Spammers steal your lists

If spammers rip off your lists wholesale and mail to them, your subscribers will see an uptick in spam at their address.  It’s unlikely your subscribers will notice the increase, since their spam filters will block it as usual.

Email addresses flow unencrypted with email traffic through all ISPs’ operations centers, and it’s a lot easier for a criminal to collect addresses via an inside man at an ISP than hack into your ESP.  You can’t stop this exposure of email addresses, and be aware that all email is essentially in full view and shouldn’t include any information that’s sensitive to you or your subscriber.

Subscribers think you’ve sold their addresses

Some subscribers sign up to your list with a single-use address, that way they know you’ve given it away if they start receiving spam at that address.  If they’re not aware of the ESP breach and instead blame you for the spam, they’re likely to click “Report Spam” on your mailings and drive down your email sender reputation, at least temporarily.

Not many subscribers bother with single-use email addresses, so while you’re going to see a spike in complaints if your list is stolen, it’s probably not going to hurt your delivery to other subscribers.

Lists are trashed

Intruders at your ESP might damage or delete your lists, costing you lost time and revenue.  Keep a backup of your lists at your site.  Use an ESP that makes it easy for an automated process to keep your local copy up to date.

…private [domain] registration for the purpose of concealing the actual registrant’s identity would constitute “material falsification”

This means if you send opt-out email (intentionally or not) and use common privacy-enhancing domain registration services that hide the domain owner’s identity, it might add up to criminal liability under the CAN-SPAM act.  If you’re mailing for a reputable brand, why hide it?  Provide a real business name, address, and telephone in your domain records.  It’s no more info than is available on your website, and it might keep you out of CAN-SPAM trouble.

What three things are crucial for any company to know before embarking on an email marketing initiative? To help provide this answer, to email marketing beginners and veterans alike, our Email Marketing Thought Leader interview series turns to London-based Dave Chaffey.

Chaffey is an Email marketing consultant and author of “Total Email Marketing.” Chaffey also posts regular insight to Dave Chaffey’s Right Touching Blog.

In our interview below, Chaffey reveals three email marketing tips most crucial for you company to know about email marketing and the single most important component of any email marketing campaign:

iPost:
What are three things most companies do not know about email marketing, that they should, before embarking on any initiative?

Dave Chaffey:
I’ve talked to thousands of email marketers over the past 10 years about their email practices and many certainly miss out on the unique opportunities available by email – most simply treat it as a different form of direct mail.

Three of the biggest opportunities they miss out on are:

• You can track individual response and so follow-up with an email, phone call or direct mail to move the customer along to the next step

• You can trigger emails individually personalized through dynamic content insertion. For example welcome emails, birthday emails and shopping cart abandons.

• Developing an email strategy so that its email activity has clear outcomes and integrates with other direct communications

iPost:
When first launching an email marketing initiative, what should companies be prepared for in terms of initial ROI?

Dave Chaffey:
When launching a programme for maximum ROI you should aim to get it right from the start, not a “let’s dip our toe in the water” experiment.

You will almost always get your highest responses from new people on your list, before they “emotionally unsubscribe.”   So you should make those first emails count, maybe through a powerful, focused sales promotion rather than an enewsletter. Many companies are now moving away from enewsletters since they don’t have the cut-through they used to.

Alternatively, starting by a research survey email of customers you already have addresses for, can work best for some businesses.

iPost:
In your experience, how many companies realize the importance of a strong email list when launching their first email marketing campaign?

Dave Chaffey:
In my training workshops I always start by stressing the importance of data quality as the foundation for email marketing before going on to the sexier creative stuff.

Many companies don’t have a strategy to grow their in-house list and improve its quality. I know some companies who have tens of thousands of emails, but they’re not qualified or profiled to know how to target.

In my book I briefly review the type of measures that companies should be reviewing and improving for example:

• Email list coverage of database %

• Permission %

• Profile-depth (which fields available to target)

• 180 day subscriber activity % (best measure of engagement)

iPost:
Fill in the blank:  the most important component of a strong email marketing strategy is____.  If applicable, how does this differ from any other marketing strategy?

Dave Chaffey:
Great question! Easy answer, it’s “Relevance”. No surprises there… Not so different from other digital strategies like search. That’s why you need a communications strategy so you can become more relevant to your subscribers.

So how do you become more relevant? Here are three ways:

• Ask your customers what they want through a survey

• Watch what they click on, for example, in an enewsletter or on your site and give them more of that

• Follow-up through relevant triggered emails for related products after they buy – dynamic content insertion can help here.

iPost:
Your book, Total Email Marketing, offers practical tips designed to improve email campaign results.  Since this book was published, what tips have you developed that you wish you would have made it into this book?

