With the concept of “push” marketing, IMA incorporated YouTube videos into email marketing campaigns. This practice was extremely effective in driving traffic to not only view videos, but also to the NYCB website, and ultimately driving users to purchase tickets. On average, the YouTube link in an email would receive twice as many clicks as any other link in the email, and considering the design of their YouTube channel, visitors are directed back to the NYCB site to purchase tickets. The NYCB story demonstrates one method of incorporating video in email marketing. This month we’re taking this a step further and exploring email marketing that promotes many forms of social media (video, blogs, etc.) to their email list, using email marketing effectively allows companies to target segments

So, we’ve established one way you can utilize video in email marketing. This month we’re taking this a step further and exploring other avenues of social media in email marketing. Wofford College (another Bronto client), is a great example of an email marketer that promotes not only video, but also blogging, RSS Feeds, Facebook, MySpace, and soon Twitter.

Kyle James, Wofford’s Webmaster, and personal blogger manages Wofford’s email program and has been instrumental in incorporating various aspects of social media to increase website traffic, click through rates, event participation, and ultimately mind share.

With the foresight that not all videos, blog posts, or updates are valuable to their email list, email marketing gives Wofford the ability to select and choose the most valuable and applicable communications to promote through email. For example, to promote an upcoming alumni event, Wofford sent out an email campaign, which included a video of the previous event. In addition to a snail mail promoting the event, Wofford leveraged the power of email marketing and interactive media, which resulted in doubling the event participation from the previous year.

In keeping with email relevancy, the selection of appropriate media to promote is essential. Quite simply, the more relevant the media, the more effective the campaign – more click throughs, more website visits, or more sales. However, when the media is less relevant to the campaign the less effective it becomes and the greater risk for unsubscribes and complaints.

So, as I sit here at a Blog Carolinas event, it is becoming ever more evident that social media is on the upswing. And as powerful as social media is, email marketing can help it propel it even more.

Learn more about how to use social media in email marketing by attending the Customer Success Series Webcast featuring Wofford College. The webcast will be led by DJ Waldow, Bronto Account Manager, and Kyle James, Webmaster at Wofford College on Tuesday, May 20th at 2pm EDT .

Register now for the webcast

Caroline Smith

Marketing Program Manager at Bronto

Would staggering the deployment or "blast" help? Could you segment out the different subscriber types you described? (ie send the first batch to the most recent time lags, then send to the next time group etc)?

After the hair on my arms returned to its normal, dormant state (the word "blast" makes me cringe), I thought about Linda's question. My gut response was, "Sure. That would be a reasonable strategy." In fact, I've worked with clients in the past helping them implement this approach. I have always cautioned clients that "you must be very careful with this strategy." The key is sending to small segments - very targeted - and being diligent about tracking the key metrics. When your open rates, click-throughs, and conversions begin to slip while complaints, unsubscribes, and hard bounces rise…it's time to call it quits.

There is no determined hard-line metric for dipping open rates or rising hard bounces. This is where it gets tricky. Marketers who attempt this approach can quickly talk themselves into sending to one more segment. When you see the revenue continue to roll in, it's easy to get greedy - "Let's dip into the 9-month segment." Unfortunately, that one additional segment could lead to a block - honeypot address/complaint/hard bounce threshold (again, see the Email Address Shelf Life post).

So, I fall back to my conclusion from earlier - one worth repeating below:

If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto

Remarketing is the use of trigger-based campaigns to offset abandonment rates and win respondents back with a compelling and engaging offer, while creating new revenue out of previously missed opportunities.

In the past few years, however, remarketing has emerged as a successful technique for behaviorally targeting and messaging prospects and customers for those who choose to embrace the remarketing strategy. Think about the customer who comes to your website, adds several products to their shopping cart, but abandons the purchase. A well-defined remarketing strategy allows you a “second chance” at converting that respondent to an acquisition.

Most perceive remarketing as a non-necessity, but as you review your acquisition costs and acquisition rates, it’s important to pay attention to the number of respondents left on the table. Remarketing enables you to easily deploy a follow up strategy that targets that low hanging fruit.

