Golden Leads

Could you imagine if this was for an email ESP or agency? What would the implications be to such a company. I think it would shut them down 100%. Every client under the sun would think twice about using them, trusting them with data, and even the impact on online ISP reputation would be cripling.

Now InfoUSA does own some ESPs and does do email list rental as well, so I am interested to see if clients tie this bad news back to those businesses.

From Mediapost:

IN ANOTHER PROUD MOMENT FOR the direct mail industry, The New York Times this week expended 2,858 words on how infoUSA sold personal information to criminals who used the data to swindle senior citizens.

A company official deftly defended selling lists to those classified as Elderly Opportunity Seekers (3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money”), Suffering Seniors (4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease) and Oldies but Goodies (500,000 gamblers over 55 years old described as: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change”) by saying “My people aren’t investigators, they’re marketers, and it’s unfair to expect them to know everything about who is buying from us and every database that is listed on our Web site.”

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

With all of the studies we read about more ecommerce sales taking place online as a record rate, why would you every give the option to send someone to a REAL store? Well, because you have stores and some people still like to try things on, touch the fabric, see things in real life and browse. I know that even with so many opportunities to buy online, I still like to hit the stores.

You might think that this is counter intuitive to the whole interactive email marketing agency idea that we live and breathe at eROI, but it’s not. We do so many campaigns that drive people to a real world location. Sales are sales are sales, right?

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But why am I showing you this Brooks Brothers email you ask? Well due to the fact that they have embedded a trackable bar code in the email that I can take into a store for the same deal. Now not only does this drive the sale to where the consumer wants to shop, but it is trackable back to the actual email campaign.

We built this feature into our emailROI system some time ago and are happy to see more and more retailers stepping up and using it. Could you use it? Well that depends if you have a POS system that ties back to your CRM system. If you do, maybe you should give us a call and take a look.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Are you sending your subscribers too many emails? While the answer to that question depends in large part on the value your subscribers receive from your emails, it’s also impacted by the frequency of your competitors’ emails. Being terribly out of line with the industry norm may make users think you’re “spamming” them with too many emails — and lead to unsubscribes.

With that in mind, I looked at the frequency of 92 major retailers tracked via my RetailEmailBlogspot during the 16 weeks ended May 25. I found that on average those retailers sent 1.7 emails per week during that period, and that nearly 10% sent more than twice as many emails as the group average.

In light of my column last week about deal-a-day email programs, it’s interesting to note that Spiegel, Bluefly and Neiman Marcus sent at least five emails per week on average during the period — with Neiman actually sending more than one per day, averaging 7.2 emails per week. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of emails.

At the Email Insider Summit earlier this month, Jupiter Research’s David Daniels called this “branding blunt-force trauma” — beating subscribers over the head with your messages. Others at the conference wisely pointed out that while higher frequencies may generate more revenue in the short term, they can actually diminish returns when list turnover and additional production costs are taken into account. While every marketer must test and determine for themselves the ideal cadence for their program, I would bet that your ideal is less than twice the industry average frequency, not more.

At the other end of the spectrum, nearly 20% of the retailers that I looked at sent less than half the group average of emails per week. AbeBooks, Blue Nile, RitzCamera, Reebok and Snap-on didn’t even send an email every other week on average. For retailers in this lower fifth of the frequency range, there’s probably an opportunity to increase their cadence a little. 

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

Good news from the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project. You may recall that these folks perform an annual survey on how people use the Internet. It has become the benchmark for trends in behavior over the last several years.

The latest results are encouraging for email. To paraphrase the words of Mark Twain, the rumors of email’s death may have been greatly exaggerated.

Despite previous speculation that email was doomed because of spam, only 18 percent of email users in Pew’s latest study consider spam “a big problem,” down from 25 percent four years ago. Why the drop? The increasing use of spam filters to keep inboxes clear, along with the fact that people are adapting to life with spam.

Before we uncork the champagne, there is a sobering message here: Our jobs as email marketers may actually be getting harder.

Users have become adept at scanning inboxes for names (the “from” field) they recognize and subject lines that are particularly relevant. This means that they are getting better and better at skipping anything that doesn’t interest them. Years ago, the email marketing industry could count on an awful lot of impressions just by getting into the inbox. Those days are gone. If you want your email marketing to be read and acted on today, you need to make sure your messages are relevant, interesting and timely.

Although people aren’t as deeply troubled by spam as they used to be, they are much savvier about which messages they will choose to open.

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

Funny that we chose to use the concept of broken images (notice the red “x”s in the creative) to hammer home the idea of of last webinar. We actually had record attendance for this one and even more emails and phone calls in letting us know that our creative might be broken. Some people were shocked to learn that we did this on purpose.

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Really an email marketing agency that had broken images in the creative? Are you kidding me? Yep we were kidding you, but the creative did the job and moved people to take action to attend, call and start a conversation.

When you do email right, take risks and challenge the norm you can see great results. Don’t be so glued to your programs that you don’t take a risk or try something new. Testing after all is what propels success. In the words of Wieden and Kennedy… Fail Harder. Without testing, risk and failure you cannot ever reach success.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

I’m playing with a new tool called Political Monitor that lets me monitor the email campaigns and Web site traffic of all the political campaigns and contenders. Here are some early results.

Frequency: It’s interesting to compare the frequency of email messages sent out by the various campaigns, both Republican and Democratic, and to compare frequency with Web site traffic numbers.

