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I’d like to share a short story about gmail, email, and deliverability success…

Allposters.com (one of three Art.com brands) recently realized that a percentage (56%) of their Gmail subscribers were not receiving emails in their inbox. Working with their Email Service Provider (Experian CheetahMail ) Account team, they identified and implemented a series of initiatives that significantly improved their deliverability success, resulting in 100 percent of Allposters.com Gmail emails arriving safely in subscribers’ inboxes.

Here’s how:

• Removed Gmail hard bounces from file
• Drilled down into email behavior to identify the subscribers Gmail considered to be active
• Mailed only to 3 month active Gmail population
• Moved unsubscribe link for Gmail subscribers to the top of mailing
• Used a slower flow rate (10k/hr) for Gmail segments

In addition to the 100% deliverability rate, AllPosters.com experienced a 22% open rate increase, a 15% click to open rate increase and a.03% increase in transaction rate resulting in incremental revenue from customers!

View screenshots and check out the full story here.

Did you know that back-to-school emails sent in July have the highest unique open rates?

A big part of a successful back-to-school email marketing program is knowing the best time to start promotions; what types of mailings will drive the most customer response; and how to capitalize on peak times of buying interest on a more granular, or product, level.

Back-to-School mailings with offers in the subject line had 69 percent higher transaction rates than those without offers.

According to a new analysis, major email marketing trends and opportunities for driving back-to-school retail sales, include:

• September shows a higher proportion of back-to-school supply promotions in comparison to apparel.
• Search queries including “back to school” have increased each year for the past three years.
• Back-to-School mailings with offers in the subject line had 69 percent higher transaction rates than those without offers. (This is noteworthy given the fact that during last holiday season, for example, campaigns with offers in the subject line provided an average 20 percent lift in transactions).
• And more…

Click here to view all findings in the new white paper, 
Back to School Countdown: The A,B,C’s of preparing your email programs for the big day

Pretty pictures can go a long way: How Boston Proper visually engages its email subscribers

Boston Proper, a leading cataloger and specialty retailer of stylish, contemporary women’s sportswear, aims to grow online sales and extend customer loyalty while driving traffic to its e-commerce site, www.bostonproper.com. Since Boston Proper has a highly loyal customer base, avoiding the overuse of promotional discounts and, instead, relying on strong visual merchandising and imagery to drive conversions was key.

By working with Experian CheetahMail (read the full case study here), Boston Proper was able to send brand conscious and highly relevant emails to build a remarkably loyal and profitable customer base. Some of the key creative tips used by the brand, that other companies may want to consider implementing into their own program include: 

Visual cohesion with your website: Boston Proper designed visually stimulating HTML email templates based on strategic or best practice recommendations from Experian Cheetahmail. The designs mirrored the imagery on www.bostonproper.com as well as in the Boston Proper catalog, creating a visual cohesiveness amongst channels and giving customers a familiar and engaging design to interact with. 

Let reporting drive design: Once creative was complete, Boston Proper began mailing to their subscriber list two times a week, simultaneously collecting data on each customer’s response rate and activity. After a few weeks of reporting they were able to determine which mailing frequencies, offers and message content garnered the greatest response from each customer type. 

Target imagery by segment: To leverage these findings, Boston Proper used the segmentation tools in the CheetahMail application to send the most appropriate messages, at the most optimal frequencies, to each group accordingly. For example, the entire file receives two general catalog announcements per month, and a second email per week promoting a top selling product classification. Customers who interacted with the emails in the last 90 days receive a third email that is more category, trend or product specific. 

Boston Proper’s email messages have outperformed those of their industry peers in nearly all areas, with significantly higher clickthru rates and revenue per email. Furthermore, unsubscribe rates have fallen below .15%, proving that customers are highly receptive to the messages Boston Proper sends.

Compared to holiday-related emails sent on all other major U.S. holidays – including Cyber Monday, Valentines Day, Christmas and more – those deployed on Memorial Day tend to spur the highest transaction rates.

What could be the reasoning behind this trend – why are customers so quick to react to these emails, on this date, in particular? And, what can email marketers do the make the most of it?

Our observations lead us to believe that one of the main transaction-rate drivers is the pure sense of urgency that Memorial Day emails evoke. Many of the emails sent on the holiday itself stress that it is the “last day for the sale” through subject lines such as, “Last Day 20% off,”  “Memorial Day only, $2.99 shipping,” and “Time is running out!  Final hours.” Given that much of America celebrates over a three-day weekend, in combination with the unofficial kick-off of summer and backyard barbeques, those “last hours” and “final day” messages have such a high propensity to attract attention and customer action.

How can Memorial Day emails make your customers act this year? There are a few things email marketers can apply to their holiday campaigns to be successful:

Be relevant to the season: Summer is more than a new season. Summer is an exciting time for so many people especially those ready to get outside after a long winter! People are ready for activities and merchandise relevant to the season. Make sure everything about your email – the copy, imagery, featured products and more – scream, “Summer’s here!”