Five Steps to Creating a Remarketing Strategy:

• Identify your business objectives. Do you want to target online and offline activities, or are you more focused on specific channels such as paid search, online advertising, etc.? The benefit of remarketing is taking the acquisition that you have already paid an acquisition expense to and keeping them engaged to see a healthy ROI. Determine which campaigns you can act on seamlessly.
• Start simple. In our excitement to create more sales activity, we often start big. Consider beginning with something small such as a remail to email campaign recipients who didn’t open. By testing a new subject line or from line, you may be able to create a higher response.
• Make certain you have the tools. Do you have an analytics solution that can identify your respondent’s behavior and provide you that data real-time? Do you have an email solution that allows you to segment your audience easily by their behavior? The more tools you have at your disposal that can take behavioral data and allow you to make it actionable, the more sophisticated your remarketing strategy can grow to be.
• Report and trend. Make certain all the work is worth the effort. As with any campaign, reporting on data is key to successful marketing. Whether you are trending sales, CTR, acquisition cost, or turnover, keeping a close watch on the numbers will guarantee that your remarketing strategy is moving in the right direction.
• Don’t over market. Are you sending multiple remail campaigns to non-opens? If so, your respondents may be experiencing email fatigue. Be cautious with your remarketing, ensuring that across all channels you aren’t sending too often. You don’t want to lose that prospect or customer because you are over zealous.

Remarketing is a tremendously powerful tool, yet many marketers don’t utilize it as a resource for gaining customers that they’ve already targeted through other campaigns. So if you’ve been considering incorporating remarketing into your market, consider no longer, get started today.

Sally Lowery
Online Marketing Manager at Bronto

Your boss sends you a file that includes 50,000 email addresses. You import the list into your account (merging it with the rest of your house file) and "blast away." Within minutes your IP address is blocked at several major ISPs.

What went wrong? All 50,000 email addresses are customers who've purchased in the past and opted-in. Upon sign up, you included a link to your privacy policy. You even have another file that lists the date and IP address associated with each opt-in. So, what happened?

On the surface, it appears that you've done it all by the book. You've satisfied the law (read: CAN-SPAM). You're not a spammer. Why did this happen, if these are your customers?

Upon analyzing these subscribers, you uncover the following information about the 50,000 emails in the file:

• 50% purchased over a year ago, but haven't received an email since that first purchase.
• 25% purchased in the past 6 months, but haven't received an email since that first purchase.
• 25% are repeat buyers (their last purchase < 1 month ago), but haven't received an email in 6 months

Over the years, in speaking with prospects and/or clients, I've heard the entire gamut of list maintenance "strategies" from single opt-in, to double opt-in, to double-opt-in plus in-person signature/confirmation.

The question that is not asked nearly enough - both from ESPs and internally is:

When was the last time this subscriber was sent an email?

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports posed a similar question in March of 2008, Can email love survive a three-year gap? If you dig into the comments on that post, I argued that, "a 3-year hiatus between email communications is about 2 1/2 years too long."

My guide is based on a continuum (see below):

What are the risks?

• Honeypot/SpamTrap emails: An instant red-flag for ISPs
• Hard Bounces/Invalid Recipients: One metric used by ISPs to determine list health - see what AOL had to say on this one (the comments are a must read)
• High complaint ratios: Another metric used by ISPs

The three risks all negatively impact deliverability, getting emails into the inbox. But what about your brand? What about your customers? If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto

All in all, this is a fairly simple task – send a test message to a number of people in our office who use the different email clients, and make sure it looks like it is intended to look. However, a couple of computers always gave me problems, both of them used Outlook 2007, and both of them mangled our normally nice looking emails. To add to the mystery, the two bad seeds would break the messages in totally different ways.

All of the other instances of Outlook 2007 in our office rendered the message just fine, so we would normally chalk it up to a setting on the computer that was making the messages render incorrectly. Some people may be able to walk away from a situation like this; I am not one of those people. This would not stand… not on my watch.

I decided to do some research and testing to see what exactly was causing this error. I settled down with the two machines to see what I could find. I looked through all of the settings that I thought could be causing the issue in Outlook 2007, but even with all of the settings the same, the messages still did not render correctly. This is when I noticed the two computers side by side just didn't look the same, everything was much bigger on one and much smaller on the other, and this led me to check the graphics settings, which in turn led me straight to the culprit… the DPI setting.

According to Wikipedia, DPI (Dots Per Inch) is a measure of printing or display resolution, in particular the number of individual dots or pixels that can be produced within a linear one-inch (2.54 cm) space. The default DPI on a Microsoft Windows machine is 96. One of the offending computers was set to 120dpi (large) and the other was set to 82dpi (a custom setting).

