I had the honor of participating on a panel about Email 2.0-- the next generation of technologies available to email marketers--at the Email Insider Summit. As many of you who have followed my blog might guess, I spoke about individualized RSS. My co-presenters were Brent Hill from Feedburner, Correy Honza from Quiznos and Sean Meehan from eWayDirect.

Brent and I covered the gamut of RSS opportunities for marketers from advertising via traditional RSS feeds to targeted, measurable communications via IRSS. Despite some good-natured jabs with Brent's boss, Dick Costello, about some of my earlier blog entries on the topic of IRSS vs. RSS, Brent and I agreed that IRSS and RSS are generally complementary and serve somewhat different purposes.

Sean talked about desktop applications as a way of delivering content. These tools allow marketers to deliver email and avoid inbox clutter, spam filters and all the other nasty stuff in our business. Of course, marketers need to get their clients to install the app on their desktops, but companies like Southwest Airlines, with its desktop app, Ding, have already proven that this approach has huge merit.

Correy told the audience about Quiznos' recent and planned efforts in the world of mobile marketing. With Quiznos' early success with mobile video around the ultimate fighting championship (yep, you read that right), it is planning its next moves with more conventional approaches like store locators and coupons.

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When Silverpop released its study, "Email Creative That Works," I was excited see creative best practices that were truly measured rather than subjectively recommended. At the Email Insider Summit earlier this month, Greg Edwards, the CTO of EyeTracker, took measuring creative success to an entirely new level.

Greg's company is pioneering the use of eye-tracking technology to help marketers design better creative. EyeTracker's tools watch a panel of users to see what they actually look at. From this data, gathered across countless clients and email campaigns, Greg was able to share some great insights on creative best practices:

• People don't read full sentences, so don't force them into your copy.

• "Front load" your first few bullets or words with the most important information you need to share. You may not get them to read any more if you can't grab their interest.

• Use graphics and layout to guide recipients' eyes. You don't need to be blatant about it, but apply the same thinking a merchandiser might use when laying out a retail store. What will people read first, and where will they go next?

• The design needs to support a clear call to action. Don't just tell them they can have 15 percent off--make sure to show them exactly what they need to do to get that savings.

• Recipients absolutely will scroll "below the fold" if the layout is properly designed.

• Design your content with two levels of readers in mind. The first level is the five-to-10-second quick reader. The second is the reader who wants to dig in and really understand your message. Many marketers intermix these two sets of recipients in their layout and copy, and Greg strongly recommends thinking of them distinctly.

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Josh Baer, founder and CEO of Skylist, commented on my AOL unsub post and shared the URL of a site focused on the very issue I raised with Charles Stiles of AOL. It's a technical site, but it shows just how much thinking has gone into this great idea:

http://www.list-unsubscribe.com/

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David Baker, of Avenue A/Razorfish, did his usual smash-up job at the Email Insider Summit. Along with his co-presenter, Gareth Morgan from Intercontinental Hotel Group, David raised the question of incremental value. To put it another way, if you do X, Y or Z to your existing campaign approach, what is the incremental value?

It seems like a simple question at first, but it really got me thinking.

Incremental value is a very simple yardstick you can use to determine which projects to undertake and which are not worthwhile. Presumably, the simplest metric for incremental value would be conversion revenue, but that doesn't apply to every email marketer. Open or click rates would work well in most situations if you don't have another key performance indicator already in place.

If each of the possible initiatives raises conversions by some amount, then you simply rank them by the incremental revenue relative to their cost. It's business 101. What I liked about the presentation is the way he applied this simple yardstick to some of our cherished notions of "better email."

• If you use an assured delivery service, do the increased conversions pay for the cost of the "stamps" or the annual license you purchased? As obvious as this question is, I'm surprised how rarely it's brought up.

• If you add RSS (my favorite Email 2.0 topic) to your outbound mix, will the increased audience and number of opt-ins pay for the incremental cost of the service?

• If you use behavior-based targeting, will the increased response add enough value to cover the costs and hours of using this advanced approach? Again, this seems to be an obvious yardstick. Most of the data suggests this technique offers tremendous incremental value, yet most marketers still don't apply it. (Note that 75 percent of the audience raised its hand when asked if it was using behavior-based targeting.)

