Just a quick note that all the articles and posts I've encountered with advice on email marketing and social networks etc. are now collected in one spot here.

The collection will, of course, get updated as and when new insights cross my desktop.

For those (like me) with a natural reluctance to jump in headfirst to all these social tools, can I recommend this t-shirt.

Part 14 of an ongoing series...

[We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.]

It's hard to spend more than five minutes on a media website without discovering new concepts and tools for people and businesses to communicate with each other.

Facebook, MySpace, feeds, microblogging, IM, Twitter, Plurk, Plaxo, Ning...

Quick! Get a Facebook strategy in place if you want to avoid embarrassment at the big interweb party.

What's the new email marketer to do?

Flee? Rejoice? Both? Neither?

Despite want pundits might say and we might want, there are no simple answers to how email marketing should embrace (or not) social networks and other Web 2.0 developments.

But there are concepts and approaches that help us find the answers for our own unique situations...
1. All that glitters is not gold
Journalists focus on what's new, not necessarily what works. And a lot of "media" today is written by people with an agenda: vendors interested in spreading a story that fits nicely with the products and services they sell.

Don't jump into a new tool just because it makes you look good to your peers and a media who likes to talk about new things that might work, rather than old things that do work.

The new email marketers asks, "Will the tool help me reach and convert customers and prospects more effectively and efficiently than in the past?"

That's what counts. (Testing is allowed.)
2. You are not married to email
The new email marketer does not market using email. The new email marketer drives sales, opinion, web visits, downloads, registrations, ad views, ad sales, donations, or whatever else defines success for the organization. For which they happen to use email.

If there is a more effective way to use your marketing resources, then use it. As far as Web 2.0 goes, take Anna Billstrom's simple and sensible, yet often overlooked, advice:

"Find out where your customers are online and what social media they are using."

A message echoed in recent research by ESP ExactTarget on how to reach the right consumer.
3. Keep your head firmly out of the sand
A great advantage of email is its ubiquity. Everyone has an email address. It is the world's social network. Email is immortal.

But...

The fact that Facebook sends out alerts by email doesn't necessarily help my retail email strategy. A gripe I raised a year ago.

Yes, email survives. More email is sent. But that's not the critical point. What is critical is that the email audience and email user habits evolve, especially under the accelerating influence of Web 2.0 technologies.

So the new email marketer is flexible: revising strategies in the light of changes in audience composition and behavior. Seeking synergies. Looking for opportunities.
4. One thing has not changed
All these new tools and technologies, like email itself, are conduits for content. Not an end in themselves.

It is not enough to email. It is not enough to twitter. It is not enough to blog. It is not enough to have a Facebook page.

What you say, what you send, what you communicate still has to have value. In that sense nothing has changed since the day they printed the first newspaper.

Here's the new/old marketing mantra:

"Produce material people will be glad they saw or read."

Greg Cangialosi's agrees in his take on Marketing 2.0, where he says:

"...this isn't a game for being just the sizzle, you have to be the steak at the same time, almost all of the time."
5. Know your limitations
It's hard to be everywhere all the time. The growing fragmentation of communication channels causes us to spread our resources ever thinner. At the cost of the quality and value we need to communicate to make each channel work.

My feed reader is littered with the carcasses of bright new email marketing blogs that started well, slowed and died as soon as the novelty value wore off.

Only invest in channels used by your audience where you know you can provide that quality and value that earns you the necessary attention and response.
6. Web 2.0 is bottom-up
Anna Billstrom again in a comment on her own post:

"If more of our messaging could be transactional, more one-to-one conversation with the customer base (as a corporate or business entity) that's a good thing."

The growth of Web 2.0 both reflects and encourages the return to relationships that started this whole series off.

Web 2.0 is notification that we need to work against what Seth Godin calls the first law of mass media:

"Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter."

Web 2.0 is a reminder that there is an empowered human at the other end of the message.
7. Same content? Unique content?
Each tool or channel has its own nuances. And the customers using your web feeds are likely different to those preferring email. Or Twitter. Or those reading your Facebook page.

This is where the real adventure starts. Can you, for instance, repurpose content from one tool or channel for the other? Both Chad White and Linda Bustos, for example, recently explored how customer reviews and email can complement each other.

Numerous other articles address promising ways to get email to benefit from and contribute to Web 2.0 tools and concepts.