This drove me to run some tests on a larger scale to make sure I was on the right track – here's what I did: I took 6 computers; each with Outlook 2007 and Mozilla Thunderbird installed and sent them a copy of the Bronto News. First, I set each of the computers DPI to the default setting of 96, then I checked the same message with the DPI setting changed to 120, and finally, I changed the DPI to 82 and looked at the message again.

The results are extremely insightful: Outlook 2007 choked on anything except for the default DPI, while Thunderbird displayed the message perfectly no matter what the DPI was set to. To see how the messages displayed for your-self, check out the screenshots below, just click on any thumbnail to see the image in a larger size.

			Outlook 2007			Thunderbird 2.0
96dpi (default)
120dpi
82dpi

Could your contacts DPI settings be causing your messages to display improperly? The answer is a resounding yes, which is definitely something to think about when conducting your testing.

I'll be continuing my research to see if there is something that we as email marketers can do to work around this issue. Look for my next post in May, and if you've come across this in your campaigns, please feel free to leave a comment.

Lucas Weber
Support Associate at Bronto

• Including an email opt-in throughout the conversion cycle. Adding this small piece to a form, or through banner presence, will allow you multiple opportunities in the future to connect. Allowing preference management will also ensure that you deliver the most relevant email campaigns.

• Adding a transactional message post acquisition that includes cross-sell and up-sell opportunities as well as introduces new content or product, while reinforcing your brand.

What about those that don’t convert to an acquisition? It’s always a challenge to keep prospects engaged who didn’t initially convert, this is especially true with search marketing. Using integrated analytics, you can create several email campaigns that target the respondent, for example:

• An email sent several days later that incorporates the keyword they searched on, product or content.

• A cart abandonment email that reminds them that they have items in their shopping cart.

I’ve outlined just a few ways that you can incorporate email marketing into your search engine marketing, but there are many more you can explore that will fit your business objectives. Always ensure you have obtained the appropriate permissions to email your respondents and ensure that what you send is the right message at the right time and you will find post-click success.

Sally Lowery
Online Marketing Manager at Bronto

Look forward to: Automated Messages, improved message scheduling workflow, a new calendar to help you better visualize how your email marketing calendar is shaping up, and more.

To be honest, I'm most excited about our new email automation features, so I thought I could take advantage of this blog post to expound on that a bit more…

Automation - it's the panacea of the 21st century. The idea of robots doing our laundry, meals preparing themselves, and other Jetsonian wonders seem to be attainable goals. But as we approach the seemingly futuristic date of 2010 we haven't achieved those wonders yet. However, there's no need to fret as we have seen some advances in the world of automation. In this blog post I'll focus on one of these advances: marketing automation.

For many of us there isn't enough time in the day to get our marketing out the door, never mind fine tuning and growing out our marketing calendar. So, please welcome with open arms email automation, your time saver and new best friend.

Email automation allows you to execute on a campaign once and reap the benefits for weeks, months, or even years. By creating an automated message that keys off of recipient information you can easily send messages to people at the most relevant and impactful time.

It's some what of a paradox that an automated campaign (executed without any human intervention) can provide some of the most relevant messaging that you send out. But this doesn't happen by accident, such relevancy is the product of research and effort. You have to know what your customers are doing and what the next logical step is for them.

There are definitely risks involved with this type of communication, you do need to ensure that your data is accurate and up to date. If you don't take this into account, you can end up sending out confusing messages. Bonnie Malone Fry over at ReturnPath recently wrote a great blog post about safe guarding and optimizing your automated email campaigns.

However, good data and a well planned automated campaign can have fantastic results. We know you see the value and time savings there, that's why Bronto is introducing Automated Messages as a new feature in our Spring 2008 Release. We have built out an Automated Message wizard that walks you through the creation of several types of these campaigns, including Behavioral, Date Based, Recurring, and API triggered campaigns. With this addition, we've got you covered for those birthday emails, monthly traveler points summaries, purchase confirmation messages, and so much more.

