1. Want your customers/subscribers around for the long-haul? Check out Dylan Boyd’s relationship breakdown for long-term tips.

2. Looking in your inbox, you’ll find lots of different variations on the subject line/preheader combination. Darrah McLean evaluates combos on her iPhone and offers her two cents on their effectiveness.

3. Think the young whippersnappers these days don’t care about email? Think again.

4. If you don’t want to offer discounts upon more discounts this holiday season, Mark Grondin offers up some compelling alternatives.

Are you going to offer the straight discounts this holiday season or take a different approach? I’m seeing some clients adding in a free (low-cost) product with a purchase over a certain amount. What else have you seen work?

Kristen Gregory
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 7/20 Even though it’s sweltering in most parts of the country...
2. How to Use Transactional Messages to Boost Revenue & Build Relationships According to Jupiter Research, transactional messages are opened and clicked...
3. Best of the Blogosphere: Embedded Video & the Slow Death of Email? By far the most intriguing news this week revolves around...

Transactional messages deserve a lot of attention and should be re-evaluated on a regular basis. Remember that these messages are illustrating how you do business.  At the end of the day, are you helpful and clear or do people end up confused or frustrated, calling your customer service center? No matter what, make sure you’ve got the basics covered:

• Use a straight-forward subject line and your recognizable brand as the from name. The subject line should confirm the action just taken: “Order confirmation #123″ or “Your account has been canceled” or “Your items have been shipped.” Avoid sending emails from names like Customer Service because readers won’t recognize it and will have a hard time finding the email later when searching for it.
• Include all possible details about what just happened and with whom. People want to know that the actions they took were registered correctly. For a purchase confirmation, this would include billing and shipping names and addresses, the quantity/size/color/product number(s) and description, payment details, gift wrapping and note details, etc.
• Make your customer service contact details clear and prominent. If customers have to dig around for this information, they will get frustrated.
• Proactively offer information on return/cancellation policies or any other restrictions related to their transaction. If your policies are long and detailed, you can always link to them instead of including them in full.
• Tell them what’s next. If you’ll be sending a shipping confirmation once their products have left the warehouse, let them know to expect that. Are you sending a product review request a week after shipment? Say so.
• Link to your privacy policy.

To take your messages to the next level, you need to consider ways that you can strengthen a customer’s engagement and tie to your brand. How can you get them to dig a little deeper, learn a little more, increase their trust, build their loyalty - and in the end, open up their wallets again? Consider the following to continue customer involvement:

• Upsell/Cross-sell. Are there related products, accessories or services that make sense to mention at the bottom or side of the email?
• Offer a coupon/special deal for next purchases or for family and friends. Adding a deadline to coupons can help spur action.
• Ask customers to sign up for promotions or newsletters via email if they haven’t already and include a link to your sign-up page.
  
• Introduce and link customers to other areas of your site (helpful education tools, reward programs) and/or let them know about your social media presence and encourage them to participate.
  
• Help customers make the most of their purchase through how-to guides or inspirational ideas, as suggested by Margaret Farmakis.

Please note: You must respect the transactional nature of the email you’re sending by making that information prominent and not overwhelming your message with marketing. Chris Wheeler, Bronto’s Director of Deliverability, likes to say that the message should pass the “Grandma” or “Mom” test: Would your Mom think this was a marketing piece or a confirmation message of some sort? If she would say marketing or be unsure, you’ve crossed the line and need to dial the promotional content back.

Ultimately, sending messages that provide complete information on a customer’s transaction and secondarily, link to helpful resources and offer additional product suggestions can help customers feel positively about their experience and encourage repeat interactions.

Take a look at your current messages and evaluate what can be improved. What changes are you planning to boost the customer experience? What tweaks have you already seen make a big impact?

I’d love to know.