But the top tactics will only emerge later, when you know exactly how people interact with your marketing messages. We know about multichannel shoppers. Do we now have ever-more multichannel communicators?

Email marketers are conscious of the dangers of email overload. Will there be issues of message duplication and overload if people "follow" you via email, Twitter, web feed and Facebook? Do the concepts of email fatigue transfer to a wider mix of communication tools and channels?

Web 2.0 is not a threat to the new email marketer. But it is a reminder that email marketing and email marketers need to evolve with email. To remain flexible and focused on producing value to those on the other end of the marketing message. Wherever they may be.

(Your thoughts and opinions are very welcome: this is largely unexplored territory, where theory still has the upper hand over experience.)

Tags: social media, social networks, facebook, myspace, twitter, blogging, email marketing, email strategy

I wrote an article for MarketingProfs: Email Marketing and Social Media, Part 1: Adding Social Media to the Email Newsletter

Email is not dying in the midst of the social-media revolution. As one social-networking company said to me, “accurate delivery of email is a main part of our deliverable.”

Flipping that situation around: How can we, as emailers, best leverage the new social-marketing applications?

Let’s consider the simple email newsletter and expand it to include social marketing.

Read the rest on their site!

In a comment thread on The Email Wars- a little tiff happened about double opt-in compared to confirmation emails. This may just be my opinion, but I consider a set of confirmations a double opt-in process.
1- user submits their name and email address in a form on a site or via mailing list subscription method (unconfirmed opt-in)
2a- user gets, at the submitted email address, an email confirming the subscription, with a method to unsubscribe. (confirmed opt-in)
OR
2b- user will not get any email unless they respond again with a subscription request, or click on a subscription URL, or otherwise twice ask for the subscription. (double opt-in)

With option 2a, I call this “opt-in with confirmation” and 2b is “double opt-in,” because it requires the user to ask twice. 2a just informs the user, with a method to unsubscribe if someone as a prank signed you up without your knowledge.

The Obama campaign did not offer an optin with confirmation nor a double opt-in, which has caused all kinds of ruckus in the email marketing world. Whether it’s enough to be called “stupid” or not, is up for debate.

What gets me about the Obama email campaign is that the optin-list of subscribers was handed over to Biden without an opt-in.

After talking things over with Matthew Hill, a recent guest post author, about the success of his posts he has accepted a more permanent position writing (volunteering) with me here at EmailKarma.net.

Keep and eye out for his posts and welcome!

We've all had emails that worked particularly well, drawing an unusually high response. Pity, then, we can't use that same email again and again.

Except we can...sort of. Here five ideas: let me know what you think.
Tactic 1: Wait and send again later
Your list is growing and new subscribers have never seen your previous emails. Which is a challenge and an opportunity (isn't everything?).

A challenge, because it means you have to prove yourself to each newcomer before they become loyal subscribers eager for the next email.

An opportunity, because you can treat them differently.

Consider sending newcomers a unique stream of emails just for them, and adding them later to your standard list database. You can reuse winning emails from the past as part of this welcome stream.
Tactic 2: Refer back in the next email
With a little care and intelligence, you can find ways to highlight the last email in your current one without compromising the main message, particularly in headers and footers or at appropriate points in the text/copy.

Example: My August 11th newsletter included a link that proved unusually popular with readers...to a blog post listing HTML email design resources.

So I followed up in the next newsletter with a companion post for plain text email design, with this teaser:

"Last issue's popular list of top HTML email design resources gets a sibling. See this post for a list of online articles, tools and templates to help with the design of your plain text emails."

The reason this works is because the mention is inoffensive to anyone who saw the previous issue. And it's new for the many people who are reading the current issue but missed the last one.

"Many" people? Yes: check your statistics.

The average open rate over the last four issues of the newsletter is 35%. But the percentage of the list who "opened" at least one of those issues is around 60%.

The implication is that there's an ebb and flow: people don't catch every email, they miss out on some.

The result of the subtle second mention?

21% more newsletter clicks to the HTML email design article. (Some of whom will also be people who did see the last issue but for whatever reason didn't click the link first time around: no time, browsed past it, etc.)
Tactic 3: Resend the email to non-responders
There's a school of thought that says you can take exactly the same email and send it again to those people who didn't see it the first time, as indicated by a lack of a registered open.

