Register now for this virtual summit and learn all about the latest trends and best practices in email marketing without leaving your desk!

And it won’t cost you a penny/eurocent/dollarcent/… 

The DMA is proud to be a sponsor of this, the very first edition of the International Email Marketing Summit.

Not only will you be inspired by the latest tactics that work but you’ll also take away a list of action items you can implement immediately.

Featured speakers

• Dela Quist, Alchemy Worx
• Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights
• Tamara Gielen, Plan to Engage
• Denise Cox, Newsweaver
• Riaz Kanani, Alchemy Worx
• Kath Pay, Plan to Engage
• Arianna Galante, ContactLab
• Tom Bailey, eCircle
• James Bunting, Communicator

What’s on the agenda?

• Beyond just selling: engaging with your subscribers
• 7 reasons why your subscribers don’t respond
• Tips & tricks for designing emails for a mobile audience
• Inactive Subscribers: Prospects or Problem?
• Creating a successful content strategy for email marketing: 8 Easy Steps
• and lots more…

In the last quarter LinkedIn earned $33.3 million from Premium membership subscriptions. That’s 20% of LinkedIn revenues and its grown 87% in the last year.

Persuading more of the 90% of free members to upgrade is a major revenue opportunity for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn are using email to convert members, sending a free one month trial offer. I am a LinkedIn member and after many years still on the free package. As an early adopter of LinkedIn this makes me a target for Premium membership upgrade.

Just as I was putting the finishing touches to a new email copy & creative training deck of 87 slides a LinkedIn upgrade offer dropped into my inbox. It demonstrates several of the principles I’d just covered in the slide deck.

LinkedIn have optimised

What happened next was even better. I found a copy of the same offer from last November in one of my email folders (LinkedIn have tried a few times to convert me).

The difference between the email now and from last November is an excellent case study in email optimisation, so let me share the key elements of what changed and why.

Before

After

Another smart move

Not only is LinkedIn (a social network) smart enough to use email to drive revenue but they also send an urgency based reminder email shortly before the offer is due to expire. A second urgency based email to follow-up on an original offer always improves conversion.

In this issue of Infobox, there’s a lot more to integrating social media and email than just dropping in a few “share to social” icons. Dave Chaffey of SmartInsights, comes up with some inspiring examples of channel integration from the likes of uSwitch and Mothercare.

Dave Chaffey is among the speakers at a free, virtual International email marketing summit, which takes place on 16 May and is sponsored by the DMA.

Elsewhere in this issue, Simon Hill from Extravision analyses email deliverability across the globe and I reveal why I look forward to receiving e-newsletters from The Innocent Group in Campaigns we like.

Kath Pay, editor, Infobox
Co-Founder, Plan to Engage

PS – want articles like these delivered to your inbox twice a month? Then sign up to Infobox here!

The advantages of learning by doing are well known. In fact, whether its learning to drive a car or conquer a language, you have to do in order to learn.

Ready Steady Email is a hands’ on training workshop which is all about doing. It’s been my privilege to chair and facilitate most of these workshops in the last couple of years. Read on to understand how a Ready Steady Email workshop will help you with email marketing.

It’s a half day session in which you work with a small team of people on a case study to review and create an email strategy. Recipe cards are provided to help you cook up your dish and email expert facilitators sit with the teams to help guide and answer questions. This gives a higher tutor to delegate ratio than traditional lecture sessions.

As the workshop gets going the room fills up with energy with the noise of the delegates in deep discussion as they devise a strategy. Teams are in competition with each to create the best strategy and pitch it. Judging takes place at the end and prizes are awarded to the winners.

Don’t attend this workshop unless you are prepared to roll up your sleeves and join in. Those who have attended have really appreciated the unique format of this workshop. These are just a couple of comments from previous delegates

Highly interactive, very thought provoking.
I thought it was a really effective way of approaching this and has really helped me retain this information.