Kristen Gregory
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. Best of the Blogosphere: Building Relationships, Preheaders & Non-Discount Offer Alternatives This week’s posts span a variety of topics to bolster...
2. 10 Automated Messages That Rock Would you like to send targeted, relevant messages to your...
3. How to Effectively Convert Customers to Subscribers: Duke Energy case study I am a Duke Energy customer and I use online...

• To kick things off, The Email Guide provided a download of the 5 things email marketers mailing to Canadian subscribers need to know about Bill C-27. Al Iverson provided his take on why the bill could be a very good thing while Ken Magill posted a counter argument as to why opt-in shouldn’t be a requirement.
• Alex Williams and Chad White provide tips on how to get started planning, how to smartly increase frequency and stand out during the holiday season. Also, in case you missed it, Bronto hosted a webinar with the 6 holiday email marketing must-haves to create a successful holiday campaign. You can find the archive of the webinar here.
• Will Google Wave, and now Mozilla’s Raindrop, be the death of email? J.D. Falk doesn’t think so, but find out what he believes the impact of these two new players will have on email marketing.
• In today’s world it’s becoming more vital to stand out in the inbox and engage with your subscribers. What better way to do this than provide relevant and targeted content? Dylan Boyd walks through all the reasons why a preference center matters and Stephanie Miller compliments that post with some concrete, monetary reasons to optimize your preference center.
• Linda Bustos reviews case studies and provides advice on how to optimize the above the fold section of websites. Could her advice warrant testing for email as well?
• Are you looking for some subject line inspiration to pack a powerful inbox punch? Janine Popick provides 50 subject lines she feels hit the mark.

What do you think the impact will be of Bill C-27? Are you in favor of or against the (potentially) new regulations? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
@KNLorenz

Related posts:

1. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 9/28 This week there is ample advice flowing on how...
2. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 10/5 This week we’re talking about the impact of social media...
3. New Feature: Best of the Blogosphere We here at Bronto take pride in being experts in...

When reviewing the open, click and conversion data, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are the results in line with our goals and benchmark history? Determining where the results fall in your current sending pattern is the first step to analyzing your data. If the send produced results that are out of line, take a look at your campaign and identify what may have caused the spike or dip. You may need to do some testing to make this determination.

2. How many times are your subscribers opening your message? Subscribers that open your email multiple times over a set period of time are more likely to be highly engaged with your brand. Mark Brownlow recently covered this topic on his blog.

3. What are subscribers clicking on? Are they clicking on your preheader, your products, your navigation bar…?

4. How many times are they clicking on each link? This will tell you which links are more sticky and which landing pages provide the most valuable content. It could also be indicative of trouble. If, as you see in the example below, someone is clicking 4 or 5 times on a link to a PDF, that may mean they are having trouble accessing the document.

5. Where are people clicking in your message? Take a look a trend data and see if the patterns you are seeing in one message match the hot spots in previous sends. Based on this data, you will want to test link placement or drop the non-performers.

6. What links are producing conversions? Tying in data from your analytics package and conversion tracking will provide you with the answer to what links are producing results and which aren’t. If a product is not triggering conversions, for instance, you may need to evaluate whether to include in future campaigns.

7. How many times is a subscriber opening a message before they click? Before they convert? Does it take 3 opens before a subscriber clicks through or 5 clicks before they buy? If subscribers are hesitating, you may want to turn up the heat via a re-mail or triggered message, ie. “Need more incentive? Take an additional 15% off at checkout”, to get them over the barriers to purchase.

8. How many messages is a subscriber receiving before they click? Before they convert? Take a look at both how many exposures or impressions the subscriber has had across channels through your analytics package and how many emails a subscriber receives before clicking and/or converting. Both this data and the data from #7 will help you shape your frequency and communication strategy to match each grouping of subscribers. You may want to consider developing a series as Jeanne discusses in this post on ClickZ.

9. What other elements should you be reviewing? Determine if social links lift engagement rates or if they eat into your conversions. Remember, social links take your subscribers to a third party site, so you may be missing out on the immediate sale, but don’t forget to evaluate the long-term value of including and engaging subscribers on these networks. Also remember to evaluate the elements in your navigation bar(s) in the click-through analysis and consider dropping or replacing the non-performers.

