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Ten years ago in December of 2001, I coordinated an initiative with many of the leading email service and data providers to agree upon “Best Practices for Email Append” under the auspices of the Association for Interactive Marketing (a former subsidiary of the DMA).   At the time, my thought was that since few offline marketers had customer email addresses that the process of a marketer sending an opt-out request to receive their communications would give the email marketing industry the needed boost to build commercial viability.  It was also a time when permission-based marketing was still coming of age, and cross-channel permissioning was considered an acceptable means for communication as long as the recipient had opted-in to receive 3^rd party offers. 

Today, we’re closing the book on that chapter by stating that Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use this practice to acquire customer email addresses. 

There are four main reasons for this change;

1. Even in 2001, most of us viewed email appending as a stop-gap measure until offline marketers achieved critical mass online and no longer needed this acquisition method to bolster their email programs.  Today’s offline marketers collect customer emails at every point of sale, and even through new mobile and social media channels.  There is no doubt that if a customer wants to subscribe to a marketers’ email list, they have ample opportunities to do so.
2. As one of the first email service providers to become a full member of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), Experian CheetahMail is committed to supporting their best practices and recent policy position against email appending, found online here.  We believe our position is in-line with that effort and is in the best interest of marketers who wish to maintain consistent Inbox deliverability. 
3. In a matter of months, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) is going to come into force.    If you were not aware, the new law requires opt-in consent for email marketing, with limited exceptions where there is a prior business relationship.  Because the law does not require marketers to have knowledge of a recipient’s residency in Canada, it is probable that even some U.S. customers who are appended could now reside in Canada and fall under the jurisdictional requirements for Canadian compliance.  As a result, marketers who conduct opt-out email append would run afoul of CASL and be subject to a private right of action in a Canadian court. 
4. Email address turnover continues to increase, as well as the use of formerly active email addresses as ‘spamtraps’ by mailbox providers and filtering companies.  The increasing deliverability risk of mailing to potentially inaccurate or invalid recipients now exceeds the value they provided in the past. 

We believe eliminating this practice is in the marketers and consumers best interests.  I can appreciate that many marketers have had success with email appending efforts, however, the opt-out appending process should be discontinued for the betterment of the entire email marketing community.  I appreciate your consideration and support of this change, and welcome any comments, questions, concerns or suggestions on this topic by reaching me at privacyATcheetahmail.com.

Hotmail has recently been in the news for improving their users’ Inbox experience, enhancing tools and improving their filters. More specifically, Hotmail is trying to combat “Graymail”  or all of the newsletters, offers, social network website emails, and other email communications many sign up for and are no longer relevant to you but keep getting delivered. These are emails that users legitimately receive but no longer want – roughly 75% of email identified as spam by Hotmail customers according to Windows Live Hotmail.

At Experian CheetahMail, this Graymail announcement has left many of our clients asking how this change will affect their messages and more importantly their deliverability/Inbox performance. These enhancements go along with what CheetahMail Deliverability has always advised about mailing to your actives. Basically any mail that is sitting in a users’ Hotmail inbox untouched (not opened or clicked) after a while is considered Graymail. Hotmail is trying to reduce the burden of all sorts of offers, newsletters etc for the user and their own system.

We don’t have much insight into their filter algorithms but we can assume if too many people are allowing the clients emails to sit in their inboxes and end up as graymail, Hotmail’s filter will pick this up and can possibly start sending the emails to bulk. We have often seen a decrease in user engagement as a reason for Hotmail bulking. By mailing to your active and engaged Hotmail users this Graymail issue should become a non-issue. Additionally, consider asking users to add the client to their address book to ensure inbox delivery and avoid spam/junk foldering. Instructions can be found here: http://www.cheetahmail.com/deliverability/reach-the-inbox/

The two main features of Graymail that we DO know are:

One-click Unsubscribe

Hotmail has had an unsubscribe link in the user interface already, but how they handle these requests are changing and not complying could result in your email being sent to the spam folder. If a subscriber clicks on the unsubscribe link in the Hotmail interface now, and either the list-unsubscribe header isn’t present or doesn’t work, email from that sender will be permanently delivered to the spam folder. CheetahMail complies with this unsubscribe request.

