Best Practices for Email

E-mail works for Banks and Card Issuers

They are getting better ROI than other industries. (interesting insights from a recent article in emarketer)

If you have a mailbox, it will come as no surprise that US credit card companies and other financial services firms spent more on direct marketing in 2007 than any other industry. Banks and credit card issuers are masters of mailing targeted offers, and that mail accounts for nearly 42% of their direct marketing budgets.

E-mail is becoming part of this massive direct marketing effort as well, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA)'s "Direct Marketing Facts and Figures in the Financial Services Industry."

The DMA had previously released some information from the study in a press release, but a recent Marketing Charts article cited more, revealing e-mail as the number three direct marketing tactic in the industry.

The DMA also said that banks and credit card direct marketers had a better return on investment in 2007 than did any other industry, at $13.37 per dollar spent.

That may have something to do with the high open rate that the financial services industry gets.

E-mail list management company MailerMailer found that nearly 29% of direct marketing e-mails sent by financial services companies were opened during the second half of 2007—more than for any other industry.

eMarketer predicts that financial services spending on online advertising will also continue to increase through at least 2011. That means more offers on any given Web site, not just in your inbox.

Since e-mail marketing works for banks and card issuers, consumers can also expect more offers in their inboxes to join those in their mailboxes.

 

Start the Year Right and Win Back Inactive Customers

A reactivation campaign can help you revitalize your list.

How many email messages did you send out in your last campaign?  How many of your recipients actually opened or clicked on your email?

Hmmmm, that's a different story. Remember that with email, size doesn't really matter. Performance is what counts, not just for your email program and its bottom line but also for your sender reputation.

A reactivation campaign is the answer here, and it's just as important as any acquisition campaign. It will help you clean out the dead wood, re-energize your list and reclaim some of the money you spent acquiring and engaging those addresses in the first place.

Why reactivation works
Your email service provider might be thrilled that you ship out millions of messages in each campaign, but you could actually hurt yourself and your sender reputation and spend money you don't have to when you send to people who never bother to open or act on your messages.

Sure, maybe they did sign up with you once upon a time. Since then, though, they abandoned those mailboxes, and you never noticed. The ISPs are noticing, and they'll treat your email accordingly.

Many use these long-dead email addresses as spam traps to monitor your list hygiene and measure your sender reputation. The dirtier your list, the more likely they'll route your email messages to the junk folder or block you.

Just by looking at your database, you can't tell which subscribers actually abandoned their mailboxes, who deletes your messages without opening them or who still is sort of interested in you but hasn't seen any reason to open.

A reactivation campaign will identify which addresses you can safely drop from your list without killing off live ones and re-establish connections with past customers.

Think of it as going on a second honeymoon. Just like a tired marriage needs a spark to keep it going, your subscribers who take you for granted need a fresh, new reason to keep opening your messages.

You know you get the most action from your newest subscribers. Apply the tactics you use on them to rejuvenate the inactives on your list instead of spending more money to replace them.

First, identify your inactives
This takes a little database work. Create a separate mailing list, and add anyone who hasn't opened or clicked on a message in, say, six months or longer, to it. Send a message with a pleading subject line, such as "We miss you! Please come back!" Go ahead, grovel a little. Include a special offer or invitation to fill out a new profile or encourage them to unsubscribe once and for all.

Move any responding addresses back to your active list. Send the message again, this time saying you'll take them off your list if they don't respond in, say, a week. Then, scratch them from your list if they don't respond. It might kill you to do that, but a smaller, more vital list will do you more good than one where nobody's home anymore.

Next, keep everybody interested
These tactics will keep your whole list engaged and energized:

1.  Ask them what they want to get. It could be you have lots to offer, but your subscribers aren't getting what they really want. For example, if you're a book seller it may be that someone subscribed to your general list is really only interested in mysteries. Ask recipients to take control of what they want to get, and you may see renewed interest.

2.  Make them an offer they can't refuse. Discounts, new products, samples and free shipping can work wonders for retailers. B2B marketers can renew interest with a special whitepaper or discount on a conference or webinar.

3.  Incentivize! Ask users to update their profile, and give them a chance to win a big-screen TV. (iPods are, well, kind of over unless it's a really upscale one.) Be careful to keep the focus on the email, though. If the prize is too good, people will re-engage, only to click the spam button when your email actually arrives.

4.  Threaten to break up. Tell subscribers if they don't click, you're going away. It's possible that your heavily texted message is in fact being read, but you can't know it because recipients don't enable the images. It's fair to say that if recipients don't let you know somehow that they're still there, still breathing, that you'll drop them from the list.