The ultimate goal of your email marketing campaign should be to provide personalized, targeted and relevant content to your subscribers. Analyzing your messages’ performance will help you take strides to meet that goal. Go forth. Be the data whisperer!

NOTE: The next post in this series will cover tips and ideas for what to test within your message to lift opens, clicks and conversions. Stay tuned!

For more data analysis recommendations, please refer to the following posts:

• Data: Jump On It!
• More Data: Jump On It!
• Even More Data! Jump On It!

Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
@KNLorenz

Related posts:

1. More Data: Jump On It! Your data is talking to you. If you’re not taking...
2. Bronto Tracking Reports Get New Metrics Bronto is including a few new metrics on the Message...
3. Even More Data! Jump On It! (Part 3) We’ve already explored some of the more obvious metrics...

• Mark Brownlow has published a fantastic 2-part series on the future of deliverability and authentication, which quotes our very own Director of Deliverability, Chris Wheeler. The key takeaway: “Acceptable response rates in the past (from a profit perspective) may not be sufficient in the future: engagement becomes a goal in its own right, thanks to its impact on customer behavior and deliverability.”

• A recent ReturnPath study showed that non-profits are woefully underutilizing geographic data to segment their subscribers… in fact, only 20% are collecting any demographic data at all. Geographic segmentation is an easy and powerful win for non-profits as they could be including links to local resources, chapters and events, as well as providing contact info for local politicians.

• Sure, you’ve got a standard welcome message, but have you considered developing a welcome series to boost subscriber engagement? Check out Jeanne Jennings’ great post on welcome series, including her case study and testing results.

• What do you think is more important in your emails – the images or the text? Depending on your brand and audience, it could be one or the other. Chad White reveals the “secret language of sales” and the growing influence of text (from preheaders to subject line to body content) on retail email campaigns.  With the rise of Twitter and social media sharing and the predominance of automatically disabled images in most email clients, text is more important than ever.

Got other suggestions for how non-profits can segment and target their messages, or do you have an experience to share around welcome series or text in email?  Let us know in the comments below!

Julie Waite
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 8/24 This week there was news from AT&T regarding deliverability...
2. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 9/14 This week there has been thoughts around how to...
3. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 7/27 This week’s big blog news is the hubbub around Gmail’s...

Note, these are not representative of recipients (your potential or existing customers) telling you they don’t care or are indifferent to what you’ve sent them.  But, rather, they’ve gone out of their way to deliberately tell someone they don’t appreciate the email (either you, directly via the unsubscribe or the ISP via a complaint).

Let’s dive into the complaints a bit more, though.  These little bits of data a recipient fires off to their ISP or 3rd party service (like SpamCop) have two effects:

1. It signifies to the ISP that a subscriber of theirs has identified what she considers to be spam.  When these are added up over time and the recipient base, that ISP domain can begin blocking the sender.
2. It is compiled in the email platform you’re using and usually, like with Bronto’s Sender Rating, can impact your ability to send email out.  Also, that recipient is unsubscribed from future mailings until they re-optin.

At its core, a spam complaint is a person raising their hand and saying “Yuck.”

How do you measure complaints? Based on the above effects, there’s real money being left on the table after every complaint is lodged.  It not only affects the LTV (define) but also shows the value of your program as determined by the aggregate of the recipients’ reactions.

Start Simple. If you don’t yet have a way to assign a monetary value to a complaint, take it slow.  Look at your marketing spreadsheets or your data warehouse (or wherever you keep the incremental value listed per customer/prospect, even if it’s on a legal pad somewhere) and ask yourself “How much will it cost me when one person tells me they don’t want any more email?”  Is it $10?  $5?  If you have really high incremental revenue per item, it may be more.  If you’re about providing a more informational email, it will be much lower.  But at some point, you need to define how many net dollars will come out of your budget each time a new recipient tells you “No!”

