Google recently announced it is to close the long running Google Friends newsletter. Launching in 1998, whilst Google was still on Stanford’s servers it has been delivered monthly. That is until now. From next month, the newsletter will cease to exist because subscriber numbers had stalled. But a wider look at Google suggests it doesn’t pay much attention to using email as a channel to communicate with its users.

First, lets take a quick look at the Google Friends newsletter.

Google outgrew this newsletter a long time ago. Each month, the newsletter provided a mix of tips and news across Google’s vast array of products. One month it was Google Toolbar, a Daily puzzle, Google Docs, Earth Day and a power tip for Google Map Maker. Another month it was a power tip on Google Voice and news on Google Places, Youtube, Google Translate and a Doodle for Google contest.

Unless you were interested in everything Google, this newsletter was not for you.

There are perhaps a small niche of people that might like the vast array of news updates across the whole of Google. Given the size of Google, and Larry Page’s new more autonomous business unit approach. Collating and combining these centrally may just have become too expensive versus the benefits. Of course these are their most ardent fans, so ignoring them is an interesting approach.

Overall though, Google’s approach to email is scattered and unorganised at best.

Google pushes out a huge amount of information, highly targeted not just by product but also by country. You can find the full list here, it is truly impressive in scale. You can subscribe to receive this information via Twitter, Facebook, RSS and (of course) Google Buzz! Surprisingly there is no mention of email at all. Given the scale of email (3.1 billion email accounts – click for more stats), its ability to remind users of your products/features and persistently store your message so you can come back to it, not promoting email subscriptions seems like a lost opportunity. Sure, it can be misused but so can all channels.

Relying on Twitter or Facebook for Google updates can easily lead to missed updates as unless I spend all day watching for their updates (not likely!) or proactively remember to visit their profiles on these network, Google is merely hoping I catch their updates in my newsfeeds.  Further you cannot search the Facebook newsfeed at all and searching  Twitter only results in tweets going back a few days.

Subscribing via RSS is an option for me as I am a heavy RSS user, but the usage numbers are low generally especially with a mainstream audience. So low in fact, that the last metric I can find on RSS numbers is from 2005. A rather tiny 275m wordwide.

Finally there is Google Buzz! Is anyone still using Google Buzz?

So where is email? It is there, but to find it you have to click through on some of the blog links where you will sometimes bring up the option of subscribing via email. There is obviously no standardised approach to this. The Blogger buzz blog had it in the right sidebar, the Google Analytics blog doesn’t have it anywhere. It is hit and miss based on the template used.

Email is different.
Different channels offer different benefits. Twitter and Facebook are great for offering casual connections to brands. Brands you really want to hear from? Not so good. For those situations, email is the right tool for the job.

If you are spending all that time creating content, getting in front of as many people who want to read it would seem to be a good thing. People can always unsubscribe. Google even provides that service inside Gmail.

If I had a pound for every time I’ve been asked about the death of email marketing, I’d be “on the cover of Forbes Magazine, smiling next to Oprah and the Queen” (to steal lyrics from the Travie McCoy/Bruno Mars song). Basically, I’d be a billionaire.

Instead, I’m constantly coming up with new ways to answer this question and am always on the look-out for research, statistics, trends and other evidence that will finally convince the world at large that email is here to stay. Rather than cite some of the quantitative evidence I’ve compiled (and there’s a lot), here is something a bit more qualitative, but no less meaningful.

If you were ever in doubt that email is even more relevant now that is was 15 years ago and isn’t going anywhere any time soon, perhaps this will change your mind:

• Email is worth preserving: A recent article in the Independent described an acquisition by the British Library of poet Wendy Cope’s archive, including a collection of approximately 40,000 emails, which it paid over $32,000 for, representing the largest electronic acquisition in its history. Despite Cope’s admission that some of the emails are “not interesting at all,” their combined value is in their ability to show Cope’s more informal thoughts and feelings that may have been omitted from other forms of communication, like letters. As the article’s author so rightly points out, “Letters show us in our best frock; emails will show our underbelly—our peeves, our crushes our irritations.” Email is clearly engrained in the way we communicate and manage our personal relationships.
• There’s an app for that. This phrase no longer just applies to mobile. Major webmail providers are allowing developers to create applications specifically for the inbox to create a richer email experience for users. My colleague, Tom Sather, does a great job of highlighting some of the more innovative apps in his regular “Weekly Roundup” blog postings. Some of the cooler apps out there include:

1. Other Inbox: This tool allows you to automatically organize your inboxes (primarily at Yahoo and AOL) based on priority and category. You also get a daily digest of everything you’ve received by category with the most important messages highlighted for you. It’s basically like having a personal assistant file everything into customized folders (created by you) so that your inbox is less cluttered.
2. Sane Box: This tool provides a similar benefit. It uses your existing contacts, email interactions and your social networks to determine what messages are a priority. It also aims to prevent false positives by monitoring your spam folders for messages that you actively signed up for. 
3. AwayFind: This tool lets you automate your inbox by having an alert sent when you receive an important email.  You have the option of receiving a mobile text message or having your inbox call you and read the messages you’ve received. 
4. ToneCheck. This tool actually reviews the tone of your email messages to help you send email that is less offensive or “emotionally charged.” Designed as a plug-in for Outlook, you’ll see a “Tone Alert” indicator at the bottom of your message that will alert you when the message falls outside of your predetermined tolerance level.