Dave Chaffey:
I hope that many of the fundamental principles of communications strategy, targeting, creative template layout and deliverability haven’t changed. But some areas which are interesting and effective right now are the creative use of pre-headers, product ratings, video and “share to social”.

Simply, many emails just aren’t interactive enough.  Even basic polls and customer opinions can help. Engagement is the name of the game if you want to avoid the dreaded ‘Emotional Unsubscribes’.

Not Just Another Marketing Blog proudly launches its interview series, “Email Marketing Thought Leaders.”  These interviews, featuring insight from the industry’s most esteemed professionals, will help us provide you with tips and tricks you need to take your

We launch our series by speaking to Jim Sterne.  Author of the books Advanced Email Marketing and producer of the world’s first “Marketing on the Internet” seminar series, Sterne is an internationally known speaker and consultant to Fortune 500 companies.

Below, we discuss what changes about email marketing in a recession, and answer the question, ‘regardless of economic climate, do the fundamentals ever truly change?’

iPost:
What changes about email marketing strategy in a recession?

Jim Sterne:

Targeting becomes all the more critical when times are tough. People are forever overwhelmed with email they do not want and as they are doing more work with fewer colleagues, they have less time. Their tolerance is near zero. Marketers have to focus on providing value from start to finish. Instead of being entertaining or interesting, all email marketing messages have to be useful. That doesn’t mean they should only be discount coupons, but they must be as relevant as possible and that means targeting.

Make certain that your messages are relevant (segment well), timely (no general info, but serious and valuable offers) and curb your frequency (test the response to sending less often).

iPost:
What tips would you offer to companies to improve email marketing in slow economic times?

Jim Sterne:
Tip #1: Segment, segment, segment.

Being relevant is about knowing what your recipients care about. They do not all care about the same thing. They are not all interested in the few things that you care about. Any segmentation is good – it allows you to narrow the message to the recipient. You can segment on geography, weather, age, gender, purchase history, stated preferences – anything. And if you cross-reference those segments and send out a unique offer to North Eastern men over 50 who have bought twice this month and love flannel, then you are wildly relevant and will be richly rewarded.

Tip #2: Fire your subscribers.

Chances are excellent that you love watching that opt-in subscriber number climb and climb. Feels good, right? It’s fool’s gold. Your subscriber data looks great until you realize that you are not accounting for churn. It takes a tenth of a second to delete an email from a familiar source while it can take up to a minute to unsubscribe. If you send me one message a month, a year’s worth of deletes still costs me less than 2 seconds. If I really want to skew your numbers, I’ll click on the Junk button and never be bothered with your messages again. You’ll never know.

So fire your subscribers. Send them ample notice that on a certain date they will be unsubscribed unless they re-opt-in. It’s up to you to explain why they should bother.

iPost:
Conversely, what is the single biggest mistake companies should avoid with their email marketing campaigns during slow economic times?

Jim Sterne:
Avoid hitting the panic (send) button again and again like a rat in a cage. Email marketing is not a simple food delivery mechanism that cranks out sales whenever you crank out another blast. The more messages you send out the more people you will alienate. Resist the urge.

iPost:
List, creative & offer.  Which fundamental is most critical to email marketing success during a recession any why?

Jim Sterne:
Your list is your friend. These are the people who raised their hand and expressed enough interest that they were willing to allow you into their email inbox. But your list may be the least critical of the three. If your creative is great, it can (not will) become viral. That can leverage your list and let everybody know about your offer. If your offer is uninspiring, there’s no hope for you.

iPost:
Your book, Advanced Email Marketing, helps readers prove the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.  For those launching email marketing campaigns during a recession, what metrics demand the most initial focus, to either define a campaign as a success or make improvements?

Jim Sterne:
Your very first focus should be email bounce rate. If you’re sending out messages that are going to bad addresses, you may find yourself on a blacklist. People subscribe to black lists to help keep spam at bay.

Next up is your open rate. If nobody is opening your messages, you haven’t got a change.

Everybody cares about clickthrough rate and they should. This is the pro-active step that sends a clear signal. Open rate could simply reflect that you have created a subject line that is intriguing. If they delete it after one look, you have not done your brand any favors. Clickthrough says that are interested enough in the offer to find out more.

