The From Line

If you're a marketing manager for a mid-sized company and insist that your email service provider offer you a bunch a pre-fab templates you're lazy and should be fired! Pre-fab templates were great back in the day when email marketing was novel and a limited number of marketing mavericks experimented with the medium however the day of pre-fab templates for real marketers has come and gone.

Just think about it, email service providers that push pre-fab templates such as Constant Contact or iContact cater to hundreds of thousands of tiny companies sending to millions email recipients. Since there is only a finite number of templates that these email service providers offer, this means that a large number of companies have the same look and feel to their email marketing efforts without any differentiation to cut through the clutter. If you're a marketing manager at a mid sized company do you really want your email marketing to look like Joe's Bicycle Shop down the street? What if your boss subscribes to Joe's Bicycle Shop email and you unknowingly use the same template? Do you think you'll have your job for long?

I know lifting and plagiarism are common practices among marketers but for G-d sakes don't copy something that's sub-par and meant for people lacking creative abilities. And if you are a small company that's serious about its email marketing it doesn't take much these days to create a professional looking custom template. Any graphic design student at your local community college can create something far better then what an email service provider will give you. Remember, benchmark the best not crap!

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.

As you know, many ISPs include a "this is spam" button or link for a piece of email sent from a specific IP address.  When clicked, it is considered a "complaint".  A feedback loop (or complaint report) notes when a recipient clicks "this is spam" for one of your emails.  In some cases the complaints are made directly to the hosting provider or ISP in which case Gold Lasso will alert you of these types of complaints.

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.