• Email is art. The Aubin Gallery in Shoreditch is currently exhibiting a show called “Authorized.” The artist, James Howard, uses email to create posters and screenings of digital collages from imagery in his huge personal archive of JPEGs, animated GIFs and other screen shots culled from spam messages and junk mail.

So, do you still think email is dead or have I put this topic to bed once and for all?

This week the European Email Vendor Features and Functions Guide is released. The second part of the two part guide that offers side-by-side comparison of in total 53 ESPs (email service providers) worldwide and the differences between email vendors is larger than expected.

The first worldwide edition
In a collaboration of Red Pill Email and Emailmonday, this will be the first time there will be a world edition. Listing the features and functions of 53 email vendors from both North America and Europe. Adding the European vendors the number of included ESPs is effectively doubled, thus presenting a more complete overview of the international ESP marketplace.

Jordie van Rijn: “We see a lot of ESP’s expanding their services abroad. Sometimes with very aggressive methods and competitive pricing to get a bigger piece of the e-mail market. We are seeing that American suppliers look at Europe for innovation and clients, and vice versa. The US version has been running for two years, and now the European vendors are also included.”

Differences between European Email Service Providers

While all ESPs find it important that email marketing strategy is well thought out, 20% of the email vendors don’t offer any email strategy advice. A quarter doesn’t offer creative services.

Within the tools themselves are also large differences to be found. If you would like to have  more control over your data, than just a simple export mechanism, it is advisable to look at all the different ESP offerings. From the questions that were asked of European ESPs about data control, there were suppliers that offered 89% of all functionalities, but there were also ones that only offered 20%.

A new trend is offering pre-configured campaigns, such as abandoned cart campaigns, welcome emails and automatic resends to non-openers. With these types of emailings, much is gained in conversion and efficiency. But only 2 out of the 28 European Email vendors offered all types of pre-configured emailings.

Contents of the guide
The 2011 Email Vendor Features & Functions Guides show side-by-side comparisons of 53 email vendors ranging from small market table vendors to commercial MTAs and points in between, with over 200 essential questions asked. For the first time, a desktop application has been added that helps users to identify the vendors best suited to their needs based on their own business criteria.

Further contents of the guide
The Email Vendor Features and Functions Guide presents comparison tables and graphs, in 8 different categories that look at the features and functions. It explores virtually all functional areas of interest to email marketers and end users. Over 1000 hours went into the making of this Guide; written from the perspective of an experienced hands-on email marketer.

About Red Pill email
John Caldwell, the author of the guide has been in the email space since 1996. The Red Pill Email founder, has worked on the agency side, the client side, and as a consultant, using deployment tools that range from ESPs to in-house to home-grown email systems.

About Emailmonday 
Jordie van Rijn, contributing editor of the EU Email Vendor Features and Functions guide. Is an independent email marketing consultant. With his company Emailmonday he has over 8 years of hands-on experience as an e-mail marketing and loyalty marketing consultant. He has worked with A-list brands like AEGON, Unilever, Roche, Heineken, and many more. He is a common blogger, speaker and coach in the field of email marketing. Jordie is also partner at Emailtestbox and runs the website Emailvendorselection.com.

The DMA, is very proud to be a Media Partner with The Fusion Marketing Experience and is offering a 30% discount on the registration price. Fusion stands for integrated, international and connected, like in fusion cuisine.

With the taglines of ‘The New Marketing Cuisine’ or ‘How to cook up value for today’s gourmet customer’, Fusion Marketing Experience is a one day event on March 23rd, 2011 in Brussels.

Leading chefs such as our own Dela Quist of AlchemyWorx  and Kath Pay of DM Inbox, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights, eCRM and e-mail marketing expert Gianfranco Cuzziol of  EHS 4D Group, Richard Sedley of Foviance, social media marketing specialist, Olivier Blanchard of BrandBuilder Marketing,  Trey Pennington, CRM, research and technology marketing expert Alfred den Besten from MarketCap and WordPress and SEO wizard, Joost de Valk of Yoast.com (just to name a few) will share their secret sauce of success with attendees!

Today’s consumer is a gourmet.
Marketers must use the proper ingredients  and channels to cook the right recipes with one purpose: satisfy the taste buds of people so they want more.

