“Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.”
~ David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair

Any reasonably responsible email marketer knows that he or she should, at the bare minimum, follow CAN-SPAM regulations when sending email marketing messages. But, as it turns out, following this and other best practices does pay off in the long run. MarketingSherpa recently published a report called “Email Performance Since 2001,” tracing the relationship between email marketing best practices and email success. In one form or another, MarketingSherpa has asked the basic question about how well email marketing has performed since their first survey in 2001.

This chart highlights performance trends when following Best Practices and when Deviating From Best Practices. The Y Axis shows the efficiency of the email marketing endeavor. The X Axis displays the year.

Read More »

This past Thursday I received an email from Urban Outfitters made me positively giddy with excitement.

Much to my delight, the email explained that Urban Outfitters was promoting an exclusive partnership with The Impossible Project, a group dedicated to preserving the legacy of Polaroid film. Best of all, the email explained that the two entities’ interests would culminate in a series of limited in-store sales of the last remaining Polaroid cameras and film, rescued from the last Polaroid factory in the Netherlands. What a coup! Best of all, I learned that the somewhat secret sale was taking place the following day, just across the Charles River in nearby Cambridge.

And thus my fate had been decided: I would use the information gleaned from this informative in-store promotion email, venture towards Harvard Square during my lunch break, and return only after acquiring my very own special edition Polaroid camera and film.

But why describe a memorable experience in simple words when a set of photos could explain it even better? Let’s see how it all went down!

Read More »

Email design starts from the top down.

If you stop and think about it, it’s a logical statement – that’s how the email loads and is presented to the user. Therefore, what you want the user to see first should be placed at the top of the email to grab their attention and inspire interaction. This sacred area of your email template is called the “above-the-fold” area and can make or break a design.

Since you only have, on average, 400-450 pixels of vertical space, this area doesn’t give you much room to toy with the images and copy needed to truly feature your content. Factor in some additional space for a logo, main navigation bar and perhaps a refer-a-friend link, and your header section is starting to resemble a layer cake rather than an email that’s designed to attract the user.

With so much going on at the top, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical aspects of the “template” rather than the creative, eye-catching promise of the “design.” To help gain some critical distance and assess the challenges properly, let’s review some examples of above-the-fold sections. Each sample below has been vertically measured at 420 pixels which is a good average number of what the user will see before they have to scroll:

Lego does an excellent job at building an efficient and good looking above-the-fold area. Not only is most of the main featured section displayed in the preview pane, but a smaller sub-feature section makes it in there as well. Utilizing a clean design with minimal copy and navigation, Lego’s template works harder than most at getting the user to interact from the start. Read More »

The idea of behavioral data affecting email sender reputation first surfaced three years ago, when AOL announced that dormant addresses would factor into sender reputation. AOL explained at the time that spammers create significant numbers of fake email addresses for the sole purpose of driving down complaint percentage rates. Even so, they said that this metric should never affect legitimate emailers who have genuine (human) email recipients.

The next phase of this concept was presented by Microsoft at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance Conference in 2008 (PDF). Microsoft’s Anti-Spam General Manager indicated that in the future they would prefer to use recipient behavioral metrics like open-rates in addition to their other spam-related metrics to determine sender reputation. While the idea was still hypothetical at the time, the mere fact that they made these statements to a room full of email senders was worth noting.

Now, we have confirmation from Yahoo! that some of these same metrics that AOL and Microsoft have considered are now implemented into Yahoo!’s anti-spam reputation processes. Of course, we’ll never know exactly what percentage of non-openers or other behavioral factors will impact deliverability, but we can say with certainty that dormant addresses and inactive users are now playing a role in determining your Yahoo! inbox success.

Read More »

We’ve all heard the expression “a family that prays together stays together,” but perhaps email marketers could revise the expression to be “a family of brands that sticks together gets clicks together.” Recently I’ve received a few emails that do a nice job of visually explaining who they and their sister brands are in simple terms. I like each of these examples because they help educate the user about other brands that they may be interested in but unaware of, or provide value throughout an extended product line.

Our first example comes from Wolferman’s, a sister brand of Harry & David. I really appreciated this email because the footer not only explained that Wolferman’s was part of the Harry & David family of brands, but also explained in clear terms that I was receiving the email because I had recently shopped at Harry & David. I would imagine that this helps Harry & David with cross-sell opportunities while also decreasing abuse complaints.

Read More »

As any seasoned email marketer knows, there are almost an unlimited amount of ways to segment email marketing subscriber data. In the third and final installment of this three-part overview, Jordan Lane provides a summary of some common email segmentation sources, tips, and best practices.

Part III – Segment by acquisition channel

One of the most effective yet often overlooked methods is segmentation by acquisition channel. From my experience working with clients across various industries, I have found that customers acquired through different channels tend to have different behavioral characteristics. Here are some thoughts to consider:

• Email subscribers acquired through co-registration pages will usually respond or convert differently than organically acquired email subscribers.
• Subscribers who have been acquired in-store have already indicated that they are at least somewhat likely to purchase both at a local POS and online. Take the ZIP of the store into account and be sure to coordinate your multi-channel marketing efforts to maximize customer value.
• New email registrations acquired via mail-in forms and call centers may indicate that the customer is looking to shift from print to online shopping. You may consider a “go paperless” email offer to these customers that builds a positive, eco-friendly reputation for your brand – not to mention saving you print costs along the way.

With any segmentation program it is important to take a step back and realize that there is a real person on the other end of each email address. Every time you create an email, ask yourself whether your email content is addressing the specific needs of your audience. Email segmentation is not a one-size-fits-all discipline, but with a little tweaking here and there, you can find the right method for targeting your customer base.

As any seasoned email marketer knows, there are almost an unlimited amount of ways to segment email marketing subscriber data. In the second installment of this three-part overview, Jordan Lane provides a summary of some common email segmentation sources, tips, and best practices.

Part II – Demographic segmentation

Gender, age, ethnicity, interests, education level, occupation, location, marital status, number of children, and income are all examples of demographic attributes that can be used to effectively segment your email subscribers. Depending on the nature of your business and industry, you can combine such attributes to create highly targeted audiences that really zero-in on your best customers. So why would you target females with your email marketing messages when your best customers are more specifically hispanic females aged 45-60 with a college degree and adult-aged children?

The reason why many fail to use sophisticated demographic segmentation is because they have difficulty gathering all the demographic information they desire from the initial registration page. As a general rule, the more information you require at sign-up, the likelier a prospect will abandon the registration process or provide false information.

To help email marketers gather the info they need for sophisticated demographic information, I’ve compiled a list of techniques to improve the data collection process:

Read More »