Engagement is next. If they hit the landing page and then wandered off (website bounce rate) then they are not engaged. Engagement is a metric that you have to determine based on your own situation. It could be number of pages viewed, number of survey questions answered, the time they spend on your site or it might even be something like:

Sales! Yes, whether they actually bought something because of your email is probably the best measure of success. For those who do not sell online, substitute sales with Contact Us page views, calls to your special website-only phone number or lead qualification form. The real measure of success is if your email is bringing you more customers more often.

iPost:
Wild Card – Anything else you would like to add?

Jim Sterne:
Back to square one: Whom are you mailing to? What do they care about? What’s in it for them?

The Perricone MD Case Study

At the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition’s email marketing workshop,  iPost customer Neil Kjeldsen, vp of ecommerce for Perricone MD, spoke on segmentation and gave a very actionable case study built around problem, solution and results (with actual specific numbers). Perricone MD is a prestige skincare company that was founded by Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a dermatologist, award-winning author, and anti-aging expert.

Neil Kjeldsen from Perricone MD speaking at IRCE 2009

Kjeldsen helped online marketers cut through some of the clutter and find a way to efficiently reignite relationships and sales from dormant customers. When Kjeldsen joined Perricone MD, he found that the vast majority of their customers were inactive – something that Perricone MD had in common with most companies. To make matters worse, these inactive customers were far more likely to opt out and flag Perricone MD as a spammer – hurting both the company’s ability to market to them in the future and Perricone MD’s email sender reputation with ISPs.

Kjeldsen’s solution was to adopt iPost as Perricone MD’s new email service provider (ESP) and to implement the iPost Customer Engagement Program, a combination of strategic services, processes and software. Kjeldsen said that iPost first worked with Perricone MD to analyze their email, web analytics and purchase data. Perricone MD then implemented iPost’s Autotarget, which automates and updates daily Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value (RFM) segmentation.

Using Autotarget to automatically group customers into micro-segments, Perricone MD divided customers into engaged and unengaged segments. First Perricone MD started mailing safely (engaged customers tend to have very low opt out and spam complaint rates) to the engaged customers and tested a variety of methodologies to see what best improved revenue and  campaign profitability.

Perricone MD next worked with iPost to develop a “trail size” promotion for the unengaged customers and began mailing to them in “safe” segments.  The safe segment approach is central to iPost’s Rapid Reputation Repair process and enables e-tailers to mail to questionable lists without damaging their email sender reputation. According to Kjeldsen, in one month Perricone MD was able to implement and optimize the engagement programs. Because Autotarget automatically segments customer data daily, Kjeldsen said he and his team found that it only took them 5 minutes per mailing to use Autotarget.

Kjeldsen's presentation made a clear case for actionable analytics

Kjeldsen stated that the results from the iPost Customer Engagement Program included:

• A huge increase in conversion rates (from 0 to up to 33 percent)
• A dramatic jump in revenue per email sent from $0 to $0.26
• Growth in online revenue from unengaged customers from 0 to 7 percent

The Bandwagon

Amusingly, another ESP in the session presented a case study on the benefits of RFM that used data from another iPost case study on the Eastwood Company. To work around the fact that it was actually an iPost case study, the vendor referenced a DMNews article from October 2008. I encourage you to check the article out!

The ESP’s pundit, also, told the audience that RFM is – as a process – very easy to do, something that Kjeldsen countered when he got up to speak. Kjeldsen said that he used RFM analysis in previous jobs and loves Autotarget because it makes RFM easy and that without Autotarget RFM is simply not easy for small and mid-size teams.

The Workshop in General

I found the presentations to be far better at the workshop than the general sessions. The presenters came across far more knowledgeable but were still not consistent in highlighting quantitative results and making it clear what all is involved (time and resource) to achieve those results.

Last year at Internet Retailer, email marketing seemed to be treated as the bastard stepchild of the online marketing world. The event organizers kept it out of the limelight and few speakers acknowledged doing something so pedestrian and “yesterday” as email marketing. Most e-tailers I met at IRCE 2008 were either satisfied with blasting out emails or were just thinking of dipping their toes in the email marketing waters. Online marketers were somewhat intellectually interested in email analytics and segmentation but were not emotionally revved to do something about them.

What a difference a year and a recession make! Not only did email marketing more often find its way into session presentations but most online marketers I spoke with wanted to take their email marketing to the next level, even if they weren’t fully clear on what “next level” meant for them. I also far more agencies who wanted to improve email marketing for their clients and C-level execs who wanted to understand the potential of email marketing.

The sessions – sadly – were generally worse than last year and reflect poorly on Internet Retailer. Most of the presentations in 2008 did not have metrics nor did they necessarily reflect sophisticated business savvy but they at least were professional. This year most of the one I saw seemed to be thrown together. For example, on session on email marketing messaging was put on by an email service provider and an e-tailer. They promised practical advice that attendees could put into practice but everything was vague and general. Missing in action were metrics and practical processes. For example, the big takeaways from the session included have a call to action (CTA) and make your emails relevant. Ok.