5.  Ask what is on their minds. Simple surveys, sweetened with a little incentive (see No. 2), can help you find out what's going on. Maybe you're sending too often and they turn a deaf ear. Or, you're not coming around enough and they drift away.

6.  Change your format. Are you sending long, chatty emails to people who read them on their phones and don't get down to your offer? Or, do you stuff all your content into a single large image that won't show up? Offer a text format to people who read email on alternative platforms and make it short and sweet.

The effort you spend now to wake up your list and re-engage with them will pay off in better deliverability and a higher ROI.

The 10 Most Ignored Email Best Practices

Listed below are the 10 most frequently ignored best practices. If any ring a bell, chances are your email program could be underperforming.

1. Provide a subscription-administration center in each message.

Why it's important: The admin center keeps you connected to your subscribers and helps distinguish you from unsolicited email. It should include the email address they used to subscribe, an unsubscribe link, a link to your privacy policy and preference page and your contact information: street address, phone number and email address.

2. Provide a site search function.

Why it's important: Allows users to search for products, past article, company information, etc., without having to first click to the site then initiate the search.

3. Provide a forward-to-a-friend link.

Why it's important: Giving subscribers a link to send your emails on to their friends is a more proactive stance than just including a line somewhere in the message asking them to pass on your messages. The link sends the request through your server, which can also allow you to track who's forwarding your message, how often and what actions result. It also ensures the forwarded message will render properly, which may not happen when a recipient simply forwards through their email client.

4. Provide a subscription link.

Why it's important: Offering a subscription function in your newsletter allows readers who received it from a friend to sign up without having to search your site for instructions. 

5. Add-to-safe-senders-list request.

Why it's important: Most email clients won't block email from a sender listed on the recipient's personal whitelist and image rendering is also less likely to be blocked (also a safe-sender list, approved-sender list, etc.)

6. Link to a Web version.

Why it's important: Many email clients either block images or don't render HTML messages properly, especially if they read email in a preview pane. Providing this link allows readers to view your message in their Web browser instead.

7. Provide a telephone contact number.

Why it's important: Email is fast, but a phone call is faster. Many respondents want to get in touch with you directly, especially buyers, clients, or salespeople, may want to get in touch with you directly. This way you spare them the extra step of going to your Web site and hunting down your contact information.

8. Display the recipient's email address.

Why it's important: Showing the recipient’s address helps boost the email's credibility and helps readers who may be receiving duplicate copies under several different email addresses unsubscribe from the correct address.

9. Provide navigation links within the email and to the Web site.

Why it's important: Navigation links near the top of newsletters with multiple departments or articles help readers find information quickly and efficiently. Multiple site links help your readers move directly to the areas on your Web site they need or want, which adds value and strengthens your relationship with them.

10. Provide an email address for feedback or sender contact.

Why it's important: The email contact address gives subscribers a way to reach you to ask questions, send comments or alert you to a problem, such as an unsubscribe link that doesn't work. More senders provide a contact email address than a telephone number, but even more should add this feature to build their credibility and relationship with recipients.

Improving Email with Testing

Start building a testing program for your  email marketing efforts  today.

Without proper testing, there is no way to tell what your customers are actually seeing or how they are responding to your message. Before you start to test anything, you must first establish a  plan that outlines what you want to test and what you will consider a success or a failure.  Make sure to consider many factors.  For example, will a successful test be dependent on more opens, higher clickthroughs or increased purchases?  Without determining the key metrics for a successful test before performing it, you will be unable to determine which message performs better.

In order to properly test different subject lines or content, you need to verify that your customers are receiving your email and that it is rendering properly, because if they don't receive your email, nothing else matters. To do this, there are a number of valuable tools that you'll want to become familiar with, including a campaign preview tool, an anti-spam testing tool and a seedlisting tool to see if your messages make it to the inbox or junk folder.These tools should be used as part of your regular campaign process, both before and during your send.

Test to see how your message renders
Once your message is fully created and coded, test it in a campaign preview tool. These tools allow you to see how your message will appear in the various email clients. If any issues arise during this test (image rendering, formatting, content blocks, etc.), you then should make the necessary changes and test it again. Without this form of testing, you run the risk of confusing your customer or missing an opportunity to communicate key pieces of information that can result in increased sales and customer satisfaction.

If your solution does not have that capability, just set up various test email accounts that you to can monitor at the various ISPs and send you message to your list that has all of these addresses. 

