I recently returned from the US  where I enjoyed the San Francisco Giants Baseball team versus the Florida Marlins.  Since booking the tickets over the internet I’ve received over twenty varieties of emails from the Giants, the Major League baseball franchise and from various other Major League baseball teams in cities I have never visited. Now as a Digital Database marketer I’m fairly anal about providing my permission but somehow my inbox does not reflect my vigilence?

I’m a believer in the majority of times “errors” are driven by cockup rather than conspiracy – either on my part “did I not understand the boxes I did not tick “ or on theirs – In our networked society how many of us work in truly networked organisations ?

At the same time back in the UK MP Dominic Rabb  fight against  Campaign Group 38 Degrees providing the facility for people to send automated templated emails to him (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10916309) illustrates the challenge consumers face. He argues that automated templates encourages people to “deluge” his in-box with “cloned messages” that swamp his finite time and resources. 38 Degrees argue this is what he signed up to by becoming an MP and publishing his email.

This highlighted further the ongoing disjoin that exists between sign up perception, sign up reality and on going opt-in. All our inboxes are testament to the irony that in the Digital world email permission and relevance appears to often be simplified to an ongoing opt out link i.e. send if they are not on the unsubscribe list.

However instead of using opt in as the hurdle to overcome maybe it is time to turn this round from a “Can I send it ?” to a “Should I send it ?” approach. To achieve this look regularly at the degrees of demonstrable & demonstrated consent i.e.

• Can you demonstrate the opt in you actually have i.e. when captured, wording used etc – What you know
• Can & do you segment based upon what email recipients have done – What you believe

Within each category there will be different sub groups and not only will it provide you with the ability to defend any Information Commissioner Office Audits or subject access request it can also form the basis for a segmentation strategy.

Each organisation is different so a global three emails and you are out rule is not relevant. However three years after signing up for various email communications I still receive weekly updates because I fall into the bucket of we have the email address ….and he’s not opted out ….yet by clicking the link ……..at the bottom of the email ……he never sees.

Social media provides individuals with the ability to easily un follow information suppliers that are no longer pertinent.  As individual email marketers should we not be allocating finite resources on ensuring engagement focuses on optimum opportunity and as an industry should we not encourage email euthenasia ?

In September’s Infobox:

• I examine the coming of age of ‘socialised’ emails
• Return Path’s Richard Gibson looks at email marketers’ differing attitudes towards deliverability
• Guy Hanson of The Database Group spells out why email personalisation matters
• Riaz Kanani of Lyris passes his verdict on Groupon’s daily email campaign

To read the full September Infobox, click here

With Google’s new Priority Inbox Gmail feature being released to users over the next week or so, the landscape for email marketers just changed.

The cute video Google has put together (see it here), nicely shows the different levels of emails users can receive – spam, marketing emails and emails from friends and family (at around the 50 second point in the video).

The way the algorithms work is based on:

1. How often you read the email

2. How often you reply to the email

3. Manual adjustments using the increase or decrease importance buttons

I am sure there are other factors not disclosed – potentially this might include whether your email address is in the contact list.

This all means that if you want your emails to appear high up in the priority list, you are going to need to deliver content that are consistently worth opening.

This makes the mantra of providing content that is in someway valuable to the recipient more important than before. Sending an email with a bunch of products in it that bears no relevance to what the user wants is likely to result in obscurity.

A couple of  keywords to think about to ensure your  emails are engaging or worth reading:

1. Valuable – the recipient should feel like it is in his or her interests to open the email – an offer, unique content etc

2. Interesting – if you are delivering content, make sure it is relevant to the recipient. Interesting content that makes the recipient look good if they forward it on is a definite bonus! The recent music video that went viral is illustrative of this – it allows you to place your home street into the music video itself.

One potential side benefit is that we might see a potential decrease in unsubscribes as more emails are just demoted rather than unsubscribed or worse from a deliverability perspective – marked as spam.

Sidenote: Microsoft also released a feature in its Hotmail platform which allows you to see only those emails from people in your address book. This means it is even more important to encourage your recipients to add your email address to their address book.

[update] An interesting conversation on Twitter with @iamelliot led to another point around unsubscribes decreasing – there is a potential negative. Being lost in this new in between world of being de-prioritised and being unsubscribed could lead to a scenario where your email is no longer seen at all and with no way for the sender to know that this is happening.