I've seen case studies citing strong incremental revenues as a result of this technique. But there are problems which are often overlooked in all the excitement of new sales.

These problems arise because a lack of an open does not imply the recipient missed the first email. Thanks to image blocking and the way opens are measured, many will have seen it...but chosen not to read or respond.

So at least some recipients will see the email twice, which will raise eyebrows. And some of those didn't "open" the first because they didn't want it or weren't interested.

Getting a second copy could drive them to hit that "report spam" button. This double send problem is one of the hidden costs of lazy email marketing.

A subtler alternative is to use a modified version of the email to resend to "non-responders". One that avoids some of the problems with sending duplicate emails.

Fresh subject line, different creative, acknowledgment of the previous send: "Final chance to take advantage of..." etc. It's a better approach, but needs careful application. Anybody able to cite their own experiences?

Yet another alternative is to redefine "non-responders." For example, what about sending a follow-up campaign to those who click but don't buy / download / register?

Tactic 4: Learn and apply
This is the obvious, but forgotten one.

The task flow "send - track - measure" is missing two further components: "analyze" and "apply". Emails that pull an unusually high response offer clues to effective tactics and topics for the future. So you repeat the model, not the email.

Normally it's hard to pinpoint one element that is clearly responsible for an email's success (unless you do rigorous tests). But draw out the most likely candidates and experiment with them in future emails. Is it your offer? The link positions? The color of the "more info" button? The subject line approach?

Don't forget to look for explanations outside of the actual email itself, too. Maybe it wasn't something you did after all.
Tactic 5: Adapt to other channels
We too often think of email as its own isolated marketing channel with no relevance to other sales and promotional efforts.

But winning emails can find use outside of email. Eh?

An offer thats works in email can be considered for a direct mail piece or store promotion. A subject line that works might prove effective as a headline for your PPC search ads. A winning button color might have value on the website, etc.

And it works in reverse, too. Winning PPC headlines used as subject lines. Successful website offers sent out via email etc.

Of course, be aware that different channels reach different audiences with different responses.

And there's a whole other debate about whether such things as offers should be coordinated across channels anyway. The alleged synergy of the multichannel approach (a topic for another day!)

Any other suggestions on reusing successful emails?

Tags: email resends, email marketing, open rates

The early bird catches the worm (but the second mouse gets the cheese). Those who plan ahead will benefit most from online sales in the Q4 2008 holiday shopping season.

This post will get regular updates to point you to the latest advice from around the web on holiday email marketing. So bookmark it for later.

Let us begin now, with nary a tinsel or reindeer in sight...

The Email Experience Council released the 43-page Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season with relevant benchmarks and advice.

Campaigner just launched the "100 days to grow your business" series of daily tips on how to optimize your email program for the coming critical sales season.

Tim Parry gets the experts at Epsilon to reveal insights from their Holiday Shopper analysis of the 2007 season, with many tips on planning and strategy.

Lisa Harmon has a few quick tips on how to take an original creative approach and avoid the holiday cliches. Which she follows up with some hints on actual content tactics.

Chris Marriott has thoughts on planning your holiday communications, with a strong emphasis on email.

Melinda Krueger presents her advice on holiday email strategy and what you can do NOW to ensure success later.

She follows this with a second article looking at the customer focus and the holiday campaign planning process.

The folks at Bronto discuss how if successful email marketing relies on trust, then making the most of holiday sales means establishing this trust in advance.

Let's not forget that this isn't the first year of e-commerce. Check the advice on offer to email marketers from previous years:

Holiday email marketing 2007, plus update.
Holiday email marketing 2006 and earlier

Tags: holiday email marketing, holiday marketing, Christmas marketing

My latest article on OneDegree.ca deals with the upcoming ''Do not Call' legislation in Canada and how you should prepare your communications programs to deal with this.
How to Leverage the Do Not Call List to Enhance Your MarketingBy Matthew Vernhout

Is your company optimizing the potential of permission marketing? The introduction of the Do Not Call List (DNCL) regulation will certainly compel senior marketers like you to think about this question.

With the DNCL set to be launched on September 30, 2008, you want to make the most of the time you have to call your customers. Take this time to contact the customers that are the most valuable to your firm. When you call them, make sure you verify their contact information and obtain permission to contact them through one or all of your communication platforms (telephone, email or direct mail).