A stylish and intimate location.
The Fusion Marketing Experience will be hosted at the intimate and stylish, Maison Du Bois in Brussels with delicious food and an open bar. Keynotes will be kept relatively short to give participants the opportunity to interact with our marketing chefs in smaller groups and on a one-to-one basis.

Reserve your place today and use the discount code ‘fusiondma30′ to take advantage of the 30% discount.

In this month’s Infobox:

• What are the challenges facing email marketers? We look at the latest trends and developments, including hotmail Active Views, Facebook messaging and the surge in mobile browsing.
• Video is making a comeback this year. Find out what this means for email marketing and how to use video successfully in your campaign.
• PizzaExpress hit a home run with Guy Hanson of DBG when it sent him an email telling him he wasn’t a winner!
• Read the results of the latest Email Benchmarking Report to find out the big trends and challenges and why it will pay to improve your email strategies in 2011. (DMA members only)

Kath Pay, Editor, Infobox
Strategic Consultant, DM Inbox

After the email council has spent hours in the DMA offices at the monthly council meetings there is occasionally the need to move across the road to the pub where discussions (both email and non email related) can be quite interesting. One topic that came up is how quickly email marketing is still evolving. However it was also noted that some key fundamentals stay basically the same. The article below was first published in the DMA newsletters in 2008 (a million years ago in the land of digital) However nearly all the points still stand today.

When aiming to grow your email database.

1. Only collect people who want to hear from you and will be valuable to you.

2. Utilise all your own internal sources both on and offline to collect data (a recent addition to this is to also maximise all social media for this purpose).

3. When considering Third party data capture or third party list rental only use reputable companies, check the legal bits are in place and test test test.

4. Remember to track return on investment appropriately. The graph in the article below can be adapted to any campaign testing and is so simple but will give you an indication of when you will get the money back you have paid out.

The DMA legal and best practice hub is in the process of publishing a series of White Papers with useful info on all areas relating to Email marketing. I have been working on the white paper for 3rd party lead generation and 3rd party List rental and all the content is brand new and bang up to date. The only historic bit of information that might sneak in is the graph below and the explanation of what you need to consider when collecting data in terms of return on investment and what you need to monitor.

Is this information (from 2008) still relevant or are there different things in 2011 that we need to be considering? -

Third party data capture or third party list rental

Once you are maximising your own customer and prospect data (gathered from your website) then the next step is to look at how to utilise other data to get the full benefit from your email marketing strategy. In order to do this effectively you need to make sure you:

1. Are clear on the target audience; who do you want to receive your email. Look at the profile of your existing client base in relation to what you are promoting in order to ascertain this.

2. Have a clear communication strategy. Are you just promoting your product or service on emails; will the same message be reflected in other marketing mediums; or will the email be followed up by a phone call? In most cases the marketing message you send to your new prospects needs to be different to the one you send to your own customers.

3. Be clear on what you are monitoring. Don’t make the mistake of just looking at the number of people who open or click on the email – the monitoring needs to be related to your key business aims. E.g. people who purchase something or are active on the areas of the website where you need them to be active.

4. Always follow the DMA best practice guidelines (www.dma.org.uk/bpg) and be fully aware of where the data you are using has come from, how it has been collected and that the data owners’ privacy policies and data collection statements are clear and legal.

Two of the most effective ways of expanding email marketing from simply using your own data to using third party data are List Rental and Data Capture:

1. List rental – where you send a one off mailing (or if agreed a series of emails) to a selection of people who have given permission on another company’s website to receive emails from selected third parties. This is typically priced at a cost per thousand (CPM).

2. Third party Data Acquisition – where individuals give their details and sign up to become a member of your company’s mailings on a third party’s website or through an off line medium. This is normally priced at a cost per record where the price will vary depending on the amount of information you require, what the user is signing up for and what criteria of people you want to make the offer to.

Which one to use?

There are several factors which will determine which option will work best for your company. Including:

• What your key business aims are

• The type of product or service you are selling

• How regularly you intend to communicate with your prospects/customers.

• How quickly you need any marketing activity to pay for itself

As long as the data you use is of the same quality, a small test for third party list rental will quickly give you an accurate indication of your basic cost per sale (remember to also take into account the additional longer term benefits of brand awareness and increased impacts on other advertising mediums).

Data acquisition has a higher upfront cost but the returns continue over a longer period of time as you can communicate with the individual on more than one occasion. If you continue to make the marketing message effective and the volume and timing of the email sends appropriate, then you will continue to see a more intense return on investment over a longer period of time.

The chart below is based on a (theoretical) company who pay £80 per thousand for list rental and £1 per record for data acquisition. With open rates of 30%, bounce rate of 1% and a conversation rate of 2%. They are emailing the data acquisition customers weekly.