@riazkanani

Tomorrow Gmail will be launching its new Gmail Priority Inbox – where it sorts your emails for you and prioritises your emails based on what you read and what you reply to.

Gmail has always had a very intelligent spam filter which you can teach so it learns what you consider to be jnk and what you consider to be of value and this is just taking it one step further – concentrating on the positive side (valuable emails) rather than the negative side (spam).

You can read more about it here (including a cute explanatory video) .

Email errors can be  a turnoff – don’t let mistakes affect your response

Even in the age of textspeak, instant messaging and social media chitchat, people still care about quality control in communications of an even slightly more formal nature. They may write “lol” and “CU tonite @ 8” on facebook or their mobile, but they don’t like it when spelling mistakes and errors creep into a letter from the energy company or even a restaurant menu. Or, come to that, a marketing email.

In these contexts, poor quality control can quickly undermine brand credibility and – as research repeatedly shows – even lead to loss of business. After all, would you give someone a job who couldn’t spell your name?

Many emails err alike…

Here at Alchemy Worx, we’re up to our necks in email. Hundreds of messages flood into our accounts every day as we monitor what’s going on in the world of email marketing. And guess what? Loads of them contain errors. And loads of those errors are the same. And all of them could easily be avoided.

To err is only human, of course, and often only too understandable. For most marketers, an email send means tight deadlines, quick turnarounds and last-minute changes. All of which can open the door to errors. But none of that will count for anything if a subscriber leaves your list in disgust because you’ve emailed them twice. And got their gender wrong both times. About an offer that’s already expired…

Catching the glitches

So what can be done? Increasingly ESPs are adding tools and functionality to help you avoid sending poorly constructed emails (after all poor emails can upset ISPs – relationships that good ESP rely on). But there are still some areas that even the best software struggles to catch. With our help, you can still fix that glitch and save the day…

How to avoid the top 6 mistakes your Email platform won’t spot

Here’s a question to pose to anyone who still thinks social media will bring about the death of email. If that statement were true, then why are social media companies increasingly focused on improving their email deliverability?

The answer of course is that email is essential for the growth and profitability of social networks. In fact, social media companies are becoming some of the largest volume senders in the email universe, with hundreds of millions of messages being sent to their members each day. These emails include everything from status updates, friend/follower requests, wall postings, updates on tagged photos and invitations to join the network. It’s no wonder that ensuring those messages reach their members’ inboxes is crucial to the success of a social media company’s business.

However, social networks often have a higher mountain to climb when it comes to improving their inbox placement rates. Why? Because some of their practices—especially involving growing their member bases—drive a higher than average number of complaints when compared to other email marketers. Complaints negatively impact on sending reputation (the primary metric used by ISPs when determining how to route commercial email), and as a result, deliverability suffers.

What practices am I referring to? One in particular: allowing users/members to import their entire address books and then sending email invitations to those addresses to join the social network. These invitation emails often result in high volumes of complaints and can also increase the number of unknown users and spam trap addresses the social networking company is mailing to. This in turn damages their sending reputation, which lowers their chances of reaching the inbox.  Complaints and list quality in particular have a huge impact on whether a sender’s email gets routed to the junk/bulk/spam folder or goes missing all together.

So what’s a social networker to do? First, it’s important to regularly monitor inbox placement across the various ISPs and track complaints using feedback loops. Second, social networkers need to stop the risky practice of allowing users to import their address books. Finally, they need to undertake a renewed focus on the subscriber/member experience. How? Here are few ideas:

1. Create a user-friendly preference centre. Allow members to easily access it. Let them choose the types of email communications they want to receive, such as only friend updates, notifications, or wall postings. Promote the preference centre everywhere, including in the footer of every email, the welcome message, the website, the unsubscribe landing page and the member’s profile/account page. Encourage members to use it to customise the types of messages they are receiving and the frequency they are being sent.
2. Clearly communicate the privacy policy. Rather than using a lot of legal terminology, explain in simple and easy to understand terms how the member’s personal information will and won’t be used. Explain how this information can be made public or kept private and how it will be shared with other members. Learn a lesson from Facebook’s recent privacy issues, now being aggressively addressed in Germany.
3. Set the proper expectations. During the account creation/joining stage, explain what members can expect from the email program. Outline its benefits and clearly describe the program’s content and frequency. Provide links to examples of the emails being sent. The more information that is provided at this early stage, the better informed and prepared members will be for the emails to come.

Want more information? Learn how Return Path helped Friends Reunited improve their inbox delivery by over 25%. Read the case study here.

The summer holidays are upon us; a time where people slow down and kick back, enjoying the (for the most part) warm evenings. For marketers, on the other hand, connecting to the customer on their leisure time is ideal for taking our messages to them in a personal fashion. The surge of social media usage has been viewed by some commentators as the savior of personalized online marketing – allowing brands to take messages to consumers on personal platforms which they can really connect with. However our annual e-Dialog Global E-mail Attitudes Survey has suggested quite a different story.

As many of you will know, I am a firm advocate of taking a holistic approach to marketing and considering all of the opportunities to engage with customers when planning an e-mail programme. This year’s results once again provided very clear proof that e-mail is the driver of so much more than just online sales. We looked at 13,000 consumers globally, across Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific and the results overwhelming showed that e-mail is a key tool for brand advocacy on other digital channels.

The trend was perhaps at its most prevalent in the UK where half of consumers had bought offline, in the high street or over the phone, as a result of receiving a marketing e-mail. However, more significantly, the results indicated the chain reaction of activity that is triggered by receiving a marketing e-mail. The research showed that 60 per cent of consumers would undertake further research into the brand as a result of receiving an e-mail and a quarter would connect further with the brand by signing directly into the product’s social networking site.

Considering that it has recently been suggested that social media is sounding the death knell for e-mail marketing, these results highlight how e-mail is in fact the starting point of the social media journey.  E-mail acts as a vital trigger for prompting sharing activity, and consequently aiding brand discovery and advocacy.

One of the main lessons that we can draw from this is that brands that still use e-mail solely as a direct-sales tool are missing a major opportunity. Yes, e-mail is a key means for driving online sales; but its full impact goes significantly further. Whereas calculations of ROI have traditionally been focused on click-throughs, open rates and sales, marketers now need to re-evaluate the success of the e-mail channel. While an e-mail will generate sales, the brand that has the mechanisms in place to draw people to a social network has the added opportunity to use email to prompt viral conversation and foster advocates who can spread the campaign message much further than an individual inbox.

At the risk of repeating myself, for me this research also highlighted the implications of not having a cohesive message across all marketing channels. On top of the 43 per cent of UK consumers who said they had already made offline purchases following an e-mail, 47 per cent said that they would be more likely to make e-mail-prompted offline purchases in the future. I am sure you can all see both the opportunity and the problem this poses. If a consumer is knocked off their feet by an excellent email marketing campaign, and then pops in-store to make a purchase, it is essential to ensure that there are consistent messages across all channels, particularly if the e-mail linked to a promotion.

Globally the research demonstrated consumers’ receptiveness to brand interaction, the challenge now lies in helping brands make the leap from viewing e-mail as solely the delivery mechanism. E-mail is a fully interactive medium that allows businesses to engage directly with the consumer, prompting the product research and links to social networks that are required to encourage brand advocacy.

There is plenty of best practice published for email marketing, from blog posts to books, whitepapers and more.

However not all best practice is created equal and I’m looking at email creative best practice in particular. When should it be followed and when should you consider ignoring it or doing the opposite?

Let’s start with a few examples of commonly seen and published best practice.

• Subject lines should be below 70 characters in length.
• Short emails work better. Reduce your email content and length.
• Emails should be a maximum of 700 pixels wide.
• Include the first name in the subject line.
• Don’t include the first name in the subject line.
• Use your brand in the from name.
• Use competitions to encourage engagement.
• Avoid the word free in subject lines.
• Send campaigns Tuesday to Thursday.
• Don’t send campaigns during lunchtime.

Best practice? In tests I’ve seen all of the above ignored at one time or another and great campaign results still produced.

For example, short subject lines are intended to work by allowing quick evaluation and getting the customer to open to find out more. However short subject lines can lead to poor qualification of which customers open and whilst opens look good clicks or conversions are hit. Short is often good but it’s not wrong to use long subject lines too.

