Posted by Kath Pay on March 9, 2010
In this month’s issue of Infobox, Stephanie Miller addresses some of the reasons why good email gets marked as bad. Even the most respected brands have some email message blocked by the spam filters – in fact, about 15 to 20% of permission-based, legitimate email marketing never reaches the inbox*.
The ISPs like Yahoo!, Gmail, T-Online, Orange and Free.fr now require marketers to do more to be considered “good.”
In this webinar organised by The Email Marketers Club, you’ll learn what the ISPs are saying is important for marketers if they want to get their messages delivered to the inbox.
Speaker: Stephanie Miller, VP, Global Market Development, Return Path
Moderator: Tamara Gielen, independent email marketing consultant, author of the email marketing best practices blog Be Relevant and founder of the Email Marketer’s Club
When: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 11am EST
(8am PST, 5pm CET, 4pm GMT)
The first 10 people to register using our special discount code of DMAEMAILBLOG will get to attend this webinar for free!
To find out more or to register for this webinar click here
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Posted by Kath Pay on March 8, 2010
While the date has yet to be set for the forthcoming general election, all political parties are gearing up to campaign in what promises to be the most closely contested general election in years.
As the Obama presidential campaign in 2008 showed, the difference between winning and losing could come down to which candidate operates the most effective communications campaign. A well executed digital marketing campaign undoubtedly helped to connect President Obama with voters in a way no politician has done so before.
Regular targeted and personalised emails to voters proved to be one of the most powerful communications tools in the Obama’s election campaign. It remains to be seen whether any of the UK’s mainstream political parties will harness the power of email marketing in a similar fashion, but recent history suggests they’d be foolish not to.
In this month’s Infobox Return Path’s Stephanie Miller looks at the rules of engagement when it comes to inbox placement; David Hughes of Email Academy puts forward his case for why averages don’t tell us anything interesting; Newsweaver’s Denise Cox addresses the challenges and choices around videos in email; and James Bunting of Communication explains why he’s impressed by the way Amazon uses data. For DMA members’ eyes only, this month’s special report is Anatomy of an Email Newsletter Checklist.
Why Good Email Gets Marked as Bad, Stephanie Miller
Don’t be Mr. Average: why averages are a bad, bad thing in email marketing, David Hughes
Video in email, denise Cox
Campaigns We Like: Amazon, James Bunting
Posted by Tink Taylor on February 16, 2010
Facebook has recently announced that businesses with applications on the social network will soon be able to ask users for their email address and permission to contact them directly:
“We’re excited to announce that you will soon have the ability to ask users for their primary Facebook email addresses, providing you with a direct channel to communicate with your users”
Currently, applications can communicate with users through internal Facebook notifications, but this doesn’t really provide much opportunity to build a more personalised and direct relationship with users of the social network.
With the new changes to Facebook, application owners will be able to specify optional or mandatory email permissions when users install or use an application. But let’s be clear. The emphasis here should be firmly on social media and any marketer thinking this is a quick win to getting a new database to blast is mistaken. Facebook itself has given some advice to marketers on how to most effectively use this new functionality:
“We recommend you use email to send them interesting and relevant information, like receipts for purchases they make, messages to help reactivate them if they haven’t visited your application or integration in a while, or newsletters promoting new features or contests.”
Integration is key
We’ve covered the links between social media and email a number of times on the blog and I wrote earlier this month about a great campaign from Fat Face that utilised the power of email and social media in combination to great effect.
This move by Facebook allows email even greater levels of integration and throws water on the fire that social will be the death of email. The use of social media and email working together (as with other channels) rather than in spite of is just as much a central part of any marketing campaign. This is backed up by Facebook’s announcement that they intend to provide a functional email client.
Of course it goes without saying that the way in which businesses use this valuable data will ultimately dictate how valuable it becomes. Facebook itself has put together a list of fairly stringent rules and regulations that can be found on the developer wiki.
Companies that use this data correctly will be able to elevate the relationship they have with these users. But companies that use this as a way to further bombard contacts with marketing messages, with no targeting or segmentation, will very quickly find the data become useless and, even worse, that users end their relationship with the brand on Facebook and email.
Posted by Kath Pay on February 11, 2010
Recent research published by the DMA highlighted a statistic that we in the email marketing sector should draw great strength from: consumers prefer to receive direct marketing messages via email rather than any other channel.
Of the 1,367 consumers interviewed for the 2009 Marketing-GAP Tracking Study, conducted by online market research company fast.MAP and the DMA, 51 per cent expressed an interest in receiving marketing emails about companies they know. Direct mail was the second most-popular channel, with 38 per cent of people open to receiving items of this sort.
