I'm very excited to announce that one of the most respected email marketing executives has joined Silverpop. Loren McDonald has come onboard with us, serving as vice president of industry relations.

Loren is well known throughout the industry for his keen understanding of email marketing and insights into methods to maximize the benefits and returns the channel offers. His development of white papers, studies and articles over the years has helped move the industry forward. His leadership and deep experience will benefit not only Silverpop and its clients, but all marketers eager to maximize customer relationships in ways that build lifetime value.

Loren will be a regular blogger and contributor to Silverpop's e-newsletters, as well as help drive thought capital through the development of white papers and original research for both Silverpop and Vtrenz audiences.

To read the announcement about Loren, click here.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I always like simple but insightful models, so I made a note to share one of the better examples I've seen recently. Skip Fidura, who manages OgilvyOne Worldwide's email marketing department in London, presented at Silverpop's customer conference in London last week. One of his many good slides included a pyramid with the six levels of relevance. You'll have to imagine the graphic, but here are the six levels from the bottom up: Offer, Profile, Affinity, Collaborative, Expressed and Behavioral.

Skip pointed out that many marketers debate whether expressed preferences or behavioral targeting are a more accurate way to drive relevance. I happen to agree with his ranking, but it is a good point.

Another interesting note from his presentation was based on what I believe to be Ogilvy research: Who you market to is 50 percent more important than Where, When and What you market. Noodle on that for a while...

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a recent conversation with an anti-spam advocate over the best way to stop unwanted messages, he suggested to me that all the challenges in his industry and mine would go away if emailers would only double opt-in all their recipients.

It has been a while since I've heard this argument, but it's not surprising that it came up again. It's a very logical point of view, and it would seem almost foolproof. The problem is that it doesn't always work.

In my book, "The Quiet Revolution In Email Marketing," I cited a ClickZ article that suggested double opt-in failure rates upward of 50 percent. In other words, for every 10 people who sign up for a double opt-in based permission email newsletter (or promotion), only five will actually complete the process. This kind of drop-off can undermine even the most successful email programs and begs the question: Why do so many people fail to complete the process? Here are some possibilities:

• The actual confirmation email isn't sent out immediately. By the time someone receives a confirmation, the person has forgotten all about signing up or has decided he or she no longer wants to be on the newsletter list.

• The recipient doesn't recognize the "From" field. In the past especially, a lot of double opt-ins would come from auto-responder systems that didn't allow the brand of the actual marketer to be displayed. So recipients would get a strange message and be unsure of what to do with it.

• Recipients have been trained never to click on anything in a message. I've spoken to people who are so concerned about phishing and Internet security that they won't click on anything in an email--not even a link to verify their permission.

All these reasons may be valid, but I believe the largest driver of failed double opt-ins is spam filtering. A recent article by Ken Magill of Direct online magazine brought this home, and it's worth reading if you've ever considered using a double opt-in. To summarize, a very legitimate mailer found its opt-in confirmation messages being blocked by an ISP spam filter. This is more common than most ISPs want to admit, but this particular case was worse than most. It turns out that some malicious person was providing a spam trap as their opt-in address. And, of course, the confirmation was then sent to that spam trap address, completely convincing the ISP's spam filter that the marketer was spamming.

The bottom line is that double opt-in is a powerful approach, but it's not a cure-all. On the positive side, I recall one of our clients using double opt-in to reconfirm a list they'd inherited, and the overall response rates were very high. On the negative side, malicious users, aggressive spam filters and poor execution all can combine to make double opt-in a problem. And, in my view, the only way to make customers even angrier than sending them unsolicited email, is NOT to send them the critical email updates they went out of their way to request. There's no easy answer for these challenges, but I'd love to hear from folks out there who have had strong experiences either way with double opt-in.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In its usual great job of uncovering interesting facts and sharing them with marketers, MarketingSherpa has just released its latest information about how online consumers are viewing their email.

To find out whether BtoC email marketers should be designing for preview panes and image blocking like their BtoB counterparts, the research firm recently surveyed more than 1,300 email users age 18 and over. It discovered a couple interesting things.

One is that preview pane usage is on the rise. As the major ISPs and email clients upgrade to newer versions offering preview panes, nearly 40 percent of consumers have now been exposed to them, and nearly 27 percent say they have begun using them by default. I think this growing availability and adoption across demographics probably stems from the fact that active content, such as ActiveX, is always disabled, making preview panes much safer to use.

Somewhat surprising to me, MarketingSherpa also found that fewer than half of online consumers surveyed routinely block all images. Based on how many ISPs and email clients now block images by default, I would have guessed this number to be higher.

So what does this all mean? In a nutshell: Creative really does matter, particularly for BtoB marketers (where an estimated 70 percent of recipients use preview panes). Great design and layout are essential to the effectiveness of a message because it must be able to function whether seen in its entirety, or confined to a preview pane and/or with images disabled.