Test to see where your messages are placed
If your message doesn't make it to the inbox, you are missing out on potential revenue. Plus, having your email land in the junk folder is  damaging to your brand. If you don't test inbox placement during every campaign, you run the risk of doing the same thing over and over, resulting in multiple ineffective campaigns. Pivotal Veracty has a great tool for testing this using email seeds.

Test your content
Content is one of the most fundamental and overlooked aspects of testing. By making easy and small changes to your content, like changing one word in the subject line or highlighting a product feature, you can increase clicks and sales dramatically. In most cases, A/B and multivariate testing capabilities will be embedded into your email platform. If not, you'll want to find a solution that natively supports these critical testing functions. When testing campaigns with different content, you'll want to start by changing one element at a time. This allows you to more easily see what factor is having a direct impact on your email response rate. An easy and effective way to do this is to pull two randomized samples from your entire list. Depending on the size of your list, there are two common ways to perform A/B split tests.

A/B testing
For smaller lists, it is common to split the entire list into two randomized groups and send one version of the email to each of the groups and measure which group had a better response rate for opens, clicks or revenue generated. Next, apply those findings to future mailings. For larger lists where statistical significance is not a concern, many marketers use a 10/10/80 split, but you could also select an exact number of recipients for each test mailing. This method allows you to determine the best performing email and then send it to the remainder of the list for maximum impact. 

Multivariate testing
There is also value in testing a carefully selected combination of factors so that you can determine if any of the test elements interact with each other positively or negatively. There are cases where two best performing elements from earlier tests demonstrate poor performance when combined. However, before you embark on a multivariate testing program, you should recognize that multivariate testing is much more complicated than A/B split testing and requires advanced planning, stringent adherence to the test plan and an extra level of sophistication to interpret the results.

Learn from your results
Be sure to track and document your testing results and share information on what works with key stakeholders involved with your email program. So remember, don't be afraid to test. By understanding your customers better, you will send them more relevant messages, which will increase your ROI.

Building Your Email List

Email is a quick, inexpensive, and powerful way to target and address your various markets, especially when compared to direct mail,  and other traditional marketing channels. Listed below are a couple of pointers to make sure you get off on the right track.

Building Your  Email List   ----  Be selective

If you want to build an email list of existing customers, be sure to obtain their permission first instead of adding their names without telling them.Provide a value proposition that makes them want to be on your email list. For example, offer them an additional three-month warranty on a product in exchange for receiving product updates by email. This approach gives you the opportunity to strengthen the bond between you and your customers. If you add an email address without permission, recipients can get fiesty- everyone gets too much email - they will complain and mark your messaging as spam  and possibly shut down the relationship with you altogether.

When building an email list of fresh contacts, remember bigger is not necessarily better. You want engaged customers --not just a list of dead nonresponders. Be sure to build a list of qualified names out of which a certain percentage will turn into prospects. Out of those prospects, a certain percentage should turn into conversions. When done correctly, you can enjoy higher sales results because your offers are sent to the right audience at the right times.

To qualify new contacts, many companies require individuals to confirm their initial request to get onto an email list by replying to a confirmation email. This is called "double opt-in", and it can slow your acquisition rate by 50% or more, but typically makes for a much more qualified and responsive email list.

Asking a new contact to take a single action to get onto your email list is called "single opt-in". This approach grows your list faster than double opt-in, though the list may not be as responsive and as rich with qualified prospects.

Remember, once permission is granted for your email communications, relevancy and timeliness determines whether or not a recipient views your emails as spam.

• Collect email addresses from registration cards, point-of-sale, customer service, and sweepstakes. For prospecting purposes, gather email addresses from your website, online white papers offered, from visitors to your trade show booths and from sales calls. Be careful: Just because you already have a person's email address for one reason or another doesn't necessarily mean you have permission to start sending all sorts of email campaigns to them. In all cases, give people an expectation of the value they will receive in return for handing over their email address to you."
• Post a privacy notice on your registration page at your website. People are understandably suspicious of any site they come across on the Internet so it's best to address their concerns up front. As reported by eMarketer, IMT Strategies found "93% of US internet users consider it very important that the site display a statement of how it will use personal information."
• Show prospective subscribers a sample of what they are signing up for at your website. 
• Keep your registration page simple by asking for minimal information. You can always get more information later using surveys and incentives once an individual is added to your email list.

