Subject line testing is not a new concept to email marketing or to this blog.  However, it is an important key to email marketing success. Subject line testing is easy to do and offers concrete results, but is often neglected.

Below is a typical inbox. Which subject lines best grab your attention? Which approach would work for your brand? Which one do you think is the worst performing? There’s only way to know – test it out!

Keep in mind:

• Best-in-breed email programs consistently test their subject lines.
• It is important to verify your past findings and current theories about subject lines instead of making assumptions.
• If you can increase your open rates even slightly by optimizing your subject lines, the potential to increase click and transaction rates increases.

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Last year on Data Privacy Day, I offered our readers a list of The Top 10 Things An Emailer Should Never Do. This year, I’m paying tribute to Data Privacy Day in a slightly different way — I’m asking that email marketing leaders take a few moments to consider these thought-provoking privacy topics for further consideration. Keep in mind, these are open-ended questions and don’t necessarily have one right or wrong answer.

Top Ten Email-Related Privacy Questions for 2010:

1. If you knew who, or how many, of your email subscribers were also Facebook, Myspace, Twitter or other social networking ‘friends’ or ‘followers’, how would you communicate with them differently?
2. Have you considered the potential synergy of using email behavioral tracking information to drive online advertising media buying efforts?
3. Are you tracking email acquisition sources or other user attributes to identify patterns and reduce recipient abuse complaints?
4. Will your users perceive a potential benefit or be turned off if you collect more demographic or lifestyle information via acquisition or preference center pages?
5. Is it time your privacy policy was updated?
6. Do you reference your data services providers (such as your ESP) in your privacy policy and indicate how subscriber and website visitor data is being tracked and used?  Email privacy@cheetahmail.com for a copy of a full compliance briefing guide on this topic.
7. Do you enable third party cookies to be used on your website for advertising purposes, and if so, is there a section in your privacy policy or elsewhere explaining how users can opt-out from receiving these cookies?  For more information on this topic, please refer to these cross-industry guidelines.
8. Have you ever thought about how email traffic drives your competitors’ website activity and how it could improve your own email relevance?  (Yes, this is a shameless plug for our sister company, Experian Hitwise, and it has little to do with privacy, but it’s still worth considering!)
9. Have you ever referenced or referred subscribers to the Privacy Policy or User Policy Guide of your ESP to provide educational information on how your ESP uses client data?
10. Do you know your company’s Chief Privacy Officer or other privacy affairs representative?  Isn’t it time you did?

For more information on Data Privacy Day, we encourage you to visit the official Data Privacy Day 2010 website.  To discuss any of the above questions or others you have about privacy in general, email privacy@cheetahmail.com.

To the chagrin of Dallas Cowboys fans everywhere, the Minnesota Vikings recently advanced in the NFL playoffs. A friend of mine is a diehard Vikings fan and received the email below just as the game ended. (For the record, I verified that my friend is not a bandwagon jumper or Favre follower – but is a 100% certified and valid Vikings fan.)

NFL shop.com did a great job with not only the creative, but the subject line, the time they sent the email, and the segmentation. As far as I can tell only those with a preference set as being a Viking fan received this email.

The subject line was: Your Minnesota Vikings Just Won – Order Now & Get Free Shipping Over $75

We have all been guilty at one time or another of abandoning our shopping carts. Maybe we couldn’t find our credit card, or the shipping costs shocked us, or we simply lost interest in our purchase.

Whatever the reason for the abandonment, the simple fact is that the vendor has let untapped revenue slip between their fingers.

Experian CheetahMail’s new white paper, The remarketing report: Benchmark data and analysis for connecting web behavior to email marketing explains the value in marketing to abandoners, reporting that sending reminder emails to abandoners who do not convert after the first abandoned cart email can boost campaign revenue by up to 33 percent.

But why do website visitors abandon their carts in the first place? A study by PayPal and comScore found that 45% of US online shoppers had abandoned shopping carts multiple times in just three weeks. The average cost of abandoned goods in those shopping carts was $109. In the same study, 46% of online shoppers said high shipping charges was a “very important reason” for ditching their carts.

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Regardless of your feelings about the taste of Domino’s Pizza, you have to hand it to these guys – they do online checkout processes better than just about any company on the planet. We could all learn something from their CRM and online marketing initiatives.

A few months ago, I had an eye-opening experience when a friend of mine decided to order a late-night pizza from Domino’s well after most local eateries had closed their doors. I was blown away with what I saw — the Domino’s website features a real-time “pizza tracker” that shows the progress of your pizza being prepared, cooked, and delivered to your doorstep in 30 minutes or less. Sure enough, a hot pizza arrived at our door merely 25 minutes later, nevermind the fact that it was very late at night and snowing outside.

Comparing this with my previous Domino’s transactions from back in the day, it almost seems crazy to think about the typical Domino’s experience of yesteryear. The last time I had ordered Domino’s, the following were all true:

• Their commercials featured a claymation “Noid” who supposedly plagued other pizza delivery companies with quality control issues.
• The telephone I used to call Domino’s was a dormitory pay-phone.
• To ensure there were no problems with delivery, I waited patiently by this pay-phone until the delivery man either showed up at my door or called me back asking for directions.

It’s amazing what technology and innovation has done to improve the pizza ordering and delivery process since then.

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Today, Experian CheetahMail released “The remarketing Report: Benchmark data and analysis on connecting web behavior to email marketing.” This white paper delves into the details of deploying emails based on website browser behaviors, and reveals some surprising results along the way.

As most of us would expect, abandoned cart messages pull higher open, click and transaction rates than standard promotional messages. However, marketers might be surprised to learn that cart abandoners respond differently to triggered emails that leverage web analytics data. A few specific notes on browsers versus abandoners include:

• Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.
• Meanwhile, customers that only browsed products but did not add any items to their cart (i.e. ‘browsers’) are much more likely to respond to an incentivized email offer.

This report confirms that email marketers don’t need a special remarketing offer to convert abandoners into buyers. This is a positive development for the email industry in that we don’t effectively encourage our customers to abandon their carts with the hope of receiving a discount email at the end of the process.

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There comes a time in most email marketers’ lives when the email address he or she sends from needs to be changed. This change might be warranted because of an IP update, a change to a new email marketing service provider, a hosting update, aesthetic concerns or other reasons.

When a change like this must be made, what should be done? Two of the most critical goals are:

• Do your best to ensure that deliverability does not suffer when you begin sending from the new email address.
• Make sure subscribers recognize that the new ‘from’ address is you and do not hit the spam or unsubscribe button in error.

After a thorough whitelisting process, what’s next? Do you alert your subscribers about the new email address, if so how?

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