I would like to see Internet Retailer take a pledge to only have speakers who

1.       Share the specific results of their programs and

2.       Give attendees an idea of how much time and effort is involved to achieve the stated results

In small and mid-size companies the whole online marketing team has too many things on their plate as is. They usually need help prioritizing – given their resource constraints – on what will help them best move the revenue needle. A lot of things are interesting or worthwhile but few can do them all.

Last year at Internet Retailer, email marketing seemed to be treated as the bastard stepchild of the online marketing world. The event organizers kept it out of the limelight and few speakers acknowledged doing something so pedestrian and “yesterday” as email marketing. Most e-tailers I met at IRCE 2008 were either satisfied with blasting out emails or were just thinking of dipping their toes in the email marketing waters. Online marketers were somewhat intellectually interested in email analytics and segmentation but were not emotionally revved to do something about them.

What a difference a year and a recession make! Not only did email marketing more often find its way into session presentations but most online marketers I spoke with wanted to take their email marketing to the next level, even if they weren’t fully clear on what “next level” meant for them. I also far more agencies who wanted to improve email marketing for their clients and C-level execs who wanted to understand the potential of email marketing.

The sessions – sadly – were generally worse than last year and reflect poorly on Internet Retailer. Most of the presentations in 2008 did not have metrics nor did they necessarily reflect sophisticated business savvy but they at least were professional. This year most of the one I saw seemed to be thrown together. For example, on session on email marketing messaging was put on by an email service provider and an e-tailer. They promised practical advice that attendees could put into practice but everything was vague and general. Missing in action were metrics and practical processes. For example, the big takeaways from the session included have a call to action (CTA) and make your emails relevant. Ok.

I would like to see Internet Retailer take a pledge to only have speakers who

1. Share the specific results of their programs and

2. Give attendees an idea of how much time and effort is involved to achieve the stated results

In small and mid-size companies the whole online marketing team has too many things on their plate as is. They usually need help prioritizing – given their resource constraints – on what will help them best move the revenue needle. A lot of things are interesting or worthwhile but few can do them all.

Posts you find here will not be about patting ourselves on the back or highlighting our own company accomplishments. Like the email marketing solutions we provide, our blog posts will be real world and actionable.  We’re not going to give you heaps of email marking information you can find elsewhere and we are certainly not just another marketing blog.

Rather, we will provide you with tips and tricks on how to take email marketing to the next (and profitable level).

Concepts you will find shortly, include:
•    How can email marketing work to your advantage during a recession?
•    How can you ensure your email marketing campaign sends the right message, to the right person and the right time?
•    What role will email marketing play in the rise of social networks?
•    How can you use email marketing to drive multi-channel sales?

We commit to ensuring the information you find on this blog will be invaluable to your email marketing campaigns.

Our blog is not just another marketing blog and we hope each reader is not just “another” email marketer. We are focusing the blog on email marketers who want to be sound businesspeople with an eye toward improving the bottom line!

If you have questions or topics you would like to see in upcoming posts, please leave ideas below in the comments.

II. MarketingSherpa stressed:

• Take an analytic approach

• Tie in email marketing with optimized landing pages. Big push on optimizing landing pages that included full day of training prior to the start of the show.

• Tie in email marketing with social networks.

III. Social Media:
A. A lot of talk and survey results show big plans from companies on spending more here but the results on this were mixed. One case study of (anonymous company) showed a 62% increase in reach of the email. However, the case study where an emailer (Miles Media) showed results portrayed the reach as being minimal.

• 100K emails sent

• 47 posts

• Ave of 8.4 opens and clicks (she didn’t show these on her slides so I just scribbled down the numbers from her talk but I think I got them right)

B. The big winners from the two case studies for most popular social media sites were:

• Anonymous company in descending order of posts: Twitter, LinkedIn (sign a B2B emailer???), MySpace and Facebook (a distant forth)

• Non-anonymous (Miles Media) in descending order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Digg (distant forth)

IV. The email marketing awards were a joke. only big name companies won. (Big names = Fortune 200 and Global 1000. )

You may be asking yourself right now – why, did their vast array of resources yield superior results? Well, no. Except for a couple of winners from Capital One and a catchy email postcard from Dell, the winners…how should I put this…stunk. They were just a mass of very tiny and often unformatted text. One exec I spoke with said they looked like the type of emails he gets all the time and automatically deletes. Another exec described them as “text dumps.”