Watch out for:

• Don't make it difficult for people to stop hearing from you by email. Make it easy for a person to leave ("opt-out") of any or all email communications. For example, people may still wish to receive your product updates but not your company news. If it's difficult to be removed from your email list, recipients can complain to their ISP or self-appointed spam police who in turn can have you blacklisted. Being blacklisted means the recipient's ISP will automatically filter out any inbound email containing your name or email address.
• Don't promote your company or services through the renting, sponsoring, or bartering of email lists without performing a background check of the list owners and asking how they obtained their email addresses. You could be guilty by association if you are perceived as doing business with a spammer. Furthermore, spam laws are currently getting tougher in this area. Monitor the latest developments in legislation by visiting www.spamlaws.com.

Pre-checked opt-in boxes: Some online subscription forms have the "check" box for receiving email communications pre-checked. While this speeds list growth, some

U.S.

courts and legislative bodies do not consider this practice as being truly an "opt-in" choice. Your list grows faster employing this practice, but the people who passively join your list in this fashion may not be as qualified as those who proactively check the box.

How to Ensure Email Compliance and Deliverability

This current brief by Des Cahill of Habeas is right on when it comes to what you can do to ensure email compliance. Read on (article excerpt from iMedia)

You know how to write an email. You know spam is bad. You know to send emails to your customers to promote your products. But what you don't know about email can hurt you. It can damage your reputation as a legitimate business, it can upset your customers and it can decrease your ROI.

Here are eight things you might not know about email, how those unknowns can hurt you, and what you can do to fix them. If you don't know the answers to these questions, you could have a problem.

How do your emails look in various browsers and email servers?
If you don't render your emails, when you send them the images may be blocked, text can be jumbled and your well-crafted message gets lost. To fix this, you can pay for rendering services, or you can send a sample email to fake addresses on a number of different email servers and review them on different browsers.

What is your reputation as a sender?
If you have a poor reputation, you can be unfairly marked as spam and your emails will not be delivered to your targets. To fix this, you can hire an email reputation service provider like Habeas, Return Path, Goodmail or Pivotal Veracity to monitor and maintain your good reputation.

Who wants to get your emails?
If your list is populated with people who don't want to hear from you, they can potentially mark your emails as spam and you can be added to blocklists. To ensure you have a strong list, include an "unsubscribe" button in all of your emails and frequently update your lists to only include interested recipients.

Are your IP and domain addresses verified?
If both your IP and domain addresses are not verified, you can be marked as a spammer and put on blocklists. To avoid being blocked, maintain a static IP address because static addresses look less "spammy" to the receiving systems.

Do you understand and use Sender Authentication technology?
Senders that don't support these standards will have a worse deliverability rate versus other senders. It's essential for companies to understand authentication. SIDF and DKIM are both specifically designed to thwart phishing (and phishing variant) attacks. Commercial senders need only publish appropriate DNS records to complete SIDF. DKIM can be done by any downstream server or even a mail client.

Is your content interesting to your recipients?
If you send an email that is not targeted specifically at the interests of your recipients, they are likely to ignore your message and your clickthrough rates will be very low. The best way to reach your audience is to use customizable content programs from ESPs like ExactTarget, Constant Contact and Silverpop to better target your email messages.

Are you on a blocklist?
If you are identified as spam, especially on the larger lists, your emails will not be delivered. How do you find out if you're on a blocklist? Monitor the public repositories, and consider getting the assistance of an email reputation service provider to get you off the blocklists.

Is your infrastructure new? Are you using a new IP or Domain?
Emerging reputation systems being employed by ISPs like Microsoft will throttle down your email to a trickle until you've established a reputation. Use existing infrastructure to send the bulk of the email while concurrently sending the same message content in smaller volumes off the new system until a reputation is established.

Segmentation is key to email sales

Online retailers could improve sales by using segmented e-mail lists, according to an Internet Retailer survey analyzed by Vovici.

Approximately 40% of respondents said that their e-mail campaigns yielded conversion rates of 2% or less.

Vovici noted that 43% of respondents did not segment their mailing lists, which could have contributed to the low conversion rates.

Identifying e-mail recipients by age, sex, annual income, past purchase history and other characteristics can generate more effective campaigns.

A MarketingSherpa study underscored the usefulness of segmentation. Marketers who used advanced e-mail tactics such as dynamic content, A/B offer testing and segmentation by user details had higher click-through rates than those who did not.

Internet Retailer noted that Fossil segments its e-mail list by shopper categories and demographics, and that its average order now has about 1.5 items in the shopping cart at checkout compared with a previous average of about one.

John DeCaprio of Fossil said that "e-mail is one of our bread-and-butter marketing tools, but we need to do a better job analyzing the messages we are sending out and the responses. When it comes to e-mail marketing, we were constantly looking at ways to minimize list fatigue."

