Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Retailers Fail At Email Address Validation

Hats off to the folks at Fresh Address for bringing to light an extremely important study on the costs & issues of bad email addresses getting into your system.   You can find the report on their site here.

Unlike so many irrelevant "studies" that look at things like open rates, this actually shines a light on two giant issues associated with permitting bad addresses into your system:

1) Deliverability.  When you mail you are penalized by the ISP's for undeliverable email.  Reach a certain threshold and you are blocked.  Why would you tie a hand behind your back by trying to mail to addresses that you know are not going to make it?

2) Money.  I hadn't really contemplated this one too much, but FreshAddress says that bad addresses cost the retailers in the test an average of $6.7 million dollars annually!

What amazes me is how difficult marketers make Email.   I think the problem is that we are so used to marketing being hard, that when we have a tool that makes it so easy to do well.....Marketers must feel like they have to find a way to make it more difficult...

Case Study: Rich Media in Email

One of my top trends for 2006 is a renewed interest in rich media.   Direct Magazine has a great case from Tulane U. that used this kind of email to students in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Coregistration's success in building qualtiy email databases

Ginger Conlon, Editor-in-Chief of 1to1 Media sent this note out to Morgan Stewart who heads our email strategy group.  I thought I'd share the note and Morgan's reply since co-registration seems to be such a hot topic.

Dear Morgan,

Coregistration is an increasingly hot topic, as companies work through best (and worst) practices. In this issue we discuss the strategy and a recently proposed set of guidelines to help marketers navigate the issue's complexities. Do you think coregistration is an effective marketing strategy or a confusing nuisance to customers?

[To editor from Morgan Stewart],

Several of our large clients ventured back into the co-reg space in late 2004 and 2005.  ExactTarget has conducted analysis for several B2C focused clients and the results are pretty overwhelming… co-reg is ineffective.

A couple highlights:

1) Open and click rates are consistently less than half those for house lists.

2) Co-reg people unsubscribe from the email programs faster.

3) Co-reg conversion rates are much lower than house lists.  For one client, revenue per co-reg subscriber was ~10% revenue per house-list subscriber.

4) Co-reg programs simply have a hard time paying for themselves in an eCommerce environment at current market rates.  The best performing co-reg lists we have seen to date would take 16 months to break even.  Our research to date suggests that rates for Co-Reg names should be in the $0.05/name range in order for this to be a profitable investment… a ways off from going rates of $0.30 or more.

Clearly the issues you highlight in the article are valid.  In addition to some of the intangible concerns that you have described, the fact that co-reg results are generally poor make this an email practice to avoid.

Email as a carrier for third party advertising

Email is attractive to advertisers because it is targeted and trackable.  Email marketers generally know quite a bit about who receives their messages.  The key to success is that the ad has to fit with the expectations of the subscriber.  You never want to abuse permission, violate privacy or be irrelevant. 

CareerBuilder is focused on helping people find jobs.  Their email options include specific alerts when a job becomes available and general career building newsletter emails.  Included in the emails are ads for such services as professional resume writing and education services.

A Worm In Apple's Email

Design for deliverability. 

Now that handheld devices have become ubiquitous, subscribers have a lot of choice as to how they interact with your email.  Design has to be flexible enough to deliver your message to various media in formats that work.  This goes beyond HTML vs. Text.  Viewing images is optional for much as  50% of all email.   Emails must be properly designed to achieve your goals even in the event a subscriber is not seeing your image. 

Image suppression—Industry statistics show that email open rates are declining, indicating that a significant number of subscribers are keeping their images turned off.  This Apple email was designed mostly as images and therefore is unreadable when opened.  To avoid this mistake, make sure you test your emails before sending them.  And resist the urge to replace text with images at all costs.  Thanks to my friends at CampaignMonitor for the heads up on this one.

Seth Godin & Squidoo

I was recently invited to be an early beta tester for Seth Godin's new venture Squidoo.  The idea is that "Everyone is an expert" and most that search is too busy for most people who are just trying to become 'educated'.   Seth has a terrific ebook you can download called Everyone's An Expert (at something) that you might want to check out.   

You can also view one of my "lenses" here.....

In Seth's own words: 

"Squidoo lets anyone build a simple, free web page that points to blogs, online stores, maps and other information on a single topic—any topic. Each page can contain insight, bullet points, links, products and pictures, and each page earns royalties for its creator or for charity."

"Squidoo leverages the power of personal recommendation. The site will eventually host millions of handmade ‘lenses’, each a focused, useful guide to some area of expertise, some glimpse of the net. Instead of aimlessly poking, a lens lets a user see the big picture—a human being’s big picture, the overview you need to get the meaning of the idea."

"The heart of Squidoo is the lens. A lens can point the best hotels in London. Or blogs with pictures and articles about Paris Hilton. Or personal accounts about Hurricane Katrina.

A lens can expose a cross-section of the web, a more personal and more humanly relevant take that no computer could ever create. A lens is an easy-to-build page of links and referrals. Two lenses may be on the same topic, but they are never the same — every lens is personal, and every lens is built by a person, a Lensmaster."