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.

Perhaps I’ve now seen all of the Toy Story movies too many times with my kids, because the line from the theme song really sticks out with Facebook Messages; “Some other folks might be a little bit smarter than I am, bigger and stronger too, maybe. But none of them will ever love you the way I do, it’s me and you.”

Even without seeing the new Messages user interface and only seeing ‘Zuck’ and ‘Boz’ demonstrate a portion of it yesterday, it seems apparent that the Facebook email application is not a ‘Gmail killer’ or intended to be competitive with any full-fledged email client webmail or software program. But what it does have that no one else has captured is the notion of a truly personalized messaging platform.

However, my wake-up moment on the webcast yesterday was when they disclosed that any user can change their privacy settings to restrict emails just to their friends, friends of friends, or everyone. More importantly, should the user tighten their settings to exclude everyone, Facebook will bounce all emails from that sender to that user. In other words, if a marketer does not have a ‘fan’ or ‘friend of friend’ relationship with that user, then they should assume the address will bounce.

It is important to note that there apparently will not be a ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder for these unrelated messages to be filtered into, just an ‘other’ folder that isn’t designed to be a ‘reputation’ or anti-spam filter since all emails from unrelated senders will just bounce away. There is no ISP ‘Batphone’ when trying to resolve deliverability to ‘friends’, so even the most experienced and skillful deliverability team in the world won’t be of much assistance with most Facebook deliverability problems.

The clear conclusion from this is that marketers should not attempt to collect an @facebook.com email address without making a strong effort to first ensure that the user is a ‘fan’ or logs in through Facebook Connect.   This should require Facebook-specific language on the email registration or transaction page, or most certainly on the post-registration or transaction page. Because if you don’t do something to befriend these users, then your ‘Messages’ may not get there at all.

Today was a landmark day for me – I was the victim of some misused personal information! Hooray!

I am joking about the “hooray” part, of course. Data privacy is no laughing matter, and if the information that was exposed to me today had been more significant, I would be pretty angry right now. As it so happens, it was not, so I feel comfortable sharing it with you all in the hope that we can all learn a bit by others’ foibles.

So at around noon today, I received a phone call from a representative at a home improvement ratings & reviews service that I am a happy member of. Unlike most review services, this one is a pay system that works on a subscription model, so it is not that strange that they would be contacting me with account or service information. However, after a moment of basic customer satisfaction survey-type questions, the conversation moved into some uncomfortable territory.

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The social networking site Facebook recently scrambled to react to negative user feedback arising from recent changes to its term of service. The most telling lesson from this latest controversy is how quickly Facebook has responded to user concerns and how welcome this response has been to the aggrieved users, privacy advocates and the media.

Every emailer gets some complaint feedback from recipients, often routed through direct ISP ‘feedback loops’ where users press the ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ button. While studies have shown that a portion of this feedback may be ‘false positive’ mistakes, the substantial majority are clearly negative feedback from aggrieved users.  Unfortunately, few email marketers closely track these complaint percentages or use this data to quickly respond to trends/spikes in complaints. 

The message here is simple; every email marketer can quickly respond to increases in complaint feedback.  The reasons for complaint increases are usually very clear, and often tied to subscriber acquisition practices. Email is the greatest testing vehicle ever created, and complaint reduction can be tested along the same lines as subject lines. However, if the complaint reasons or testing processes don’t seem clear, then comment here and I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.  

It took 64,000 complaints for Facebook to pay heed to their users.  After doing so, their users are now further endeared to them.  How much negative feedback do you need to before you re-examine your privacy practices? 

In case you didn’t know it, January 28 was Data Privacy Day, celebrated in 29 countries worldwide! While we weren’t able to procure any Rick Astley appearances or even a severely miscalculated power slide by Bruce Springsteen, we did manage to check in with our resident privacy and compliance expert, Ben Isaacson. Below, Ben I. gives a quick run-down on the things that the truly responsible email marketers among us should never, ever, ever do!

Top 10 Things Responsible Email Marketers Should NEVER Do:

1. Never send an email to recipients who have complained and ask them, “Why did you press the spam button…I thought you liked our stuff?”
2. Never personalize emails by casually dropping Big Brother-ish web analytics data; “Since you opened and clicked through 4 of the last 6 emails, we thought you’d like this offer.”
3. Never further personalize emails by saying, “We saw you shopped for 3 hours the other night for this exact item, so here it is!” 
4. Never require customers to register (or login) before they can unsubscribe from your list.
5. If you append Experian INSOURCE® (or other) demographic profiles, never over-share non-personally identified information; “Since you are a single male over 35 who loves dogs, we thought you’d also love this.” 
6. Never share email lists with partners.
7. Never embed registration forms in emails.
8. Never tell users they must reconfirm their list subscription by clicking through and providing all of their personal information. 
9. Never use Refer-A-Friend technology to automatically add forwarded friends to your email list.
10. Never mail your unsubscribed recipients and say; “We know you unsubscribed, but our Email Service Provider told us it was OK to keep mailing you!”  :-)

Happy (Belated) Data Privacy Day!