Top of the list is John Edwards, with 11 email drops over the past 30 days. As I reported in my blog, there is also some interesting affiliate links driving traffic to the Edwards site as well, specifically an email newsletter called The Freebie Swamp that offers a link to a free “Stop the War” bumper sticker that goes directly to the Edwards Web page.

Next on the list is Joe Biden, with nine campaign emails in the last 30 days, followed by Barack Obama with seven, Hillary Clinton, five, Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd with four each, and Mike Gravel at zero.

As far as Web site traffic goes, though, Hillary is way out in front, dwarfing everyone else. Take Hillary out of the equation and Obama and Edwards pretty much are battling it out for a far distant second and third place. It will be interesting to see how this changes as things heat up.

On the Republican side of things, it’s clearly Newt Gingrich who has embraced the whole email thing. In fact, Newt outpaces everyone, Democratic or Republican when it comes to staying in close touch with his base: 20 email campaign messages in the last 30 days! Mitt Romney is also no slouch, sending off 12 email epistles in the same period, followed by John McCain and Mike Huckabee with seven, and Ron Paul with one.

Most interesting, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback, and Tommy Thompson have sent zero emails, as they apparently have not embraced interactive marketing when it comes to political campaigning.

On the Web traffic side, a huge surprise to me was that Ron Paul was way, way out in front — a lead obviously not generated by his email campaigns. Apparently Ron has awakened the blogosphere and they are responding with a lot of traffic to the site. Mitt is a not-so-close second, followed distantly by John McCain. Rudy doesn’t even register on the graph.

In fact, the Republican contenders as a group encompass both the most and least frequent users of email compared to the Democrats.

As far as mentioning the other party’s candidates in their email drops, in the last 30 days:

Hillary is mentioned in four separate occasions by Newt Gingrich and once each by Mitt Romney and John McCain. Barack Obama is mentioned once each by Chris Dodd, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

On the other hand, McCain is not mentioned by any of the Democratic candidates but is mentioned numerous times by Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, and of course Newt.

So, what does it all mean? You’ll have to draw your own conclusions but for me, it is like any product: you better drive people to your web site and stay engaged with them if you want to sell the product. Based on just email drops and web site traffic, Rudy and some of the other candidates better get their interactive act together, and by all means don’t underestimate Newt. On the Democratic side, it seems like a one-horse race, at least as far as Internet interest is concerned.

And of course there is much more. We’ll be tracking all the Congressional campaigns as well into the 2008 elections.

Anyone who is working with a political candidate or a political organization and would like to learn more about this data, please email me. I think you’ll find it fascinating.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

After the amount of form spam we have seen the past few months, even in double opt in, we are releasing a built in Captcha Authentication system in the emailROI platform this month. It is ready now and will be available to ALL emailROI customers to implement and use in their own sites with ANY emailROI opt in form.

It is really just another line of code to select which makes it incredibly easy for all of our customers to implement. All that it requires is going into your account settings and checking this box “Require Captcha Authentication for Optins”.

If you are having any issues with form spam now is the time to use this new feature in your account to slow it and even put and end to it.

If you are using another email platform and are tired of these issues, time to drop us a line to see how it works. You asked, we listened, we gave.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

We just completed a case study with ReturnPath on Reaching the Inbox and Rendering Solutions and how to design so as not to encounter these issue pre-campaign.

eROI uses this data primarily to educate, consult and design. We like to help the troubled mailers become good ones and enjoy the increased response that comes from improved deliverability. Of course, if education fails, they can segregate their IPs so top-notch marketers don’t suffer because of other mailers misdeeds. (Which is why eROI has so many IPs and spend so much time monitoring, balancing and segmenting mailers on volume, reputation, list hygiene, vertical industry (say banking), and even by brand.)

eROI also uses Sender Score Campaign Preview to help their clients with content assessments. Content is another area where many ESPs typically have little control, so having a mechanism to help clients pinpoint where they need to make changes is crucial. But eROI is a hybrid ESP with full service and self service clients, agencies and other partners; due to this they can head off or test for issues prior to a campaign drop that they are creating, or test on behalf of a self serve client that requests it. Read more about how eROI uses the Sender Score suite to help its clients.

If you are struggling with deliverability issues, talk to eROI about how they address these problems. They help you assess your content? They segregate high reputation mailers from low reputation ones to protect their deliverability. You can’t expect your ESP to solve the problems that you are causing in your program, but you can expect eROI to help you diagnose and solve your problems so that you can increase your email success. Why else would we have so many great long term clients and even more each month selecting us as a partner.

http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-q207-reaching-the-inbox.html

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

Dear Email Diva,

In Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN and AOL the emails we are sending out are being delivered to the users’ inboxes, but all content and images have been deleted. There is absolutely nothing to see — no links, nothing! Can you shed some insight on this?

Zachary Schenkler
Co-Founder & President
Ojeez.com

Dear Zachary,

Since HTML is not in the Email Diva’s skill set, I asked smart person (and longtime Web site developer) Kal Hadi. He had this advice:

“I cannot comment on that specific situation since I don’t have the code in front of me, but, in general:

All Web-based email clients, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc., delete all code above the body tag of the HTML email. If the email document doesn’t have its own CSS code, and is placed below the body tag, the email will default to the CSS used by the email client itself, which will cause it to render improperly and in some cases could change the font color to white on a white background, which makes it invisible.

If you use CSS, place the CSS code below the body tag, and use tags in the email itself for those clients that don’t read CSS. Example: