The From Line

There is a dirty little secret with email service providers (ESPs) and it’s about time it has been brought to the forefront of industry discussions.  I learned about the intricacies of this secret while culling Gold Lasso customers that exceeded our spam complaint threshold. After politely showing a few of them the door, out of spite they revealed to me that they were simultaneously using the services of five other competitors unraveling a twisted web of ESP “switch-a-roonie” that promotes spam and hurts the industry.  This dirty little secret is so obvious that I’m surprised it hasn’t been exposed by privacy and anti-spam advocates and used to smack the smug faces of ESP executives.  Surprise!  The dirty secret is that most ESPs have no economic incentive NOT to do business with customers who refuse to use good list practices.  Let me say it this way: Email service providers make good money from bad customers who in some circles could be considered spammers.  You might be scratching your head thinking most ESPs have strict anti-spam policies and lobby hard to clean up the industry.  For the most part this statement is correct, however there are always a handful of bad customers that are tolerated because of the big checks they stroke.  These customers come in the forms of traditional direct marketing agencies that have to blow their client’s budget, affiliate marketers, and idiots who have deep pockets but not a clue about how email marketing works.  One thing these types of customers have in common is that they want or have to send large volumes of email and have either purchased an email list or have appended a purchased direct mail list.

Contrary to popular belief most ESPs don’t give their high paying bad customers the boot.  Most try to force them through a reformation process, however if the customer continues to ignore best practices some ESPs will do one of the following; either isolate the customer on an IP block reserved for wrongdoers (a sort of purgatory) or mix their bad customer’s email across multiple IP addresses of customers with good sending practices increasing the bad customer’s chance of making it to the inbox.  In the first scenario, the ESP milks the customer as they are well aware their email will either wind up in an ISP black hole or get bounced faster than an Atari Breakout ball. The bad customer, fed up with bad deliverability, will feverishly switch to a new ESP as soon as their contract is up.  In the second scenario, the ESP increases the deliverability risk of their good customers.  The attitude is akin to “so what if some customers get 90% deliverability instead of 96%.  What’s 6%?” Eventually this attitude catches up with reality and good customers start complaining.  This is when the ESP gives the bad customer the boot as their foot is already in the door of another ESP.  Contrary to what Ken Magill of Direct Magazine says “a marketer can’t ride an ESP’s e-mail reputation, folks” a marketer CAN ride the reputation of an ESP’s customers… for a while at least.  In either case the ESP is doing a disservice to not only their customers (good and bad) but to the industry at large.

The time has come for ESPs to get together and create their own blacklist of customers who they have booted because they refused to clean up their act.  This would prevent these bad customers from trying to hop ESPs causing headaches and silently undermining the industry.  The secret is out!  Let’s do something about it.

As the mobile phone continues to become the main communications device, email rendering on mobile devices have become a serious issue.  Since many mobile devices only display text emails, email marketers have a challenging time separating their mobile users from their traditional email client recipients. 

This segmentation will be necessary to ensure proper rendering of their messages to non-HTML friendly email clients.  It will also be difficult for email marketers to determine the true open rate of their campaigns because of this growing user base.

What can marketers do to combat some of these issues?  Mobile marketing messages need to be designed for text so that it can be read by a Blackberry or other device. This might bring people back a decade, but some of the same tactics will yield successful results.  Marketers should use uncommon characters such as asterisks, equal signs, etc. to make the message more visually appealing. These symbols can also be used to segment paragraphs, and call attention to certain headlines that would normally be bold.  

Headlines become highly important to attract attention.  A clear and exciting subject line needs to drive the same readership as sophisticated graphics.  Also, since the screen of a Blackberry or other mobile devise is about 320 pixels, messages should have a column of text that is no more than 50 characters for the easiest reading. 

Many times when an email marketing campaign is not yielding results, the first area a marketer will look at is the list.  In the case of mobile marketing, it might not be the list itself but the way people are accessing or not accessing your message.  Keep in mind that the majority of those reading mobile messages are business people with a Blackberry or other device.  If a B2B marketer starts to see declining open rates, deliverability might not be the culprit but rather format and mobile access.  It is a good idea to survey your list with a text message asking if they are using mobile devices.  Users can opt-in for mobile versions of the message, and marketers can segment their list for best results.

Improvements in mobile communications are rapid, and issues related to message design and segmentation will quickly change.  In the meantime, a few easy steps can increase your email marketing’s effectiveness and get your message to the right people.  Whether your campaigns are intended for the traditional email client or mobile device, customizing the message format is tantamount to engaging your audience.

In the world of email marketing, buying a list is considered a big “faux pas” amongst permission fanatics and professional email marketing pundits alike.  In fact, the practice is so loathed that the mere mention of a purchased list can get you banned by a mainstream email service provider.  So what’s a marketer to do when they want to engage in email marketing but don’t have a year or so to grow a list organically? 

Fortunately, some very creative, yet somewhat desperate marketer came up with the idea of co-registration and the email list industry has run amuck with the concept ever since.  For those you not familiar with the practice, co-registration is where your opt-in offer appears alongside or after the opt-in form of another website.  The idea behind this is that since it’s sometimes difficult and time consuming to get people to come to your website to opt-in, it is easier to syndicate your opt-in offer to other websites.  If done properly, co-registration has proven to be an effective way to grow your email lists. However, just as with anything in the list industry, it has been abused and twisted to meet marketers’ objectives.