Watch this three minute video of the workshop and feel the energy of Ready Steady Email

Ready Steady Email has been attended by a wide variety of people and is suitable for:

• People with little email marketing knowledge through to intermediate ability
• Hands on email marketing executives
• Managers responsible for email marketing
• Account managers working with teams undertaking email marketing

At the end of the session attendees have a clear understanding of how to approach these seven email marketing needs:

• Strategy
• Data acquisition and management
• Segmentation and targeting
• Design and content
• Testing and refinement
• Measurement and evaluation
• Legals and compliance

Watch the event listings on the DMA website for the next chance to book.

Over the years I have implemented automated programs and experienced the extraordinary results they can deliver – from cost saving and improved engagement to higher customer satisfaction levels. However marketing automation magic cannot be conjured up through software alone, and I would argue that the magic is not in its ostensibly “fast and easy-to-implement” software. I think the magic comes from within the tests and learnings within your existing email programs.

When driven by a solidly built customer-focused relationship marketing strategy, marketing automation can be a profitable lead generation and management device combining insight, processes and technology that helps to scale your lead management program. Sure, it can be super speedy to get up and running (ask any software vendor); it can include seemingly cool social behavioural insights and of course it can show results quickly. However getting there is anything BUT speedy, cool and quick (ask any revenue-focused marketer). One of my favourite no-nonsense blog posts last year is from Marketing Profs.: “Planning, detailed execution, and a thorough analysis are key to success. It’s not magic. You can’t just snap your fingers and “poof”― all your marketing campaigns and drip sequences have been put into place.” I couldn’t agree more.

So how do you create Marketing Automation Magic?

Try looking inside your long-running email marketing program. For some time now digital marketing mavens have been foretelling the demise of email marketing in favour of social sharing routes and yet, email is the very foundation and channel by which marketing automation is powered. Need convincing? Take a look at these statistics: Twitter sees about 140 million tweets per day. Email? 188 billion messages. And according to data from Forrester’s Q1 2011 North American B2B Technology Marketing Tactics and Benchmarks Online Survey, email marketing still ranks fifth in a range of 21 tactics that marketing professionals deploy to attract, engage, and persuade customers along the buying lifecycle. Therefore, understanding the behaviours generated by your past email newsletters and by analysing test and learn program results, marketing automation implementations can deliver real results quicker.

You’ve probably been sending monthly email newsletters regularly and have a wealth of information and learnings dating back years. Don’t treat your marketing automation implementation and your email marketing activities as mutually exclusive. Use the vast knowledge and insight sitting in your existing email marketing tool. For example, knowledge of the right format that drives the best results is just one of the insights that should be drawn into your marketing automation plan. If you have been advancing your email marketing program over the last couple of years, you already have insights to drive best-in-class automation:

• Mobile usage across your customer base
• Social interactions and behaviours
• Website behavioural metrics
• Timing and content insights by customer segment
• Revenue generators by content segment

An excellent case study is Citrix’s Anti-newsletter Strategy that employed learnings from their email marketing program and applied them to their automation program. What they learned from their quarterly email newsletter helped drive success in their automation efforts.

I think most marketers have heard about email authentication and the use of Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF). If your using an email service provider then its likely that they will handle the authentication for you and you don’t need to worry. But why do emails need to be authenticated ?

Authentication wasn’t created to reduce spam, althought indirectly it does help, but it was designed to reduce the amount of phishing emails and emails with fake sending addresses. It is easy for anyone to send emails pretending to be from a particular domain and without authentication you have no way of knowing if the sender is valid or not. Authentication works using DNS (Domain Name Service) records. You can think of DNS as a giant phone book for the internet. To check if an email is authenticated the receiving email server will look in the phone book to verify details about the sender. Only the owner of the sending domain has the ability to change entries in the phone book (DNS records) which makes the authentication process secure.

Unfortunatley this does not entirely stop phishing emails. A spammer can easily purchase a domain very similar to the one he is trying to copy and then setup the authentication correctly. The emails will pass authentication and you may think nothing is wrong unless you look closely at the domain being used.

In January 2012 the new DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) standard was released and I have to admit I was a little confused to start with. People talked about it strengthening DKIM and SPF but didn’t understand how ? Then suddenly the penny dropped. DMARC is in essence a two way feedback loop for authentication.

Until now, the SPF and DKIM standards have lacked a communication loop between the sender and receiver. A sender has no way to tell the receiving ISP that emails from this domain are authenticated and any that aren’t should be quarantined or rejected. Conversely the receiving ISP also has no way of telling the sender that the emails it is receiving are passing or failing authentication. DMARC provides this communication mechanism and closes the loop between the sender who is authenticating messages and the receiver who is trying to interpret these records. DMARC, like DKIM and SPF is another DNS record that is added by the domain owner or administrator.

DMARC doesn’t change anything in the way the two authentication processes work but brings them together in one standard. To fail DMARC you need to fail both SPF and DKIM authentication.  The feedback from the receiving ISP’s is in the form of an aggregate report. Currently we have only ever received reports from Gmail but hopefully Yahoo and others will follow soon. The report is sent daily in a zipped tar file and is in xml format.  You can import the report into Excel so you can read it like a spreadsheet or use a website such as www.dmarcian.com to format the results. What is staggering about the report is the number of emails that are being sent from other mail servers pretending to be from domains under your control.  You can enter the IP address of mail servers where the authentication is failing into www.projecthoneypot.org and immediately see if the address is a known spammer.

Authentication doesn’t help your emails find its way through the mine field of spam filters and smart inboxes but without it it is likely your emails will be rejected at the first hurdle. DMARC gives the sender a way of checking if emails are being authenticated correctly and what action the reciever should take if authentication fails.

You can learn more about DMARC at the website www.dmarc.org

Developing a good email marketing strategy can be a daunting task. To help you get some perspective, here are 3 key stages to keep you on track.

Develop a customer centric communications strategy.

I know this can be a bit of an overused statement, but to make the email channel work in the modern environment of priority inboxes’ etc it is vital. Focusing on the needs and motivations of the customer as they would relate to your brand is a great place to start. If you are going to be talking to the customer and expect them to engage, purchase or become loyal as a response, you’ve got to say the right things. This can’t be done at a campaign tactical level, when the heats on to get more sales to hit target; it needs to be part of an overriding communications strategy. This strategy will set out more than just how many promotional emails need to be sent to achieve revenue objectives. To develop this email communication strategy, these are some of the key elements.

• Understand how your customers perceive the brand and its products or services.
• Research the motivations and needs that engagement with your brand satisfies.
• Research the strengths that define your brand equity.
• Define your customer lifecycle and set business rules to identify where each customer sits.

Focus the strategy on increasing LifetTime Value

Once you have got a clear idea of your customer and the stages the customer goes through in their engagement with you (from discovery to defection), you can start to plan. One key objective of any email communications strategy should be to increase revenue by increasing customer lifetime value. Now, don’t think this is purely a retention statement, it equally counts for acquisition too.

Acquisition

If you’re going to be focusing on lifetime value, it will have an impact on which sources you target for acquisition. Customers coming from sources that provide a low lifetime value customer should be avoided, or the price you pay for acquiring the prospect should reflect their future value. In the case of an email address, they are not all worth the same, so the first task would be to identify sources of prospect email addresses that will provide good future customer value. A good place to start is to look at any results you have from past activity, and look at the overall sales achieved over time, from those customers.  The problem with email is that it is a cheap marketing medium that can be abused with little (apparent) cost implication. Good email prospect data, costs far more than poor quality prospect data, but can be far cheaper in the long term, as it produces good long term results.

Retention

Without the understanding of the customer (and you’ll only get this from the research suggested above) you won’t be able to sell to the customer what they want, how they want it. You’ll only be able to sell your product or service how you perceive it. Customer knowledge also allows you to tailor communications for each stage of the customer lifecycle. This will make your communications more relevant, more effective and more likely to meet business objectives. The strategy should be one that makes every marketing communication be seen as a positive experience by the customer, not a negative “interference” experience.   Ensure you do this by following these key rules:

• Define the commercial objectives for each stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Develop a customer communication plan that reflects the customer research and meets business objectives.
• Ensure research and testing is part of the strategy, to promote future development.

