SuretyMail Offering AOL Free Non-Profit Accreditation

The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy (ISIPP) SuretyMail program is offering non-profit email senders AOL email acceditation at no charge.

AOL Pro Bono Email Acceditation Service for Non-Profits
"Through the program, qualifying non-profit organizations - and qualifying non-profit advocacy organizations - receive the full functionality of AOL's email system, including having all images and web links enabled in emails, at no charge to either the sender or to the recipient."

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Technorati: email marketing, ISIPP, AOL, email deliverability

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

How to Make Your Email Enticing in AutoPreview and Mobile

MarketingSherpa released an article, "Know-How: How to Make Your Email Enticing in AutoPreview & Mobile -- 16 Samples of Best & Worst Tactics" (Open access until Aug 6).

Tip 1: Start with compelling copy.I totally agree. I see alot of emails when rendered in the AutoPreview screen show me their "Web page version" HTML link.

Tip 2: Use CAPS to catch the eye.
While most spam filters will count this as Shouting, this tactic may increase your SPAM filter score. Use a content checker to see if there is any impact.

Tip 3:Use text symbols to catch the eye.
MarketingSherpa uses the following example:
*(:-.,,.-:)*"*(:-.,,.-:)*"*(:-.,,.-:)*"*(:-.,,.-:)*
Mobile Telecoms Daily Service

If I saw that in my AutoPreview screen I would think it was spam!


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Technorati: email marketing, mobile marketing, preview pane, marketingsherpa

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

Optimizing a Landing Page Sequence

The current Excess Voice Newsletter provides seven tips on writing a web site landing page sequence. As an email marketer, once you get your recipient to click through to you web site you need to be able to capture that sale. So here are the tips the article provides.

• Reduce the length of the sequence. If it takes three pages to complete the purchase, try cutting back to two pages.
• Be very clear on the purpose and objective of each page.
• Keep all the important information within one column and create a strong linear flow from top to bottom.
• Write a strong headline. Express the value within the first few words.
• Work hard on the last few lines of the page. Just saying “Next…” is not good enough.
• Consider adding an email-capture field at the end of the first page in the sequence. Assuming that they did not come through your newsletter, you will be able to follow up with them if they did not complete the purchase.
• Use short paragraphs, bullet points and indents to make the page easy to read.

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Technorati: email marketing, landing page design

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

Integrating RSS and Your Email Strategy

Lee-Ann Vermaak, iMedia Connection, released a new article, "Integrate RSS with Email for Best Results". Lee-Ann believes that you should look to integrate your RSS feeds into your customer life-cycle messaging strategy. RSS should compliment your email marketing strategy and not replace it. She also suggests to leverage the subscription information from RSS feeds to target your emails. You can create profiles based on the content that users subscribe to and then incorporate those profiles into your email marketing strategy.

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Technorati: RSS, email marketing

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

Key Email Market Trends in 2006

In their latest research, E-consultancy provide five key email marketing trends for 2006.

1. Increased understanding about the return on investment benefits of effective email
2. More strategic services, such as campaign optimization and behavioral response marketing
3. Widespread adoption of email marketin best practices.
4. Greater sophistication in terms of integrating email marketing within the wider marketing mix
5. Increased use of RSS and mobile as complimentary communication channels

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Technorati: email marketing, email marketing trends

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

UK Email Service Market to Grow 20 Percent

E-consultancy released their latest research, "2006 Email Marketing Platforms Buyer's Guide". They found that the size of the UK market for Email Marketing Platforms and Services will grow by $178 million (pounds) by the ned of 2006. This represents a 20% increase over 2005 and a 50% increase over 2004. Their latest report contains an overview of market trends and profiles of UK companies offering email marketing platforms and email-related services.

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Technorati: email marketing, e-cosultancy, email marketing buyers guide, email market trends

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

Three Testing Tips To Improve Your Email Returns

Stephanie Miller, MediaPost, release an article, "Testing: Increase Your E-mail Batting Average" (free login required). The article provide three testing tips to improve your email return.