•  Build up excitement early: Highlight Memorial Day sales, specials and items at least three weeks prior to the holiday. (Note: that means now)
• Use holiday-appropriate imagery: When planning your creative, think of bar-b-ques, outdoor gatherings and parties.
• Create urgency in the subject line: This is a ‘must do,’ especially for the emails that go out on Memorial Day itself. Words such as ‘final,’ ‘last’ and ‘today only’ can be your best tools.

Apparently, the value of email communications is not only increasing with marketers, but with criminals as well. Whether you’re a marketer trying to avoid your brand being abused, an employee trying to secure intellectual property or a consumer trying to avoid being phished, here are some tips and techniques to consider when evaluating the state of phishing today.

For the brands:  Understanding the anti-phishing ‘takedown’ process

A phishing ‘takedown’ is when a brand owner requests that a website hosting provider or ISP remove the website domain that is being used for phishing on their network. Akin to a good mixed martial artist’s takedown technique, the best phishing takedown advice is to do it as quickly and forcefully as possible because the main impact of a phishing campaign takes place within 24 hours of the email being sent. In most cases, a brand is better off using one of the professional service providers who specialize in these requests and have pre-existing relationships with global networks rather than trying to identify and reach out to the networks themselves. The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) has authored an excellent white paper on this topic which can be found online here. Contact the APWG directly for more information on a list of their members who provide these takedown services or refer to their membership directory online here.

For the corporate employee (or consumer):  don’t get ‘spear phished’

According to IBM research, while overall phishing attempts are down from past years, ‘spear phishing’,  or phishing emails that are personalized to specific users or to domain name recipients, have dramatically increased in the past year. The goal of these types of campaigns is not to collect the recipients’ personal or financial information as with most consumer phishing attempts, but rather to get a user to click on a link so a software program can be downloaded to the users’ machine. Afterwards, the criminals will use this software program to install what’s called a ‘keylogger’ program to collect user names and passwords to various types of accounts, which often times includes web-based access to corporate databases where the criminals can easily steal intellectual property or otherwise make use of the corporate network. InformationWeek describes these types of these attacks in detail online here. In some cases, these emails will appear to be sent from current or former colleagues whose names were harvested off business directory websites. Examples such as ecards are regularly abused due to their innocuous nature.  If you ever receive an unexpected e-card or odd link from a current or former colleague, whether by email or IM, then it is immediate grounds for suspicion.

For everyone: some easy tips to avoid getting phished

Identify the real ‘sender’: Most of the time, an email recipient simply looks at the friendly ‘from’ address to see the name or domain name of the sender. This is what the phishers rely upon – that users don’t check what the actual sending domain name is behind what’s visible by default in the message. Every email program, including Microsoft Outlook, enables users to easily see the real ‘transmission’ domain name the message is being sent from, which often times is completely unrelated to the domain name in the visible ‘from’ address.  To do this in Microsoft Outlook, users can simply open an email and click the  icon in the middle of the top-header of email message. This will open up a ‘Message Options’ box which will show the true message transmission information and include the transmission domain name that reveals who really is the sender. As you can see from the below example, the friendly ‘from’ address from this corporate email includes a shortened corporate domain name ‘chtah.com’ while the transmission information includes the full transparent corporate domain name of ‘cheetahmail.com’. In this case, a user may not easily recognize the visible ‘from’ domain, but would easily recognize the “Received:from” sending transmission domain name. With a phishing campaign, it’s the “Received:from” sending transmission domain name that will either be from an ISP (usually associated with a foreign top level domain name like ‘example.ru’ for Russia) or another domain name that is unrecognizable to the recipient.   In either case, it will not reflect the same brand or domain name used by the phisher because they do not have the technical rights to use this domain for email transmission purposes.

To be sure, check the ‘whois’ record: If you are ever unclear about the domain name that is listed in the ‘from’ or the ‘Received:from’ address, then the easiest way to validate its legitimacy is to check the public record ‘whois’ database listing the respective owners of the domain name. The most comprehensive whois database is hosted by Network Solutions and can be found online here. Other than a reference to the official corporation name and address, the main thing to look for is whether the domain name was registered within the prior days or week. Almost all phishing domains are registered within  a week of the phishing email being sent. Even if the corporation is not listed or it’s hidden by a ‘proxy’ registration, the date when the domain name was registered is always publicly referenced and is the most important factor to raise suspicion.

Sport Chalet Horizontal Email

One of the keys to rising above the crowd in email creative is innovation. If an email contains a clear message and a unique design, its chances at being effective increase considerably. One such innovation, developed by the Experian CheetahMail Creative Services Team, is the horizontal email, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive and profitable for our clients.

We asked three of our expert designers to share their theories on why horizontal layouts work, and what other best practices and tricks of the trade they incorporate into their creatives to bolster their performance.