This is great news for a marketing medium that is still in its infancy, but it is no time for complacency. We need to ensure that we become ever-more sophisticated in our approach so that we can continue to meet the needs and expectations of consumers.
In this month’s Infobox Alchemy Worx’s Dela Quist looks at the selling power of the ‘nudge effect’; Skip Fidura argues his case for why email marketers should be focusing on outcome metrics, rather than process metrics; Sara Watts explains how unsubscribes can be a good thing; and News International’s Rupert Harrison describes what he likes about Molton Brown’s email marketing. For DMA members’ eyes only, this month’s special report is Eight smart customer engagement strategies.
Don’t forget that we’d also like to see you in the real world at our series of Email Customer Lifecycle seminars during 2010. On 3 March, we’ll be looking at conversion – how to earn that click and open and drive revenue. Tickets for the first Lifecycle went fast, so to guarantee your seat today, please make your booking here.
The secret power of the unopened email, Dela Quist
Process versus outcome metrics, Skip Fidura
Why Bad things are not always all that bad, Sara Watts
Campaigns we like: Molton Brown, Rupert Harrison
Special report: Eight smart customer engagement strategies by Experian Cheetahmail (available to DMA members only)
Posted by Ross Caddy on February 8, 2010
Now in its fourth year, the National Client Email Marketing Report is the most widely read and distributed of all EMC reports. Over 150 marketers completed the 2009 survey and with the support of a media partner, New Media Age, we are aiming to increase this to over 200 in 2010.
For the 2010 report there are multiple sponsorship opportunities. We will provide each sponsor with a bespoke report that is co-branded with their logo and perspective which can be distributed to prospects and clients.
To find out more information on this opportunity please contact Ross Caddy on 020 7291 3383 or ross.caddy@dma.org.uk
Posted by Guy Hanson on
Many years ago, I read a short story by legendary Sci-Fi author Arthur C. Clarke called “The 9 Billion Names of God.” The story revolved around an order of Tibetan monks, who had determined that there were 9 Billion possible variations on how to write the name of God and, that once this task had been completed, mankind’s reason for existence would be fulfilled.
Not surprisingly, the monks were finding that this task was taking a long time to achieve by hand. Leveraging the newly available technology of the time, they commissioned an IBM mainframe ( this was 1953 ), and 3 months later the job was done.
It was after the admittedly sceptical IBM engineers had decommissioned the computer, and were heading back down the mountain trail to the nearest airport, that they suddenly notice that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
I was thinking of this story while I was visually inspecting a new client’s email list prior to broadcast, and starting to wonder precisely how many ways there are that people can mis-spell Hotmail ! So I ran the file through our suite of email address hygiene applications, and the answer would seem to be close to 100 – and those are just the ones where I had at least 90% confidence that Hotmail is the domain that they were actually intended to represent.
There was “htomail.com”. And “hotamil.com”. And “homtail.com”. And “hotmali.co.uk”. And “ohtmail.com”. And . . . – the list is ( nearly ) endless. And that’s before we even start to consider the likes of “btinterent.com”, “ayhoo.co.uk”, “ntlwolrd.com”, “tisclai.co.uk”, and “gogolemail.com” ( all real examples, by the way ! ).
Sometimes these errors are made on purpose, by people who are responding to a call to action ( “give us your email address and you can download our 2 for 1 voucher” ). Consumers are increasingly savvy, and want the reward without exposing themselves to a blizzard of e-marketing activity. This could point to issues with engagement – another topic in its own right. However, these errors are more often the result of genuine errors where people either can’t type or can’t spell ( or both – as an aside, this has been recognised by the developers of www.fatfingers.com which finds mis-spelled entries on eBay such as “nitendo wee” where bid activity is – not surprisingly – much lower, so the chance of a successful bid is correspondingly higher . . . ! ).
Anyway, back to “hootmail” – oops ! While it’s ( almost ) funny, this also represents a serious problem for e-marketers. Bounce activity is one of the core metrics that feeds into the calculation of a sender’s reputation data. While the vast majority of these addresses will be filtered out after the first time that they have been broadcast to, you’ve still got to generate the bounce notifications first ! e-Marketers have traditionally dealt with this by using a separate IP address for the welcome email / first broadcast, but the increasing use of domain-based reputation means that this isn’t a perfect solution either.
Because of this, it’s starting to place a premium on making sure that the address is being captured correctly in the first place. That means using a technique such as double-entry, so that if our fat-fingered friends get it wrong the first time, it will be flagged up when they enter the address correctly ( hopefully ) the second time. Alternatively, to use a validated opt-in process that generates a confirmation email and only activates the account once the confirmation email has delivered successfully.