Read the full article.

• United Online to update FBL
  (tags: united_online fbl deliverability)
• Return Path + Habeas = good for email marketers?
  "any concentration in a marketplace raises questions. Matt Blumberg, Return Path's CEO and Chairman, was kind enough to take time out to answer them for me." - Mark Brownlow interviews Return Path's CEO, Matt Blumberg
  (tags: industry deliverability safelist senderscore)

Those with a B2B email list can tiptoe quietly past all the challenges associated with sending email to the big consumer webmail sites, particularly Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo.

Or can they?

I just checked the distribution of domains on my own B2B list. The big three account for almost 25% of the database:

Gmail: 11.9%
WLH: 4.6%
Yahoo: 7.9%

These free email address services have long shed their rough and ready image and now offer users powerful tools and advanced features.

Combined with their portability (the email address isn't zapped when you move jobs), it's no surprise to find business folk using them to get commercial email from informational websites and vendors.

So have you checked your list recently for webmail addresses?

The marketing challenges are mostly about deliverability and rendering. These resource guides may help:

Windows Live Hotmail
Yahoo! Mail
Gmail

Tags: webmail, email deliverability, windows live hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail

Seems like the popular thing to do this Fall.

First AOL is switching to ARF for all feeds as of September, then RR.com announces plans for an upgrade, Yahoo is also still on hold but talks a new FBL are not far off... and today I received the following note from United Online (Juno/NetZero).


This is to inform you that we are in the process of updating our Trusted Sender List, and would like to confirm your domain name and its unsubscribe email address for our records.

The following is the domain name and its corresponding unsubscribe email address that we have in our Trusted Sender List:

example.com : FBL@example.com
Please reply back to this email to confirm all the details, and to let us know if there are any additions or changes.

Also, please provide us with a human readable contact address where we can contact your domain directly for any issues with the feedback loop.

We appreciate your cooperation in this regard.

Sincerely,

Security & Abuse Department
United Online, Inc.

I don't have many details at the moment, but I'll keep you updated as I get more information.

Thanks to David Armano for publishing a number of highly relevant and intresting Images on his blog receintly, this one particularily hits home as the symbolism can be tied back to several topics already discussed here.

Loyalty
Trust
Authenticity
Creditability
Consistancy

Remember there are two sides to each of these traits. Be on the right side and your program will grow and prosper, on the wrong side and delivery woes will find you.


Thanks to Logic+Emotion for the image.

• Embedding images in email - Campaign Monitor Blog
  "based on our results, it is clearly not worth using embedded images in your emails. All you will be doing is forcing people to download encoded images that they will not be able to view."
  (tags: coding)

I recently summarized the best HTML email resources in a private discussion list post and thought I'd expand here for public consumption.

There are numerous such resources, of course, but these are among the more useful...do suggest others in the comments.
Overview articles, collections, guidelines
Email anatomy: outlines the structural anatomy of a marketing email and gives you a nice framework around which to hang your design approach.

How to code HTML email newsletters: Extensive advice on use of HTML, CSS, tables (or not) etc.

Campaign Monitor: First port of call for HTML email resources. Check out their blog and 2008 HTML email design guidelines.

The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email: Looks at what makes "good, modern HTML email design."

A designer's guide to HTML email: Advice given in the context of a newsletter redesign project.

Email design for mobile devices: Articles and links on how to approach design in the context of mobile email.

Coding an HTML Email: Three-part article on how to turn a design into HTML.

Design and layout: ...category at the BeRelevant blog.

9 best practices for email design: Another good overview, this time from Vdot Media.

HTML email coding/delivery: Free 60+ page guide from MailChimp.
Standards and support
Email Standards Project: Working to get email client developers to support a set of minimum standards for HTML email. Includes details of how each of the main clients currently in use shape up in this regard.

CSS support in email: Extensive guide from Campaign Monitor.

Forms in email: Details on which clients support forms, from Mark Wyner and from eROI.

Multimedia in email: Collection of articles and links on best practices with regard to videos in email.

Animated gifs: Another roundup from Campaign Monitor, this time of which clients support animation.
Email templates
Michael Fasani: Sample code and rules for robust emails that he says work well in various display environments.

The Holy Mail: Glen Lipka's universal template, which also has an update.