Sport Chalet Horizontal Email

Senior Graphic Designer Roald Ansano recounts his inspiration for the unique layout:

“The first time I realized the potential of horizontal designs I was reviewing a retail client’s summer campaign. It was designed like a wide postcard, with products you could scroll left to right to look at. If the same products had been laid out in a normal template, I would’ve just scrolled up and down, out of habit. But I was already doing something different from the norm, so it kept me interested.”

Read More »

Even though coding for email marketing is, in many ways, easier than that of a website, mistakes are very common. Fortunately, these mistakes are easy to troubleshoot, and most are even easier to fix.

This handy reference helps HTML coders quickly establish the cause of an error and outlines guidelines for proper email coding.

Why are HTML Errors in Emails Common?
Most issues are simply due to messy code. Very often, code gets re-used on a regular basis to deploy campaigns where the content and images are continually being updated and moved around. This can lead to unintentional duplication or omission of HTML tags, and QA oversights.

There’s also the matter of which email client (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 2007, etc.) you’re viewing the code. Knowledge of what works across each of the major email clients will help in determining where rendering errors are occurring and why.

Checking Code with an HTML Validator
First and foremost, use an HTML validator, like the one built into the CheetahMail application, to check your code. It reviews
the code and generates a report, detailing where errors like missing HTML tags, malformed table structures and alignment issues exist in the code.

In addition, make use of QA options like Mailbox Snapshot tools which provides screenshots of what the code will look like across multiple email clients.

Across the Board:
Some coding issues tend to be universal. Here are a few of them:

• Layout is off by one pixel or pushes out past the border of the design
  This is usually due to one of the <td> width measurements exceeding the total width of the table. The widths are determined by a simple math equation involving the table cells; usually the math just needs to be corrected. If you add up the individual table cells and they don’t equal the <table>’s width, you’ve found the problem. The problem could also be from the use of CSS to format the design. Certain email clients like Outlook 2007 and Hotmail won’t understand formatting CSS (margin:1px;) and will disregard it. The use of CSS in email is not a best practice.
• Parts of a layout don’t display
  This can be due to a malformed table structure, incorrect HTML syntax, or colspans that are missing or have incorrect numerical values.
• The background image behind the HTML text repeats
  The best practice is to design your creative so it doesn’t rely on background images. If a background image must be used, leave some extra space for the HTML text to “grow” when rendered in different email clients. Since various email clients tend to add extra line-spacing to HTML text, this will allow for the table cell holding the HTML text to expand while maintaining the integrity of the design.
• HTML text isn’t aligning properly and is leaving blank areas in the creative
  Make sure to use aligning properties inside the <td> like valign and align. Without those attributes defined, the HTML text will float in the vertical middle within the <td> tag. If that doesn’t work, review how the overall table is set up, and if the <td> measurements are correct.
• HTML emails in Outlook have a mysterious “break” every 800 pixels from the top of the email down
  This is caused by the rendering engine that Outlook 2007 and 2010 are built on. Since Microsoft Word inserts an automatic page break every 11 inches, or the length of a letter size document, Outlook 2007 does the same. There’s currently no way to code around this issue without changing the design to use flat colors and white space to counteract the automatic breaking.

Email Clients and Their Personalities
Once HTML code has been developed and validated, testing can begin across the major email clients on both the MAC and PC operating platforms. To know the specific coding pitfalls of the email clients is to have reached true HTML email coding enlightenment!

Here are some examples to watch out for:

• Gmail/Yahoo!
  Known to be very finicky, Gmail will pick up on the slightest coding mistake and render the email incorrectly. Extra line-spacing is added to HTML text which can break a design. This can be controlled with the correct usage of inline styles to control how the HTML text renders. Background images should be defined within the <td> tag, and NOT within the <body> tag.
• AOL
  Form functionality like search fields and drop down boxes won’t work. Consider dynamically inserting forms based on domain, or linking to a hosted page offering forms.
• Gmail in Firefox
  Adds extra “padding” to images which causes extra white space to appear around an image’s border. You can alleviate this by adding an inline style called “style=”display:block;” to the img tag. This work-around removes the imposed padding and fixes the issue.
• Hotmail in Firefox
  The same issue mentioned above regarding Gmail in Firefox also happens in Hotmail in Firefox.
• Microsoft Outlook 07
  Most issues involving Outlook 07 have to do with it being based on the HTML rendering engine of Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is predominantly for text formatting, so it cannot interpret sophisticated code. Basically, if Microsoft Word can’t render code correctly, chances are Outlook 07 will also have trouble with it.
  • Outlook 07 has no support for background images
    This is a common problem for clients who use system text with a graphic behind it. Because Outlook 07 won’t display the background, it will just appear as a blank white space. As a quick fix, pick a color out of the design’s background and insert it as a hex color. Another option instead of using system text, is to code that section of the design as an image.
  • Animations do not work in Outlook 07
    It will only display the first frame. Because of this, it is necessary that the first frame of an animation be a significant one; if the viewer is only capable of seeing the first frame, it needs to capture the basic idea of the message.

Adhering to these simple guidelines will ensure your code will be presented properly across the major email clients. Now get coding!