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.

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.

Since the holiday season is the most important time of year for retail emailers, here are some best practices for maintaining a good sending reputation and staying in the Inbox during the upcoming holiday season – a time when the Inbox is inundated with emails and offers.

• Now is the time to emphasize the “please add us to your address book” requests and instructions during the email registration process and in welcome emails. Not only will you get added to user whitelists which overrides ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder delivery, but also recipient response rates should be better, as well as brand perception, because images are displayed by default. A new trend for marketers is to consider sending a dedicated message solely to drive address book adoption in advance of the holidays. For example, “We are going to have some fantastic deals during the holidays. Add us to your address book to make sure you don’t miss them.” In light of the recent Facebook ‘Messages’ announcement, it is also now important to use such a dedicated email to request users become a ‘fan’ or ‘like’ your content.  [See example below]
• If you have a group of recipients who haven’t been mailed in a long time, before mailing them all at once, consider testing small segments to gauge complaint and bounce rates and make creative and segmentation adjustments with subsequent campaigns to ensure these metrics don’t become a risk to your overall messaging reputation.
• It is critical to maintain the same ‘from’ addresses and formulate subject lines that highlight the email’s ‘call-to-action’ and is not too ‘cheeky’ that it could be confusing or misleading to recipients where it may lead to user complaints.

In 2009, holiday email volume rose, increasing over  26% from the 2008 holiday season. We can predict this trend to continue for the 2010 holiday season meaning the ISPs will be working in overdrive to ensure all relevant and legitimate email is delivered into the Inbox while keeping out the large amount of true spam. Following these holiday best practices, and others such as maintaining ‘engaged’ users will help keep your clients’ IP reputation strong, your Inbox delivery rates high, your targeted customers happy and ultimately your revenue numbers up.

Less than 4 days after our Creative Director, Steve Sharp, explained how to design emails to be width-compliant on this very site, something very strange began happening to my email inbox. Every so often I would open my new messages, just minding my own business, when the strangest, most eerie feeling would come over me. I felt as if I was moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. Seeing the contents of my inbox, I realized what had happened. I had just crossed over into…the Twilight Zone.

What could cause such an unusual feeling? Why, it’s the latest Abercrombie and Fitch emails of course!

Yes, just days after Steve explained the rules of keeping email width limited to the tidy confines of the preview pane, Abercrombie went ahead and broke the rules, sending some of the widest side-scrolling emails I have ever seen. And I for one, think that this is a really clever idea because of the smart way in which it was executed.

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I recently was taking a look at some email registration pages out there when I came across a nice little email registration feature that The Puma Store uses on their site.

In the lower right hand corner of their home page, an email subscription box awaits your email address. Once the address is submitted, a good looking registration page appears in a dialog box for the user to enter more details. After filling out that information, the user is sent back to the home page. The cool thing about Puma’s design is that after signing up for email, the area where the subscription field resided now displays a simple line of text, saying “Thank you for signing up!”

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The question about whether double opt-in (confirmed consent) is an email best practice has been asked for the last 10 years.

In Bill McCloskey’s recent ClickZ article he takes the strong position that double opt-in consent is no longer a best practice and should be discarded. In my view, McCloskey is correct – double opt-in will not facilitate list growth.

At this point in time, individuals are largely familiar with the traditional single opt-in email sign-up process. Double opt-in requires more effort from the person who already completed the email sign-up process, which in some cases, can be a time consuming affair to begin with. For example, many registration forms (especially for sites handling sensitive personal information) now require the customer to repeat letters and numbers (CAPTCHA forms) for security reasons.

If your sign-up process is clear and straightforward, there is no need to require an individual to work even harder to join your list. Read More »