Schedule Cleanup

Hotmail users can now decide how long they want messages from a particular sender, or all senders, in their inbox before they are deleted permanently or moved to a specified folder. This could be the best time to reach out to your subscribers and give them a choice to the frequency of emails they want to receive. This cleanup could also prove to be beneficial for senders as subscribers may not mark old, unwanted email as spam which can adversely drive up spam complaints.

It’s not too late to include video in your email campaigns this holiday season. Video in email gives marketers a chance to express their creativity while providing relevant and highly engaging content, but do you know how to optimize, or even execute on, this powerful tactic? Experian CheetahMail and Liveclicker, a comprehensive video commerce solution that video-enables your most important marketing channels, held a webinar earlier this week to share best practices and case studies on the topic.

To highlight some of the learnings, our very own Erin Geoghegan interviews Justin Foster – Co-Founder & Vice President of Market Development, Liveclicker, on the topic:

Erin: Why should marketers be using video in email this holiday season?

Justin: Video helps marketers stand out from the crowd. Right now, most B2C/e-commerce merchants are executing a ramped email sending schedule to better compete for limited consumer shopping dollars. Video offers a way for these email marketers to grab the attention of shoppers, show their products in a new light, and differentiate from the competition – all right in the inbox.

Erin: I would think we might be too deep into holiday crunch time to implement this tactic, is this not the case?

Justin: If a marketer has ready access to video content that’s ‘on message’ for a planned campaign, then it’s probably not too late. If the content isn’t there, or if there’s not a natural alignment with the current holiday calendar, then it’s probably too late at this point. If the content is there, and the marketer has never before launched a video email campaign, then I’d advise devoting at least an additional four hours of planning to the video email campaign launch.

Erin: If you could give me, as an email marketer, a three-step process for implementation, what would it be?

Justin: At risk of oversimplifying, the three steps are:

1. Get the video
2. Use the right technique to add the video to the email
3. Send the email as normal

Each of these three steps has sub-step components that will vary based on a marketer’s goals and needs. Companies that have built processes around shooting or acquiring video content will greatly simplify the job of the email marketer for part 1. Systems like Liveclicker will completely automate the “use the right technique” part, although there are still creative considerations involved. When the right techniques are used, video can be added to email today just like images, so the last step is really old hat for email marketers. I always would advocate email marketers to seek education prior to embarking on any new initiative, including video email. It pays to spend the time up front to do the research by attending webinars like the one CheetahMail hosted this week. These sessions can be an excellent source of information for even experienced email marketers.

Click here to download the webinar.

While marketers have historically used similar creative or targeting methodologies with email and display ad campaigns, few have truly integrated the two efforts in a seamless process. In-line with Experian’s Digital Advertising Services’ efforts to pioneer addressable advertising online, Experian CheetahMail has been rapidly developing integrated opportunities for clients to leverage their existing email subscriber intelligence with display advertising.

On Wednesday, December 7, I’ll be participating on a session at the Email Insider Summit about integrating email campaigns with display advertising. For those of you who cannot attend, or for those that plan to attend but want a sneak preview, here are a few key points I’ll be making about the future of these integrated campaigns:

