Golden Leads

We’re extremely excited to be releasing Listrak 3.3 today.  This release contains 2 major new features with a handful of small enhancements that are sure to enlighten our customers and partners.  The new major features are an RSS 2.0 publishing system as well as an image and document hosting service that we’re calling the Listrak Media Library.  Both of these new features allow non-technical Listrak users to publish content easily on the web and deploy that content via the email channel.

Since the real power of the web is the ability for its users to publish their own content, these two new features will help to enhance the value that Listrak brings to our customers.  We’re also helping to bridge the gap between some new Web 2.0 technologies with this new release.  Specifically, Listrak’s new RSS 2.0 publishing system will allow users to embed social book marking links within their RSS feeds.

This release will also mark the beginning of the end for major new features under the Listrak 3.0 umbrella.  All new features will be released as part of our new Listrak 4.0 feature set that has been under development for the past year.  More on that in future blog posts.  Until then, please check out the video tutorials we have released on our RSS publishing system as well as our Media Library.

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

By all accounts, spam is on the rise again. You can hear it in the numbers being quoted by the well-known anti-spam companies (they seem to agree that it has almost doubled over a year ago) and you can see it just by looking at your inbox. Spammers have found a few new tricks that have proven particularly successful at getting past even the most modern filter.

First, they are using very, very short text-based messages that make it nearly impossible for a computer-based filter to differentiate from a human-originated message. Second, they are using more image-based spam. Again, computers can’t read images, and inbox providers are reluctant to start filtering images wholesale from email. Third, many of the spam emails are simply pump-and-dump stock messages that don’t require any click-throughs to achieve their goals. Fourth, and most challenging of all, spammers have now enlisted tens of millions of zombie computers to send their messages. No longer can bad email be pinned to a few IP addresses. Instead, messages are coming from countless home and work-based computers that have been compromised by Trojan software and silently been put to use in a massive, distributed spam sending engine. You can read more about these issues in this blog post by MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan.

While this resurgence of spam may seem like just a new round of annoying inbox clutter, it is possible that it will drive the next set of lock-downs from ISPs and even the government. While we need to get on top of the growing spam problem, it is possible that the next set of anti-spam moves may go beyond image-blocking and potentially could put a real dent in the email marketing business. I recommend we all keep our ears to the ground on this and work through organizations like the Email Sender and Provider Coalition to help find balanced solutions that stop spam, but allow businesses to continue to use the email medium for legitimate, permission-based communications.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

The New York Times published a thought-provoking article (requires free log-in) on mobile phone ads. I’ve shared my thoughts on mobile advertising before, and as the debate rages on, I’m glad to continue to pitch in with my views.

The “new” idea is that consumers will accept ads in return for lower cost or free mobile phone service. Does anyone remember Juno or Cybergold? The problem with these services-for-ads programs is that the people they attract are the least likely to actually respond to the ads.

I know that a lot of people (most of whom are younger than me <grin>) have adapted to a regular stream of inbound SMS text messages from friends. Maybe they’ve developed the ability to check their phone while at the dentist, movies or business meetings, etc., such that they can readily ignore both personal text messages as well as ads. If this kind of behavior does not become mainstream, I suspect that ads simply will be too intrusive (because they will arrive when you are at the dentist, the movies and business meetings), and that people will take steps to ignore them.

Where I do think mobile marketing will shine is user-driven interactions: responding to billboards, signs, radio ads, TV shows, etc. Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of mobile marketers that keep your telephone number and continue to SMS you every few days, like the one whose message I signed up for a few weeks back. Needless to say, the marketer has provided little information on how to keep from getting its ads (and yes, it has absolutely soured the brand in my mind).

I can’t wait to see how mobile marketing plays out. No matter which direction it goes, it’ll represent a fundamental change in how people live their lives and how they interact with the companies they depend on. My view is that this kind of change is always good even if there are some stumbles along the way.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

A few days ago a few of the Listrak guys were talking about the current relevancy of the text part within an email campaign.  This topic grew more attention on my desk as the Email Experience Council just released their 2007 Rendering Report this week.  The history of the text part has its roots in the MIME specifications which we won’t go into, however from a marketer’s perspective has been used primarily for legacy versions of the AOL client and certain installations of Lotus Notes.

The graph below shows some research that we did looking at over 500,000 email campaigns over 5 years time.  Our  key indicator of text part usage is people who clicked a link within a text part of a campaign.  Our thought process is that if they can’t see the text part (ie, the HTML part rendered) then they can’t click the link, thus showing a lower click through rate.  The only potential flaw in this logic is that our data assumes that marketers include links in both the text part and the HTML part.  We know for sure, however, that some marketers are doing away with the creation of either a partial or even full text part version within the campaign opting only for the HTML part.  The flip side of the coin is that some marketers represented in this data do not use an HTML part and only send campaigns in the text.

The graph pretty much speaks for itself.  From our perspective, the usage of text links continues to fall.  We attribute this to the almost entire phasing out of legacy AOL clients not supporting HTML as well as many Lotus Notes-based organizations switching to Exchange Server and Outlook.

The bottom line from Listrak:  Text Part viewership is so low that we recommend providing only a link to the HTML version in your text part.  Take the time that you would have spent on your text part and use it to test better subject lines.

Enjoy the data.  –Ross

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

Newsflash: the new 2007 version of Microsoft’s Outlook email tool no longer uses the engine in Internet Explorer to display HTML email. Instead, it uses the somewhat simpler HTML rendering engine built into Word 2007.

While increased security is most likely at the heart of Microsoft’s switch, the Word HTML engine simply isn’t as powerful as the one used by Internet Explorer. For example, Outlook 2007 will not display any embedded players even if security is turned off. Say goodbye to video email, Flash-based email and even animated GIFs. Even more disappointing is the lack of high-end Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) features like float and position, as well as the ability to fine-tune padding and margins in table cells. For a few more details, read the Campaign Monitor blog. For a full description, read this article by Microsoft.

I believe the impact on the world of email marketing will be minimal. The fact is, a huge subset of HTML emails do not use any of the features being removed. Additionally, Outlook 2007 is part of the Microsoft Office Suite and as such is not as widely used by consumers. According to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006, only 4 percent of consumers use Outlook. Most use AOL (20 percent), Yahoo! (19 percent), Outlook Express (15 percent), and Hotmail (12 percent).

Clearly, the BtoB world has a higher concentration of Outlook users, so it may be hit harder than BtoC. But it’s noteworthy that, based on Silverpop’s recent Email Creative That Works study, BtoB recipients tend to respond less well to fancy graphical email than do consumers. I suspect that BtoC emailers will not see a big change given the diversity of email tools their recipients already are using.

Bottom line, Outlook 2007’s rendering engine is not a game-changing event for email marketers. Like the introduction of Gmail, it is something that requires attention, but I don’t think we will see any big drops in response rates or recipient satisfaction as a result. And, looking on the bright side, if Microsoft is able to raise consumer confidence in HTML email, then we may see more consumers disabling image-blocking, which might even result in higher response rates…

There’s always a silver lining <grin>.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.