This shows that the cost per sale from list rental is £40 per thousand. The cost per sale from data acquisition starts above a £100 but by week 14 has decreased to £61, and at week 25 it crosses the line with list rental at £40 per thousand. By the end of the year the cost per sale has dropped to below £20.

This hypothetical example shows that data acquisition incurs a higher upfront cost which takes a longer time to pay for itself, however over a longer period of time the value is greater.

This means that some companies, particularly those which need a quick return on investment or where the product or service will be either relevant to an individual or not (and this will not change over time), will be better off using list rental. When using list rental, make sure that the landing page you are sending the recipient to has a clear option to sign up to receive more information from you even if they don’t want what you have to offer right now.

For other companies where the return does not need to be so immediate and customers are more likely to buy into the product or service once a relationship is built up, data acquisition is going to be more effective.

In many cases both methods will work for a company if the targeting and creative are correct. The best thing to do when getting started is to run small tests of both list rental and data acquisition, and continually monitor the return on investment by looking at both the source and type of data. This will help to not only determine which method works best for you but will also help to continually improve the campaigns, thus maximising revenue and profit

The industry is rocking with the news that Goodmail, an email accreditation service, has announced they are ceasing operations giving their clients one week’s notice. This involves the uneviable task of changing IP addreses and possibly having to warm up new ones.

Goodmail was in negotiations with Symantec but was unable to close the deal. A client received an email from Goodmail saying the following: “No longer a viable company on a standalone basis, and unable to find a suitable acquirer, we are now forced to shut down.”

You can read more over at emailexpert.org

Amazon released yesterday its new email service. For a miniscule USD 10c per thousand you can send your email marketing emails via Amazon’s sending infrastructure.

Is it that easy? I hear you ask…No it isn’t. In fact it isn’t a service aimed for the regular small to medium business. Essentially what they are offering is more like an MTA service (Mail Transfer Agent) rather than a full ESP service such as dotmailer, eCircle, Silverpop, Lyris etc offer.

Within a typical email marketing sending tool there are 2 parts of the tool – the ‘front end’ with all the bells and whistles and useability that we the user are familiar with and the ‘backend’ – the MTA, which is the part which does the sending and deliverability of the emails. Amazon’s SES appears to be the ‘backend’ – so a ‘front end’ will ideally be required.

It doesn’t have the bells and whistles that ESP’s offer and you need to have a good technical team on hand to implement and customise the API. It is however highly scalable and would in fact be a perfect option for some of the smaller ESP’s to use in order to take advantage of this scalability.

You can read more on this subject by the following authors:

• Email Expert. Andrew Bonar has been testing the new service out and will be posting results of his tests throughout the next few days….you can follow his updates on @email_expert and @andrewbonar
• The Magill Report
• Email Vendor Selection
• Econsultancy
• Amazon Web Services Blog
• Business Insider
• Alchemy Worx

Following on from yesterday’s review of 2010, I thought it would be interesting to see which posts caught people’s eye and garnered the most visits to this corner of the email marketing world in 2010.

So without further ado, the top post of 2010 was:

Email best practice is dead, long live best practice by Tim Watson of Smartfocus. The post looked at how not all best practice, especially email creative best practice is not created equal and when should it be followed and when should you consider ignoring it or doing the opposite. Click here to read the post.

It narrowly beat out the DMA’s Deliverability White Paper Outlining 10 Steps for Improving Inbox Placement by Margaret Farmakis of Return Path. The post referenced DMA’s deliverability whitepaper and outlined the major factors impacting on deliverability in simple and easy to understand terms. Click here to read the post.

Leaving the following three posts making up the top 5:

3. 2010 DMA National Email Marketing Report by Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights
4. What does the Gmail Priority Inbox mean for email marketers? by Riaz Kanani, Lyris
5. How to grow email lists through offline touch points by Tim Watson, Smartfocus

A big thank you to all the authors who contributed throughout 2010, this blog could not function without it!

With the new year upon us, I always find it interesting to pause and look back on what happened in 2010 – it was a big year in email marketing.

We saw major changes to the inbox with Microsoft and Yahoo changing the way people can see their inbox thanks to filters which show only emails from your friends and family. Google went further and released their Priority Inbox feature, which aimed to learn which emails are important to you and promote them to the top of your inbox accordingly. It was also a bad year for postmasters with major ISPs continuing to increase automation of spam filters and reputation and decrease staffing.

The much prophesied death of email continued to be delayed, despite continuous proclamations that social media would lead to its death. In the end, Facebook ate their words and upped their game “launching” new email features that group messages by sender rather than conversation or date (Note: it doesn’t seem to be widely available yet!). I sense integration between these two channels is set to intensify in 2011.

I am sure there is plenty more that I have forgotten – feel free to add your highlights in the comments below.