Keeping the email width to 700 pixels is intended to avoid left to right scrolling as we are more used to vertical scrolling of documents. Almost every email follows this best practice rule. However, there have been a clutch of super wide side scrolling emails of late, Hugo Boss and Selfridges are examples sending several. These emails are getting engagement and being interesting by being different. They are deliberately doing the opposite to everyone else.

Putting a first name in the subject line worked when it was different. If you use it every time your list will become numb to it.

This is very Purple Cow like, as Seth Godin says in his book, be remarkable. What works now won’t always work in the future, as it becomes commonplace and boring.

So don’t be a slave to best practice that is more tips than best practice. To get your message across you may need to be different, be contrary, be bold and standout. And of course run split tests to evaluate.

There are other types of best practice that shouldn’t be ignored. Simple points such as test to ensure your email displays correctly in email clients, be legal, have clarity of opt-in to ensure low complaints and high deliverability, don’t purchase lists. These really are hard rules and being contrary to this foolhardy.

A good email has to answer the questions that the customer has. To engage and start the conversation think about how these questions are answered by your creative and campaign

1. Do I know the person/company sending this email?
2. What’s this email about?
3. Why should I read it, what is it offering me?
4. Does this have value for me?
5. What action is it asking me to take?

So obey the immutable best practice and for the rest consider if it will help you stand out and ensure the above questions are answered as quickly and as clearly as possible.

Long live best practice!

Tim is the Operations Director at smartFOCUS. For Digital marketing tweets follow him on Twitter: @tawatson.

When it comes to using Social Media for marketing, the words “relationship” and “conversations” often come to mind. This is of course no different to the approach of the best email marketers. They understand the need to deliver content that builds a relationship and maintains engagement over time. In the same way that people can become emotionally unsubscribed to your email list, your fans can learn to ignore your tweets and your Facebook pages.

Given this similarity, it is no surprise that most of the content used in your email programmes are often also right for your social network programmes. Your fans and followers are also interested in your interesting tidbits, how-tos, special offers and anything else that causes your customers to give up some of their valuable time to read your messages. The only way to achieve this coherence in message and tone is to have the same people who deliver your email programmes also deliver this content through the social networks.

Mat Braddy, CMO at Just-Eat (the online takeaway company) has given an interesting interview over at IMedia UK in advance of their session at ad:tech London next month which illustrates how they have implemented this approach and generated a fan-base on Facebook larger than Dominos (you can see their fan page here.)

It would be interesting to understand how much of that fan-base actually interacts with the brand itself as the size of your fan-base is only one of the metrics that should be monitored. Some of the other metrics worth understanding is how many fans comment, how many click through and how many share the content with their friends.

The plot of the science fiction film ‘Inception’ centres on the interesting concept of planting ideas in the dreams of the unwitting dreamer, the objective being that so that when the ‘dreamer’ awakens the idea is freshly planted in the subconscious.
This imaginative concept set my mind racing on which ideas, specifically related to deliverability I would plant in some marketer’s minds as key thoughts so that when they awaken the ideas might crystallise during waking hours:

1. Move away from the thought process that all emails that are sent make it into the inbox. Not true! In fact, ISPs, filtering companies and consumers all block, filter and report email as spam, meaning that only a subset of all mail sent is actually delivered to the inbox.

2. Focus on improvements; be obsessive about understanding what the metrics are that can improve overall response, start to think about Inbox Placement Rates (IPR), seek to improve, make it a KPI. Challenge all comers who state ‘delivered’ or ‘accepted’ is a reliable guide to what makes it to the inbox, because it is not. The fundamentals of reliable calculations require the accurate use of a broader collection of metrics.

3. Think about deliverability, not as a terse-technical subject dominated by those responsible in the technical team, or that someone else worries about so they the marketers don’t have to .Think about it as something that everyone in the organisation should be aware of and have some insight of.

After the dream the marketer will awaken with these three thoughts at least somewhere in the mind and when met with the word ‘deliverability’ their eyes won’t glaze over or worse still ignore one of the most important aspects and barriers to success.

Richard Gibson, Channel Relationship Manager at Return Path and Chair, Email Marketing Council. Twitter: @RichardGibson.