• Develop educated testing hypotheses.
• Segement. Not all subscribers are created equal.
• Usa a multi-variat approach (with or without the technology) to develop a "best landing page".

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Technorati: email marketing, email testing, multi-variate testing

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

Case Study: Time, Inc. and Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail

Goodmail released a case study with Time Consumer Marketing, Inc. (Time Inc. brands including Fortune, Busines 2.0, People, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly). “Time sent an email describing new functionality on their online customer service site to active readers of several magazines…. Users were given various options to manage their subscriptions, such as renewing, paying bills, and making changes to their account information.”

Here are some of the index scores that were reported from the use of CertifiedEmail compared to non-CertifiedEmail messages:

• Click through rate: 130 percent
• Site Login: 128 percent
• Customer service option selected: 127 percent

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Technorati: email marketing, TIME magazine, GoodMail, certified email

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

Are You Surveying Your Email List?

In Jeanne Jennings lastest Clickz.com article, “Three Good Reasons to Survey Your E-mail List”, she asks “…when was the last time you surveyed your email list?”. Jeanne mentions that you should be surveying your email list two to four times a year. The article goes on to provide some best practices regarding surveys.

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Technorati: survey, email marketing

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

Whitepaper: 2006 Email Marketing Audit

EmailLabs released their latest whitepaper, “EmailLabs’ 2006 Commercial Email Message Audit”. The whitepaper reviewed 203 commercial emails to see if they implement EmailLabs’ 18 recommended email marketing best practices. They found that few email marketers employ more than 1 or 2 of the best practices. The only best practice with an adoption rate of 100% among the senders reviewed was a working unsubscribe link.

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Technorati: email marketing best practices, CAN-SPAM

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

Test Shows Specific Subject Lines Increase Conversion

The Marketing Experiments Journal released their latest findings in regards to their latest email subject line split test. The test found that the more specific the offer is in an email subject line the higher the conversion rate.

The article also points to three factors that have a significant effect on open rates, click through rates and final conversion rates. Subject lines need to:

• Help a reader recognize your company and remember the value of your previous emails
• Express urgency
• Be specific in their promise

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Technorati: email testing, split testing, subject line testing, email marketing

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

Combat Email Image Blocking with CSS

CampaingMonitor blog has an extremely helpful tip in on how to use CSS to combat email image blocking. The article provides a step-by-step example that was used to provide the newsletter header for “CSS off, images off” and “CSS on, images off” scenarios. Worth the read!

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Technorati: image blocking, email design, css, email marketing

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

12 Email Tips You Can Not Ignore

Krill Popov and Loren McDonald released a new article on clickz.com, "If Email Clients Mangle Your HTML...Fix It!". I think the article should be titled 12 Email Tips You Can Not Ignore. Anyways here are the tips that all email marketer should follow:

• Design the top three or four inches of your email with text and HTML that will tell readers what offer or content they will find below.
• Code email by hand. Unnecessary code bloat can increase your file size and could potential mangle your email.
• Avoid using nested tables. Some email clients have a hard time rendering them.
• Avoid 1X1 pixel spacer gifs. These are often found in spam and could get your email blocked.
• Background images for individual table cells are generally accepted, but may not appear in email clients such as Lotus Notes.
• Host your images instead of embedding them. Some ISP filter emails with embedded images.
• Use inline CSS. Some email clients strip out all the header information prior to rendering the email.
• Keep HTML email 500-650 pixels wide.
• Use image alt tags. The only email client that renders the alt tag is Gmail. (Not so sure if this is that effective.)
• Avoid forms. Many email clients will not render forms correctly or pass data from an email form to your Web site.
• Host rich-media (audio, video, Flash) on your Web site. Put a link in your email to these functions on your site.
• Avoid scripting (JavaScript, Visual Basics). Some ISP will block the email because they are mistaken for containing malicious code.

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Technorati: email delivery, email marketing, email design, email html tips

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