later made a purchase
• 73 percent of respondents said they deleted promotional emails unopened
• 42 percent unsubscribed
• Of those who made purchases, 67 percent decide due to sale prices and 55 percent decided due to free or discounted shipping.

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

Study: Email Accreditation Programs

ReturnPath recently released a new whitepaper that explores the different ways that marketers and ISPs have been using a combination of methods to get legitimate email delivered to the inbox. The basics of authentication and reputation are explained along with the latest trends in Email Accreditation programs.

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