Stay consistent. Once you’ve got the value down, be sure to apply it to all recipients across the board fairly.  You can break down the values per mailing segment, but in my experience, it’s more effective to have the opportunity cost assigned multilaterally.  Makes it much easier to compare one campaign to the next within your campaign.

Be true to yourself. The whole point of email marketing in the first place is to spread the word about your company, service or product, right?  Pay attention to complaints coming in (of which any good email platform should expose) and act on this information.  Turning a blind eye or accepting the complaints as collateral damage for emailing will result in potentially alienating your recipients.  And, with that individual, you’ll lose their willingness in the future to even get your email.

Don’t be afraid of complaints; embrace them.  The spam complaint isn’t going anywhere soon.  Many ISPs still use it at as the glue tying senders to email performance, recipients are being trained more and more to just “spam it” from their own web or thick clients, and successful marketers know exactly how much a complaint drives out of their potential success in dollars.  Take action when receiving them and use your marketing savvy to avoid more in the future.

I’ll leave you with this thought…

39% of all respondents said they used the “report spam” button often or very often. - MarketingSherpa “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008″

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler

Related posts:

1. 6 Considerations to Lower Complaints & Improve Your Sender Reputation Got complaints? The bad news: Complaints are the best...
2. Sender Reputation: What it Is, And Why You Care This is the first in a series of three posts...
3. TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST! In our ongoing effort to make Bronto clients better marketers,...

There is a lot of controversy around B2B marketing and what many in the industry deem as “cold-calling by email.” If a company buys a list of executives and mass emails them, it’s easier to identify that as not permission based marketing.  But if a lone sales person emails one executive about a potential business opportunity, is this spam? Sure, if you’re a named executive of a company, your name is out there, and vendors will contact you by whatever means possible – phone, mail, in-person visits, etc. But is email sacrosanct?  Most B2B salespeople would say no, some would say “if it’s relevant, it’s not spam,” but I’m willing to bet the recipients would disagree.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Jigsaw has taken a lot of heat about their practices –- even getting blacklisted by Spamhaus –- and in turn helped escalate the debate within the blogosphere and Twitter. It now looks like Dun & Bradstreet (who own Hoover’s) are taking the high road and offering executives listed in their directory the opportunity to remove their email address from the database. Take a look at this email that was forwarded to me recently (click to enlarge):

Interesting, eh? I’m not sure why they felt the need to push their service offerings ahead of the main point of the message, but this is a great step towards allowing people to protect their workplace email inbox, just like they can with their personal addresses.  Of course the recipient’s name and contact info (including email) is probably on other similar sites, but D&B/Hoovers is one of the biggest names in the industry, so it should help the unsolicited email onslaught they likely receive on a daily basis. The executive who received this removed herself from the directory, and I will be interested to see if she finds it makes a difference in her inbox.

The bottom line is that sending unsolicited email is a bad practice no matter if you’re working in the B2B or B2C spheres, and whether you’re sending one email or 100,000. If you’re a B2B email marketer and want those hot execs to opt-in to your list, then create a strong campaign to target them by direct mail, telemarketing, conference event or SEM/PPC to drive them to your signup page, convince or incent them to join…and once they’ve joined, deliver good content and information as promised. Want more advice? Check out this article, 7 Steps to FTC CAN-SPAM Compliance for B2B Email Marketing.

Julie Waite
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. The (Hopefully) Final Word on Purchased Lists I recently gave a webcast on list acquisition best practices...
2. Effective Permission Based List Rental Tactics Permission based list rental can be an effective email acquisition...
3. A Case of Expired Email Permission A few years back at Bronto, I spent my days...

1. Learn more about David Greiner’s HTML5 video tag testing here!

2. Did you catch the Wall Street Journal’s article titled “Why Email No Longer Rules“? Most experts in the blogosphere outright rejected the notion this week. Check out Scott Cohen’s, Mark Brownlow’s, and Laura Atkins’s pro-email arguments. Right on!

