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“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.

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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.

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We all know that email is a great way to drive traffic to your business’s Twitter page. But in my view, the biggest challenge for businesses using Twitter is convincing your customers that your corporate tweets are relevant, interesting, and worthwhile.

So, I was fairly intrigued to read about new restaurants in Boston using Twitter to create buzz around their grand openings. Of course, an event like an opening is inherently interesting to local consumers because of its newsworthy nature. But after the first customers are served, how does the restaurant continue to use Twitter effectively? What would I want them to tell me?

I guess I want to know what’s in it for me. Daily menu specials or entertainment listings might be beneficial to Twitter users. Even better, if we’re talking about a very busy restaurant where I can almost never get a reservation, Twitter would be a great place to share table availability due to last-minute cancellations. (Maybe then I would finally be able to eat one of the tasty daily specials I always read about!)

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In the June 30th eMarketer article entitled “The Sad Tale of Abandon Carts,” a strong case is made for the value of abandoned cart emails. These ReMarketing messages have proven for some time to increase email engagement rates and drive higher revenue per email by 50% or more (compared to standard promotional email).

The eMarketer study cites high shipping costs as the top reason why consumers abandon their shopping carts, as well as the desire to comparison shop, a lack of money, and wanting to search for a coupon.

These findings reinforce my rationale for frequently encouraging clients to create abandon cart campaigns. As I see it, ReMarketing should be a key part of almost any businesses’ email lifecycle program, helping maximize potential revenue during checkout.

When it comes to ReMarketing, there are a few critical rules to remember:

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One of the things I like most about working in the email space is that as of 2009, being an email user is entirely label-free. When you give someone your email address, it doesn’t drag along a laundry list of negative connotations or misleading assumptions about who you are as a person. An email user therefore is given a tabula rasa—a clean slate—that gradually takes on the character of the contents within the inbox.

Now compare that perception with your initial reaction upon hearing a new acquaintance say, “you can find me on Twitter.”

Of course, with any new technology there is always going to be the knee-jerk reaction that any early-adopter is probably a geek. But let’s disregard that perception for now—as any mobile phone user now knows, giving out your cell phone number today does not send out images of the Zack Morris brick phone the same way it did in say, 1990. Once a technology becomes mature, the geek argument becomes moot. But think about the other stereotypes that come with saying “you can find me on Twitter” to someone you have just met, and then consider the obvious negative implications that someone might draw from it:

• You have enough interesting and/or important things to say in 140 characters or less that this person should be happy to receive all of your updates in real-time…
• By that logic, you consider yourself an interesting and/or important person…
• You are very concerned with how many people are “following” you…
• You are an egotist.

Obviously, this string of stereotypes is an unfair characterization to draw without getting to know someone first. But here’s the problem I see facing the Twitter community: there is some significant truth to these conclusions.

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Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit in Austin, TX, where a number of interesting discussions took place on the state of word-of-mouth marketing across the digital landscape.

Bazaarvoice is a partner of ours and has helped a number of our clients combine the power of user-generated content with email marketing. As I told a number of colleagues at the event, the real beauty of combining email marketing with ratings and reviews is that the numbers speak for themselves – according to a recent article by Mary Wagner of Internet Retailer, fifty-three percent of shoppers “prefer to see recommendations based on top ratings by other consumers” compared to only twenty percent who prefer to see best sellers. Likewise, Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research recently stated that “two in five online shoppers are partial to retail sites that offer customer ratings and reviews,” and that “tactics like adding a link to write a customer review in the order confirmation email are the new standard.”

A few high-level takeaways I gathered from the event include:

• Product review submission/confirmation emails perform exceptionally well across the board, especially when it comes to open and clickthrough rates.
• User-generated content (UGC) not only drives sales, but also functions as a product development and inventory tool for some of today’s biggest brands, including Dell and Sephora.
• While it is difficult to predict which content will become truly “viral,” marketers can help guarantee ROI by ensuring that viral campaigns are initially distributed to a large enough group of people. That way, even if the campaign is only forwarded at a 50% rate of decay, the campaign reaches close to double the size of the initial recipients — half of which were essentially sent for free.

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Worn out by the amount of debate, downsizing, and anguish going on regarding the global economic woes, I’ve decided that now is a good time to take a break from the downturn and look at one of the bright spots in marketing today: Direct-to-consumer TV advertising.

The prevailing thinking among email marketers for many years was that email could become more like mainstream media by incorporating elements such as streaming video and other rich media into their messages. As it turns out, the exchange seems to be working the other way around; TV advertising is becoming more like email, and it might be a trend here to stay.

Skipping right past Bob Garfield’s latest marketing doomsday prophecy (because we’re staying positive, people!), Ad Age has a great profile on the success of Direct-to-Consumer TV spots, with newcomers such as the “PedEgg,” “Rosetta Stone,” and “ShamWow” raking in dollars and almost single-handedly keeping the TV advertising model afloat. Jeck Neff’s article explains:

While many traditional TV advertisers pull back significantly amid the sharp downturn, short-form direct-response advertisers have been quick to take their place. And some, in fact, would say the PedEgg, Snuggie and Loud ‘N Clear could yet save an economy where consumers have largely lost their will to buy.

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