Make it part of a multi touch, multi channel strategy

In a connected world, where people are hooked onto the grid in multiple ways, touch points come via multiple channels. Just to take one example of a device, the smartphone can deliver a marketing message via email, web, social and SMS simultaneously. Studies have been suggesting recently that someone is likely to be watching the telly or walking round a store while access their phone, so the potential for cross media confusion abounds. Add this to multimedia spamming potential, and it makes integrated marketing communications essential for each channel’s success. Email has an important role to play in future direct marketing, with its unique strengths, it can only be effective as part of an overall cross channel strategy. Complimenting other channel activity, email often drives an uplift on other channels as well.

Taking a strategic approach to the email channel can bring lots more opportunity to the party, ultimately allowing customer knowledge to drive content, timing and targeting; nudging that little bit closer to true one to one marketing.

I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

And if they unsubscribe, it means they want you to stop sending them emails; so you stop, because it would be crazy to carry on, wouldn’t it?

So… why have I been sent marketing emails from a company I’ve previously unsubscribed from, with text saying “we’d like you to subscribe to our newsletter”. No thank you. I’ve unsubscribed once – isn’t that enough? Someone even sent me an email Christmas card that automatically signed me up to marketing emails!

Those are two examples from a very limited sample size. It is possible I have been very unlucky, but it does demonstrate this issue exists. It wouldn’t take long for the trust that has been built up with the public over the last few years to be eroded. At a time when we should be encouraging as many subscribers to sign up to our email communications, playing fast and loose with email permission is not the way forward. New European legislation threatens to make permission and data use more of an issue for the online marketer, we need to develop the public’s trust, not damage it.

With the revenue driving potential of the channel, it is easy to see how some could be tempted to go against the express wishes of their customers, in an attempt to drive a few extra sales. But in doing so marketers must consider the cost to their reputation.

Okay, that might be a bit harsh. Perhaps the resolution should be: “I resolve to stop and take a breath before hitting the ‘Send’ button.” Maybe it is because we all spent a bit too much time in that strange place called Christmasland during December but there were some very high (and a lot of very low) profile errors during December that could have been easily avoided.

Starting with the high profile, the New York Times accidentally offered more than 8.6 million people a half-price subscription in an email meant for a few hundred, because they sent it to the wrong list (http://bit.ly/uHerov). It is one thing to send an email to the wrong list when it is about the same size as the one intended, but to be off by a factor of 10,000…!

Another much lower profile (in the sense that The Guardian did not write an article about it) but potentially just as damaging case occurred to a client who sent an email with some broken links and images. After the obligatory call to both Support and his account manager, we discovered that the client had sent a test message. Now you are probably asking yourself what we asked the client: “If you noticed that the links and images were broken in the test message, why did you send the email to your customers?” The answer was delivered without embarrassment or acknowledgement of the obvious: “We were under time pressure to get it out.”

So, for 2012 I ask all email marketers to do the following before each email Send:

1. Ask a colleague who did not help you write the email to proofread it. If a colleague is not available, use spouses, partners, the postman, or even English-speaking baristas.
2. Send a test message to a number of accounts on a number of platforms.
3. Go into each test message and make sure it looks as you intended.
4. On one of the test messages click on all of the links and make sure they go to the page you intended.
5. Think about the list you are going to use for the campaign and without looking at it write down the number of people you expect to receive the email on a piece of paper. This part is important because by writing it down, you will be less tempted to look at the number and convince yourself that it is right and you are wrong.
6. Now look at the stats for the list; are the numbers similar?
7. If you really want to be sure, pull a couple of random recipients out of the list to see if based on your segmentation you would expect them to receive the email.
8. Go make a cup of tea to give your brain a few minutes to catch your pending mistake.
9. Send your email.

I should also add that you should make sure you monitor the stats for your campaign while it runs its natural course but that is probably a separate resolution.