1. Emailers have always used pixels and cookies to better analyze open or click-through activity, or more recently with transaction reporting and remarketing efforts. In addition, most emailers have tested or implemented third party tools using pixels for analytics or creative optimization. So adding a new third party pixel to email campaigns for display advertising can be easily understood and implemented.
2. Many online marketers have integrated website re-targeting into their suite of display advertising efforts, and leveraging email pixels to enable re-targeting is similar to using a web based pixel. This is bolstered by the fact that most email recipients are now using web-based programs, which can render this type of pixel (and associated cookie) for use with display ads. However, as with any re-targeting effort, this type of display advertising is considered to be ‘behavioral’ and falls under the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising . As a result, marketers must make sure their privacy policies reflect this practice, and provide advertising recipients with in-ad notice and choice through the ‘AdChoices’ icon.
3. The benefits of integrated campaigns are many, and include consistent messaging across channels, improved relevancy for online display ads, and increasing performance of re-targeting efforts by extending the reach to email recipients who may not be visiting your website. In addition, future integrated display ad campaigns will be able to leverage the same segmentation schema as with email, transactional data, and addressable demographic or psychographic data, all of which in a privacy-centric way.
4. The potential drawbacks of these campaigns includes making sure you are working with a large enough display ad partner to be able to reach these types of ad recipients , making the investment of time and resources to upgrade your privacy positioning, and avoiding over-personalization with display ad creative.

I look forward to sharing more with you in the future about this exciting topic, and welcome your comments or questions. Learn more about Experian Digital Advertising Services.

As the push for last minute sales drove volumes higher, email volume surged 34 percent from Dec 21 to Dec 31 last year. Looking at trends for 2011 thus far, Experian CheetahMail is predicting this increase to be even higher.

As featured in a new white paper: The Happy Holiday Inbox: Last minute tips for spreading the cheer with email this year, the biggest trends include:

• Mobile and social galore: Links to social networks and mobile viewing are amplifying email marketing promotions. Fifteen percent of email openers read emails on a mobile phone, and that number is growing.   Additionally, forty percent of online consumers who use social networking sites plan to use Facebook for feedback from family/friends to help make a decision about a product, according to a survey by PriceGrabber.com.

• Touting and shouting shipping deadlines: Including deadlines to provide urgency, and directions that encourage customers to act fast, is more prevalent than ever.  An analysis of last season’s campaigns confirms that on average, shipping deadlines improve email transaction performance by 22 percent.

• Creativity shines: The 2011 holiday season is showcasing some of the trendiest and most appealing looks email has ever sported.   And it’s no wonder – compared to email campaigns without animated gifs, ninety percent have significantly higher transaction rates (60 percent) and 118 percent more revenue per email than the campaigns without the animation.

To learn more, download the white paper today.

Cyber Monday is here!  Are you tired of hearing about it yet?  Well here is a new fun fact that indicates just how big of a deal this last Monday of the month truly is.

Eighty-two percent more emails had Cyber Monday in the subject line this past Friday, November 18, to Saturday, November 26 as compared to the same dates last year, according to an Experian CheetahMail analysis.  

These subject lines didn’t just tout the day, they shouted out special deals and offers that were tough to refuse. Some of the subject lines that caught my eye included:

• Up to $50 off – it’s officially Cyber Monday!
• It’s Cyber Monday!  Don’t Miss Out! + Free Shipping Every Day
• 50% off Exclusive Cyber Monday Event Starts Now
• Bonus Event! 80% Off Cyber Fix Deal Starts Now

Keep the Cyber celebration going everyone – happy mailing (and shopping)!

Experian CheetahMail tracks the holiday mailing activity of 385 brands that also mailed in the 2010 Holiday Season. All metrics are based on results 3 days from send.

Through week 7 of this holiday season, the percentage of campaigns offering 10% and 20% have decreased, while those offering 30% and 50% off are on the rise in comparison to 2010, according to the latest analysis by Experian CheetahMail.

Interestingly, ‘Buy One Get One’ (BOGO) offers are generating lower transaction rates and revenue per email  than 25% or 50% off campaigns. Are consumers more drawn to 25% and 50% off offers –which essentially are the same thing as BOGO half-off (25%) and BOGO free (50%)?  It sure seems that way!

If you are an email marketing considering a BOGO offer this holiday season, I’d recommend testing both types of offers in your subject lines to see what works best for you.

Happy mailing!