Another point for e-mail marketers to consider is the type of e-mail they send. If the goal is to make sales, which is especially important for online retailers, then a campaign may need more transactional e-mails.

A SKYLIST survey found that among all US e-mail marketers, promotional and transactional e-mails were far down the list of the most common types used.

Current Email Buzz

The current buzz in the email industry

HTML vs. text
Consider this the topic that will always be relevant. For years, companies have debated the pros and cons of sending in HTML versus text only. HTML has always been the runaway favorite for its branding power, merchandising capabilities and ability to track open rates. The debate has taken a new angle with the increasingly complex issues related to rendering, deliverability and preview pane usage. I suspect this will be one of the constants for 2007. I suspect this subject matter is also popular as it touches all aspects of an email team: creative, analysts, production, copywriters, strategy, et cetera.

Deliverability
Speaking of hot button issues, deliverability is all the rage these days.  Fewer than 50 percent of marketers create emails that render appropriately (according to a recent Email Experience Council study). The Outlook 2007 threat for B to B marketers this gets its own fair share of email water cooler talk as well.  I expect deliverability related issues will get more mind share as change resistant marketers see their campaigns trend downward and are compelled to finally address the issues.

Usage
According to a recent Forrester Research study, email has reached almost universal penetration, with 97 percent of consumers and 94 percent of marketers using the channel. With this staggering number, how many marketers could be left on the fence deciding if they should dive into the email space?

The big takeaway from the interest in this type of research and related metrics is hopefully that CMOs and CFOs finally begin to invest in email accordingly. Most email teams are stretched thin as it is and as this channel becomes near ubiquitous, marketers should use this to their advantage as they fight for more marketing resources and dollars.

Frequency
Twenty years from now, I suspect this will be a top five email conversation piece as well. However, it amazes me that as much noise that surrounds the number of emails sent by a company, there is little action or change to correlate with this key topic. First and foremost, try asking your subscribers how often they want to get messages from you. Also, test segmenting your non responders with a roll up of your messages that lightens the frequency of emails they receive.

Authentication
My guess is this area is misunderstood and well trafficked as marketers seek information on what authentication really means, who should be utilizing it and how. This could be positive news for those offering services in this area as there is at least a curiosity in this relatively new niche of email marketing deliverability services.

What's not on email marketers' minds?
Just as telling from my research was the least viewed category: spam. I would like to think this is because all marketers are fully compliant with CAN-SPAM but with 81 percent of marketers unaware of CAN-SPAM (WebSurveyor Corp.) I am afraid this is not the case. Let's hope we see a trend in CAN-SPAM compliance for all email marketers.

Main Goal for Email is Retention Efforts

Three out of four e-mail campaigns focus on customer retention, while the remaining quarter are for new customer acquisition, according to the latest version of an annual Direct Marketing Association (DMA) study.

Company announcements are a popular customer acquisition method, with 68% of respondents saying they used this method. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they send out company newsletters, and 63% use special discounts and one-time offers.

Two-thirds of marketers use special offer codes when sending e-mail as part of an integrated campaign.

The DMA categorized responding firms as advanced, intermediate or beginner; as marketers or service providers; as business-to-consumer or business-to-business (or both); and by company size.

B2C firms use e-mail marketing more than B2B firms. B2C marketers estimated that they would allocate 11% of their total marketing budgets for e-mail marketing in 2007. B2B firms said that they would allocate only 6.5%.

The frequency with which marketers send e-mails has grown since 2005.

Email- Fast Facts and Thoughts

E-mail has nearly total penetration, with 97% of consumers and 94% of marketers using the channel, according to a new study by JupiterResearch.

Click-through rates have remained steady since 2003, at an average of 5%.

E-mail marketing is a success in the sense that consumers who buy products advertised in e-mails spend 138% more online than peers who do not.

When e-mail solicitations work, they work quickly: 29% of all online consumers buy immediately following an offer.

Three-fifths of e-mail forwarding is done by women. The study also found that consumers ages 18-34 often use a separate address just for marketing e-mails.

Nearly a third of respondents said that they read promotional e-mails, looking for promotions when opening e-mail and forwarding them to friends

According to Jupiter Research, 93% of U.S. Internet users consider email their top online activity. Email is a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to communicate with prospects, customers, and vendors.

Points to Ponder:

How do you use email marketing effectively, without irritating your recipients? Can you answer these simple questions below:

• How often to send email
• How to write messages that get a response
• Why you must systematically deliver what your customers value, and quickly fix problems when you don't
• When to use HTML and when to use text only
• How to build lists that perform