MailChimp: Free HTML email templates, tested for cross-client conformity and with coding tips to boot.

Campaign Monitor: 30 free "safe" templates.

CarbonGraffiti: Ten "safe" templates in various formats (postcard, columns etc.).

CakeMail: Basic and advanced newsletter templates.
Checklists
The Email Experience Council: Their email design roundtable recently put together checklists for email coding and email design, which you can buy from their whitepaper room.
Email design tools
Design preview tools: Inbox Inspector, Campaign Monitor and
Litmus

Fingerprint: Gives you information on which email clients your subscribers are using.

Premailer: Converts CSS styles to inline style attributes, plus other features.

More preview tools here, most of which are part of wider testing and service packages.
Design inspiration
Spam Meltdown: Hundreds of screenshots of emails arranged by design and topic themes (e.g. "rounded corners" or "coupons").

Email Design Gallery: Showcase of attractive emails, arranged by layout and messaging type.

Retail Email Blog: Reviews and screenshots of emails from leading online retailers. Check the Design Hall of Fame.

Smith-Harmon EDM Review: Blog showcasing creative designs for retail emails.

The Email Wars | Email Design: Another marketing blog written by an agency, but featuring a range of good (and often cutting edge) design.

Make it Pop: More advice on (and examples of) creative email design and development.

MarketingSherpa's Email Award Winner Gallery: Details of the 39 winning email campaigns, selected for their actual success in driving action or reaching goals, rather than how pretty they are.
Image blocking
Image blocking and suppression in emails: Articles and links on how to design with blocked images in mind. (And get the t-shirt.)
Usability
Nielsen Norman Group: big report with email newsletter design guidelines from a usability perspective.
What about text?
Which is better? This post and this one list the reasons for and against text/HTML as your preferred format.

More on HTML/CSS in emails | Tags: email design, html email, image blocking, css in email

Return Path's purchase of competitor Habeas means the merger of two of the largest deliverability services in the world. Is this good for email marketers?

General opinion in the industry seems to be yes, not least due to the positive impression people have of Return Path as a company (an impression I share).

But any concentration in a marketplace raises questions. Matt Blumberg, Return Path's CEO and Chairman, was kind enough to take time out to answer them for me.

Q. The sender side of the email world seems happy with the move. Have you had any reaction from the receiver side of the industry to the purchase?

Blumberg: The reactions have been very positive. Our largest receiver partners (both Return Path's and Habeas's) are excited that we can bring more senders through our rigorous process and "to the table" with them.

Q. With the Habeas SafeList and your own Sender Score Certified whitelist set to remain separate, can we expect a package discount for those companies who choose to use both?

Blumberg: We haven't finalized go-forward pricing strategies yet, and the two companies have historically priced services very differently, and in different bundles with other services we each offer like the monitoring tool and consulting. That said, of course our objective is going to be to gain as much client adoption of all our tools and services as possible.

Q. Is there a danger that the credibility of the SafeList might be compromised if it's seen as a poor sibling to Sender Score Certified?

Blumberg: I'm not sure anyone sees it that way. The two lists have different distribution to receivers and different qualification criteria to gain accreditation.

Q. Goodmail Systems is perhaps the closest to you in terms of email certification. CEO Peter Horan implied possible future agreements between Goodmail and Gmail / Microsoft / international ISPs. Is there room for both Sender Score Certified and Goodmail to run concurrently at the same ISPs?

Definitely. We are both going to be running at Yahoo! shortly. ISPs want credible, high quality mailers to have multiple paths to the inbox.

Q. Although you've commented that Return Path can't be described as a monopoly, it does now occupy a very strong position in the deliverability world. Some people might be a little unnerved at that much "infrastructural influence" being in the hands of a single private entity. Any comments on that?

Most ISPs do offer their own whitelists. Goodmail (massively venture backed) and ISIPP (small, scrappy, well-connected) are still in the marketplace. I'd guess that ISPs are unlikely to accept 20 whitelists, but I'd also guess they don't just want to accept one.

In addition, the major factors in inbox placement are not whitelists (either those run by the ISPs or third parties) but rather the reputation systems that are run by both ISPs and third parties like Ironport, Secure Computing, Barracuda, Commtouch, Cloudmark and others.

Thanks Matt!

More on email certification | Tags: return path, habeas, matt blumberg, email deliverability