3. Lastly, Melissa at Blue Acorn offers some important Web site preparations to make before the holiday rush begins. You can certainly incorporate many of these strategies in your email as well for holiday success.

Will you try out the new HTML5 tag in your email? What do you think about the WSJ article?

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Kristen Gregory
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. Best of the Blogosphere: Building Relationships, Preheaders & Non-Discount Offer Alternatives This week’s posts span a variety of topics to bolster...
2. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 8/24 This week there was news from AT&T regarding deliverability...
3. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 9/7 This week, the blogosphere was still going strong despite the...

For example, I don’t believe that your subject line should be less than 55 characters or more than 67 or whatever the studies say. At the end of the day, you can write a long ineffective subject line or you can write a short ineffective subject line. It’s not the number of characters you use that matter, but what you say and how you say it.

Here are the only 4 subject line rules I truly follow:

1. Put the most important information at the beginning of the subject line.
WHY? You want that information to avoid being truncated in an email client or remain unseen if someone doesn’t read that far.

2. Be as concise as possible (unless testing proves otherwise).
WHY? You’ve got a couple of seconds of someone’s attention - if that.

3. Consider all the angles (direct call-to-action, benefit-oriented, specific vs. vague, etc).
WHY? Different approaches will resonate with readers differently and there are so many ways to communicate the importance of an email message. Check out Dean Rieck’s subject line tactics presented by Linda Bustos for inspiration.

4. Test, test, test.
WHY? None of us really know what’s best for sure. After you brainstorm the possibilities, narrow your choices down and do some a/b split testing for success. Testing opens the doors to learning and better outcomes.

And while subject lines are ENORMOUSLY important, don’t be afraid to:

• Try testing your subject line WITHOUT branding if you always do (as long as you have a recognizable from name)
• Use words like “free” and “x% off,” etc - I see these all over my inbox. If you’re concerned about a specific phrase, run your emails through a spam filter test and/or test to a smaller segment of your list before fully sending.
• Disagree with other members of your staff - let your subject lines ideas battle it out in an a/b split.
• Take risks!

What do you think about my golden rules? Are there others that you believe in and want to share?

Kristen Gregory
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. Tips For Better Subject Lines Better late than never - here’s Part II of our...
2. Do Personalized Subject Lines Work? (Finally, An Answer) A few weeks ago, we wrote a blog post titled...
3. 3 Simple Rules for From Lines We’ve talked a lot about the from line recently...

• A new study shows that the rise of social media has led to an increase in time spent on email. ISPs are responding to this, with the evolution of the “social inbox.” Yahoo recently changed its interface to allow for users to view only messages from their contacts or connections, and other ISPs are sure to follow with similar functionality. Email marketers need to stay ahead of this trend, as it is now more important than ever to get subscribers to add you to their address book, and give them incentive to share your content socially. Chad White has written a great post on the new rules for what he calls the Engagement-Reputation Era.
• Are you behind on your holiday email marketing plan, or don’t know where to start? Marketing Experiments has your Ecommerce Holiday Playbook Wrap-Up for procrastinating etailers. Get last-minute advice on start-to-finish holiday campaigns, including SEM, shopping pages, email, landing pages and post-holiday follow-up.
• This week Mark Brownlow discusses how “loyalty, like permission, is not permanent” and gives great advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of assuming your readers are loyal, and three solutions to improving long-term loyalty.
• Nonprofits rely heavily on email marketing for cause awareness and fundraising, but often don’t follow the best practices to get optimal results. Margaret Farmakis at ReturnPath has three smart tips for nonprofit marketers.

What do you think about the “social inbox” and what it could portend? How do you measure subscriber loyalty? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Julie Waite
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 9/7 This week, the blogosphere was still going strong despite the...
2. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 7/13 The industry is a-buzz this week about the value of...
3. Best of the Blogosphere: Week of 7/20 Even though it’s sweltering in most parts of the country...