You have two choices if you decide to use co-registration, the do it yourself approach or the ad network approach.  The do it yourself approach to co-registration is highly effective if your market is finite with a limited number of websites catering to it.  Here you would simply try to cut deals with website owners to place your opt-in offer alongside theirs with a checkbox next to it.  These types of deals are usually done on a price per lead or barter basis.  With barter you would simply return the favor on your website.  For the time-crunched marketer who is concerned about volume, going the ad network route is probably your only choice.  With an ad network, your opt-in offer is syndicated on a multitude of websites based on demographics, geo location and a host of other variables.  Deals are usually made on a flat price per acquisition (PPA) with minimum orders depending on the type of acquisition sought and quality of data collected.  Some new co-registration ad networks are turning to market forces with an auction style system to determine price and placement.  Whichever method you use for co-registration, below are some best practices that will help to ensure your efforts are successful:

• Make sure your co-registration offers are accurate.  If you say you will send email once a week make sure these recipients don’t end up on your daily list.
• If you work with an ad network, insist that you know where your opt-ins are coming from so that you can reference the website in your introductory email.  This will minimize list attrition and remind the person that they opted into your list.  Do not accept an offer from an ad network that is blind.  This might work for banners but not for opt-ins.
• Send the introductory email as soon as possible.  “Out of site, out of mind” and people forget that they opted-in or will lose interest.
• Do not have the opt-in checkbox pre-marked and don’t use an ad network with this practice.  If someone doesn’t click a checkbox to say that they want to hear from you then they probably don’t want to hear from you.  It’s simply wasted money.

As published in MediaPost

I’ve witnessed a destructive trend in the last year with lead generation. If the lead isn’t hot with an immediate readiness to convert, it is often shoved aside, long to be forgotten –leaving the person who initially made an inquiry with a bad impression. When I question marketers about this practice, the typical answer is “we simply don’t have the time and resources to call every lead.” This answer often leaves me to ponder how much waste there probably is in a typical lead generation campaign. With a simple long-term follow-up strategy I am confident you can squeeze the remaining value out of your lead gen budget using inexpensive technology such as a time released email campaign or personalized postcards. Using one of these tools will the typical excuse doesn’t hold much merit. Just think about it, you spent the time and money to educate a prospect on a product or service who indicates they aren’t ready to buy only to allow a competitor to take your future sale because you didn’t follow up. Yes, these leads are tire kickers, but tire kickers do eventually buy and research has it that after these laggards are armed with enough knowledge they will buy from whoever is the most convenient and matches their purchasing criteria.

To implement a quality follow up campaign you may first need to define what a good follow up is and then determine the good times to do it. Some companies fall short with their follow up efforts by placing their cold leads on their house e-newsletter list hoping that that if they get in front of the prospect enough times they will be top of mind when they are ready to convert. This misconception only leads to confusion and contempt by the prospect since most of the time they didn’t opt into the newsletter list and the information presented is irrelevant to their initial inquiry. Cold follow-ups should be personal, friendly, have a call to action, and most important, be relevant to the prospects initial inquiry. Once you figure out what a good cold follow-up should be, the next step is to determine the time intervals to execute them. Time intervals should be based on feedback collected from your sales team’s experience with longer sales cycles. The idea here is to try to mimic an offline follow-up approach as much possible while gaining the efficiencies of an online follow-up.

Once you have developed quality follow-up messages and determined good time intervals, the next step is to test. Just as with any other campaign the follow-up campaign needs to be tested at every time interval until a sale or a death can be determined. This is easier than it sounds since you’ll be testing messages and intervals, not lists. Eventually, you will hit a eureka moment when the right combination of message and intervals start yielding maximum conversion rates from your cold leads.

Implementing a solid follow-up campaign shouldn’t take more than a few days with a good email service provider as long as its messages and intervals are well thought out. The time invested in this exercise will not only yield higher conversion rates but also greater goodwill as prospects are reminded that you care enough to follow-up.

As published in DM News

A few weeks ago I had an Aflac agent in my office. After we closed a deal he pleasantly asked me if I knew of other business owners in need of Aflac’s products. As a result of the good sales experience, I gave him five referrals. Every sales person knows the value of a referral however the concept doesn’t resonate well with email marketing practitioners. Now is a great opportunity to change that. Instead of relying on an inadequate forward-to-a-friend process, a more formalized referral program is needed to ensure success. A good referral program is automated, timely and usually starts where the original opt-in process ends. Once a website user has gone through the motions of opting-in, it is a perfect opportunity to ask for a referral. Ask the referrer not only for an email address but also a full name. When soliciting the referee to opt-in, always personalize the message, and most importantly, reference the referrer. A reference to the referrer gives you instant credibility and will produce a much higher conversion rate.

The above tactic works well with new signups however tapping your existing subscribers for referrals takes a little more creativity since they are often an afterthought. Most existing subscribers have little incentive to give you a referral since opting-in is a distant memory for them. The simple solution here is to provide an incentive. Trade associations are notorious for doing this by turning their referral campaigns into contests, rewarding lavish prizes to individuals who recruit a large number of new members.

Referral campaigns and tactics are an effective and proven way to grow a list organically. The good thing is that a number of email service providers offer some sort of automated referral mechanism to help you implement such programs. However, just as anything worthwhile, growing lists by referrals takes planning, effort and tweaking to make perfect.