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At the Email Insider Summit, I had the opportunity to ask AOL Postmaster Charles Stiles about one of my favorite topics: an opt-out button. The problem is that the "spam" button is used indiscriminately by recipients for both reporting spam and for simply removing themselves from a list. If a second button were added for opting out, it would allow recipients to make that critical distinction, and thus improve the ability of AOL's spam filters to tell the good email from the bad.

Charles jumped on the question. Apparently, AOL really likes the idea, but can't implement it as quickly as it would like. He said the AOL email application currently lacks room for another button. He also pointed out that an opt-out button only makes sense for quality senders. (Of course, the ability to know whether a sender is legitimate, and thus whether an opt-out button should be enabled, is already in place with its white-listing and reputation system.) He really likes the idea and indicated it's something we'll see in a few years.

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You can't have an email conference without discussing the scourge of our industry, spam, and the Email Insider Summit was no exception. The topic came up a few different times. Here are some of the notes I took:

• Procter & Gamble found that 80 percent of its recipients who hit the "spam" button did not recall ever having done so.

• Cisco found that the biggest reason its BtoB customers clicked the spam button was because their roles had changed and the messages they had signed up for were no longer relevant.

• Habeas tracks 200 million email-sending IP addresses across the world. It estimates that 99.95 percent of those are sending spam. That means that the good guys like us account for only .05 percent of the IP addresses in the world. Wow.

• IP address is no longer the sole mechanism by which spam filters judge a sender. The domain address is once again being used in many cases when spam filters weigh the spamminess of your email. This has big implications for companies that use affiliate marketers or whose email programs lack any central control. All it takes is one rogue affiliate marketer to get your domain name thrown into the spam bucket and you could find your otherwise pristine corporate email program getting bulk-foldered.

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If you are not familiar with the Email Insider Summit, it's pretty much as its name describes. A group of 100 or so of the top email folks in the country get together to share ideas, network and have some fun. Attendees include marketers from big companies, executives from vendors and the occasional media person. This is the second Email Insider Summit, and the folks at MediaPost are already planning another two for 2007.

I will be posting several entries over the next several days from the notes I took, but let me start by telling you about the number 49.

A recent study by ReturnPath presented by Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services, found that the maximum number of characters in a subject field should be 49. She said that lines consisting of 49 characters (presumably give or take a few) performed 75-percent better than longer subject lines and much shorter subject lines. Stephanie, who also organized the summit, pointed out that your actual numbers may vary a lot, and that testing is always called for when determining what works best for each marketer.

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Steve Smith recently wrote an article for MediaPost's Mobile Insider citing recent Nielsen study findings that video makes up less than 1 percent of iPod usage. Wow. That got me thinking. Is video really going to catch on in handheld players and phones, or is it a pipe dream?

As those of us from the email world know, embedded video in email enjoyed a short renaissance back in the late 1990s until Microsoft decided that Java and other plug-ins were deemed too scary. Microsoft disabled those features in email by default and pretty much ended the video email momentum.

But the PC is a different story. Back in Sept. 2000, Microsoft released Windows ME (Media Edition) with the promise that computers would be great platforms for listening to music and watching television. Of course, Microsoft was WAY ahead of its time, but its vision is proving out six years later. More and more Web sites have animation, and even feature video ads all over them. I watch nearly all my TV on my Microsoft Media Center PC attached to my TV at home. And, of course, there is this little site called YouTube...

So what can we take away from this?

Video works.

Of course, not all video works in all situations, but I believe video has no equal when it comes to engaging people. Short-form video seems to be the "killer video app" on computers, at least for the early 21st century. My friends and I were trading our favorite humorous commercials over email before YouTube made it one-click easy. People use computers in an active way and expect fast results. Short videos seem to fit that to a T.

Looping back to the original question: will video on mobile phones, iPods and other tiny screens, truly become a reality? My view (pun intended) is that video will find a way. Short-form video will help bridge the gap (see the Verizon and YouTube deal), but I suspect we'll see entirely new forms of video and video devices emerging as the world's most engaging medium finds its way to the insatiable eyes and ears of consumers.

P.S. I'm headed off for two great weeks of intensive email discussions. This week is the Email Insider Summit in Deer Valley, Utah. And next week is my regular gathering of the top emailers in the country. This second gathering will feature top-notch speakers on social sites, mobile marketing and user generated content. I should definitely have more to talk about on the subject of mobile video after I listen to these folks.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)