However, even then you are not completely out of the woods, because some of the incorrect spellings are actually valid domains, a fact that major ISPs such as Hotmail have recognised, and which they are now monitoring as a new form of spam trap. What makes this particularly difficult is the fact that these records won’t usually generate a bounce notification, so you could end up perpetuating the problem by sending to them many times over – and ending up with a mail block every time. So the only effective way of dealing with these addresses once they are on your database is to monitor your response behaviour, and screen out all non-responders on a regular basis ( which is actually part of the best practice that you should be applying anyway ! ).
However, a better way of dealing with this problem is to pre-empt it by pre-screening your data prior to broadcast. As a business, we have developed an email address hygiene routine that applies fuzzy-matching logic to test supplied domain names against known valid domain names, and to then filter out all matches where there is statistical confidence about the likelihood of the supplied domain being an incorrectly spelt version of the valid domain. The match rates aren’t massive – on average, about half of one percent – but that’s still 50 records in a list of 100,000 addresses, which based on our experience is definitely more than enough to trigger a block against you if they are not removed.
So the key learning here is that the bar for good email data hygiene is being set increasingly higher. Standard bounce management processes are certainly no longer enough – validation of email addresses at point of capture, pre-screening to remove known errors, and recency analysis of open and click behaviour are all now playing a crucial role in the delivery of successful email broadcasts. Implement them now, and the stars will continue to shine on your e-marketing program !
Posted by Richard Gibson on January 25, 2010
Whilst everyone is full of excitement around the New Year and making predictions for 2010 I’d like to take time and ponder the DMA National Client Email Marketing Report (free for DMA members) that came out late in 2009. This is the companion piece for the quarterly surveys and tracks only the clients (or the actual marketers) viewpoint rather than their technology providers.
There is much to digest in the report and I recommend it to one and all. The thing that is most interesting for me to read is the actual concerns that marketers have and they have several it seems. The specific question was worded; “Which of the following are you most concerned about?” Top of the list for both B2C and B2B marketers alike was deliverability; top of the list means the client marketer’s number one concern. That’s right, you read it correctly, the number one concern for email marketers was deliverability and that is ahead of concerns such as clicks and conversion rates.
Although it may sound obvious but simply put without deliverability, and very specifically delivery to the recipients inbox those click and conversation rates will be depressed. Indeed the ROI of the overall marketing programme will be less than it could be.
Yet deliverability remains for some a confusing term, what does it mean? Who is actually responsible? How can I reliably measure and improve upon it? What can I do to improve upon it? Wait a minute are my messages even reaching the inboxes?
Whilst I don’t plan to tackle these questions in this post, I will make some predictions on the topic of deliverability for 2010. Firstly getting messages delivered to the inbox is, for many reasons not going to get any easier. Why? Because as ISPs get better at identifying truly criminal spam, they will focus more attention on the email practices of legitimate mailers. And as they rely more on trusted whitelists and start using engagement metrics to determine if mail is actually wanted, marketers will have to work harder to achieve relevancy in the inbox by developing loyal subscribers that regularly open, click and convert. Secondly, and following on from this, monitoring email deliverability will become more important than ever for all marketers. Those who want to outperform their competitors, cut through inbox clutter and earn higher response rates will want to understand which factors drive good deliverability and demand greater insight into whether their messages actually arrived in the inbox.
The data point they will now covet is the Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) a metric that is fast becoming widespread as marketers become savvier about measuring true ROI and a metric marketers are more frequently asking their technology providers to provide in order to gain full visibility of their email marketing programme. If you are a marketer and would like to find out more, why not take our quick three question survey here.
Posted by Kath Pay on January 20, 2010
Welcome to the January 2010 issue of Infobox. We have now set foot in what is ostensibly the email marketing industry’s second decade of existence. As we entered the new millennium, few could have predicted just how email would quickly evolve to become one of the preeminent marketing channels. Technological developments aside, what has been most impressive is how sophisticated the medium has become in such a short period of time. What the digital world will look like ten years hence is anyone’s guess, but I’m confident that the next decade will see email marketing continue to be at the forefront of marketing innovation.
This month, Infobox features articles on how the ’spray and pray’ approach used by some email marketers needs to be retired and make way for the three Ts: tailored, targeted, timely; taking a level-headed approach to integrating email with social media marketing; and a case study on how Apple uses email to effectively up- and cross-sell.
Don’t forget that we’d also like to see you in the real world at our series of Email Customer Lifecycle seminars during 2010. On 3 March, we’ll be looking at conversion – how to earn that click and open and drive revenue. Tickets for the first Lifecycle sold out, so to guarantee your seat today, please make your booking here.
The 3 T’s – Tailored, Targeted, Timely by Jonathan Burston
Email as a social stepping stone by Simone Barratt
Campaigns we like: Apple by Tink Taylor
Read the full issue of Infobox here
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