As Silverpop's 2006 "Email Creative That Works Study" revealed, response rates go clearly higher when message elements like logos and links are easily viewable and actionable by recipients.

MarketingSherpa's report is filled with interesting and actionable information, and I encourage you to check it out here. But hurry. Free access only lasts until Feb. 26.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

I don't have a lot of personal experience with eye tracking, but Greg cited examples of click rates going from 4 percent up to 16 percent and higher simply by analyzing the way people normally read messages. A gentleman from a Fortune 100 company sitting next to me leaned over and mentioned that his company uses eye tracking, and that the results Greg was citing were in line with his company's experience.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As my regular readers know, I avoid using my blog as an advertising tool and only to talk about things that interest me. So I hope you all will forgive me if this entry happens to do both.

You've seen a few blogs from me recently about individually timed email messages and just how powerfully they can affect responses rates. Well, it happens to be an area we've been talking about a lot over the last few months here at Silverpop.

The big news is that the newest release of our email application, Silverpop Marketer, contains an individually timed sending system -- messages in a single mailing can be sent individually over the course of a week based on each recipient's past behavior. For example, Recipient A opened a message at 11:37 a.m. on a Wednesday and Recipient B opened the same message at 6:32 p.m. on a Friday. Accordingly, Recipient A's next message would be sent Wednesday at 11:37 a.m. and Recipient B's next message would be sent Friday at 6:32 p.m. And, of course, you can also create your own timing and ask the system to send based on some external calculations you've done.

Have a one-day sale and don't want to wait a week for delivery? You can tell the system to ignore day of week and just send at the best time of day over a 24-hour period.

And, did I mention that the system will automatically update things like timing of last click if you want it to?

This is some seriously cool technology and I am excited to see what kind of lift in response rates our clients will be seeing as they roll this out.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the most commonly studied topics in our space is the best time of day, or best day of the week to send an email. Clearly, if you can increase response rates simply by changing the timing of your campaign, then doing so becomes a no-brainer. (Silverpop's clients, for example, tend to send more on Tuesday morning than any other time of the week.) Figuring out the best time for your product and your list can only come about with testing, but that doesn't stop the industry from continuing to speak in generalities.

The problem with sending all your messages at the same time is that it's a one-size-fits-all strategy. Like a restaurant that only serves one dish, it will do fine as long as every other restaurant serves only one dish. But one day, somebody is going to invent a menu.

A few years ago, eBags did just that. Rather than finding the best time to send to its list, the company found the best time to send to each individual recipient. I wrote a case study about it in my book, and the results were stunning. Using past mailings as a baseline, eBags found that with individually-timed messages:

• Click-through rates grew 20 percent.
• Conversion rates grew 65 percent.
• Average value per order grew 45 percent.
• Overall average revenue per receipient GREW 187 percent.

Without a doubt, the upside of this technique is enormous. I asked Larry Martine, who ran the program at the time why eBags didn't start using the technique all the time. Not surprisingly, he said it was an incredibly laborious and technically difficult process. He said he'd been looking for an ESP ever since that could do it out of the box.

I've shared this case study many times, and it's remarkable how excited marketers get over the idea. With no more effort than any other blast mailing, they can generate lifts in response of 20-200 percent.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received an email from reader Lisa Harmon with some kind words about my blog, and telling me about an email marketing contest she and her Seattle-based agency sponsor each quarter.

The "Best EDM" Contest is part of a series of ongoing quarterly reviews designed to highlight outstanding examples of email marketing creative design, strategy and implementation. She and her panel evaluate hundreds of candidates and narrow it down to four before opening the contest up to voting.

You can take a look at the current four top contenders, and vote for your favorite here. And, to see tons of great examples of email creative in all categories, be sure to check out her firm's Email Direct Marketing Creative Review Blog here.

Thanks, Lisa!

Posted by Bill Nussey at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just read a great article by David Baker, vice president of email marketing at Agency.com. In his July 10 column for MediaPost's Email Insider, David asks the age-old question: how much email is too much? On one hand, marketers say they want to better understand the email channel and its ability to foster online customer relationships. On the other, they continue to shower recipients with urgent promotional messages that become less and less meaningful over time.

But if marketers know that implementing best practices, strategy and testing are the way to inspire loyalty and ROI, and they have the capability to do those things, why do they do they keep falling back on marketer-driven messaging? The answer seems to lie in basic human nature: it's simply more gratifying in the short-term.

David shares the story of a "more is better" client that has started mailing the same message, only with differing subject lines, to recipients as many as three times a week. The company, which has set ambitious email sales goals with no additional budget to achieve them, is getting good results and sees no reason to stop. David questions whether this short-term success is sustainable. But like so many things in life, it seems that these marketers will have to find out for themselves.

As I mention in my book, "The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing," the problem with over-mailing is that it can actually work for short periods of time, all the while silently ravaging your brand and any future return. Never forget that recipients will give you the benefit of the doubt right up until the moment they decide to ignore you completely.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)