For those of you who are using Bronto right now, stay tuned for more info. For those of you who aren't, feel free to sign up for a free trial in May to check out the new features.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

The latest research from Shop.org, the online retail arm of the National Retail Foundation, and Forrester seems to agree with us. Recently, they published the “The State of Online Retailing 2008″and according to the report, email marketing continues to be one of the most successful marketing program for retailers. Here are some of the highlights from the report:

• Email marketing remains a top marketing priority for retailers in 2008.
• Email marketing is widely used among online retailers (92%) to market to their own customers. Over 93% of these retailers plan on making it a higher priority in the upcoming year
• The typical retailer in the survey expects to spend $311,634 this year sending emails to its own list of customers.
• Emailing to house lists is considered very cost-effective, costing on average $6.85 per order, the lowest cost-per-order among 10 marketing tactics covered in the report. (The average order value from those e-mails is $120.27.)
• The average delivery rate on e-mails to house lists is 90%, the open rate is 22% and the annual opt-out rate 6%, according to the report.
• 95% of retailers send e-mails when a product is shipped, 94% to confirm a purchase, 82% in response to a customer action, 81% when new products are available and 65% to promote online-only deals.
• Less common but getting top marks for effectiveness are more personalized e-mails.
• Only 42% of retailers send customized e-mails based on customer behavior or purchase data, but 73% rate that a very effective tactic.
• 58% send segmented e-mails to groups of customers based on stated preferences or purchase data, a tactic rated very effective by 67% of those merchants

Although Shop.org is primarily composed of larger online retailers, we see many of the same trends with mid-sized retailers as well. Either way, the conclusions are the same — email marketing is an essential marketing activity for retailers, especially with turning one-time buyers into long-term customers.

Joe Colopy
Founder and CEO of Bronto

Let's look at it like a license plate on your car. You should have one on your car when you drive, it's a good practice. Now, it doesn't provide a 100% assurance that you should be allowed to drive, but it's a good start. If a cop sees you driving down the road without a license plate they will pull you over for sure. You may be authorized to drive, but they are going to look at you at lot more closely. So you should have a license plate no matter what, even if you are a law abiding driver.

If you were speeding, you wouldn't expect a license plate to get you out of a ticket, would you? It just proves that you were the one speeding, and not some one else.

Both of these scenarios translate over to sender authentication. You should be using authentication as it can help to show that you are attempting to be a law-abiding email marketer. But if you are sending out bad emails then you can't expect authentication to get your emails into the inbox.

Now that you know why you should be using sender authentication, let's switch gears and learn about what this involves. Some of you may be worried that this is going to be overly complicated. But don't worry, we've made sender authentication a walk in the park … the ball park.

Setting The Field
There are two major teams you can join up with, but just to complicate things, each one has another version as well. They both make use of storing information in the publicly available domain definition for your website, technically called a DNS entry - or just DNS.

Who are the players?
DomainKeys is the scheme that Yahoo! created some time back, it has evolved into DKIM or DomainKeys Identified Mail. DKIM and DomainKeys both work by signing your message with a private key, then leaving a corresponding public key in your DNS.

Anyone receiving one of these signed messages can check the resulting signature using that public key. There's a lot of technical details to how the whole public / private key scheme works. Suffice to say it is complicated, but it does work.

The other major player here is Sender Policy Framework or SPF. It's cohort is SenderId, which was developed by Microsoft based off of SPF. As opposed to checking a signature, these two make use of DNS to specify IPs (server addresses) that can be used to send email for your domain.

Whenever some one receives an email that was supposedly sent by you, they can look up the originating IP and see if it is listed in your DNS. If it is listed in your DNS, then it checks out.

Unfortunately both of these schemes have their shortcomings. However, they are both a great start, and large ISPs are starting to get serious about them. By implementing them for your email marketing campaigns, you are helping to ensure that you won't be blocked unnecessarily. So to clarify, these won't ensure that your message gets delivered, but it will help to ensure that your message isn't booted outright.

Who's at Bat?
So who's making use of these for authentication? It's different for every ISP, but all of the major ISPs make use of one or both of these. Yahoo! supports DKIM and Domain Keys. MSN and their related sites use SenderId with several other large providers - Verizon, Roadrunner, charter, etc. - using SenderId and/or SPF. There are also a large number of providers that support at least one version of both systems, including Gmail, Earthlink, BellSouth, and others.

Is this a home run?
Not really, with such a mish-mash of support at ISPs you may be wondering what to do. Luckily for you this isn't a Red Sox vs. Yankees situation, you don't have to pick sides - you can implement both without any pain. And that's where it stands right now, if you are sending email you need to be using both authentication schemes.

That's why at Bronto we support all of these authentication methods. We want to ensure that you have the highest deliverability possible to all the ISPs out there.

Looking for more info? Check these pages out:
DKIM

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
• http://dkim.org/

DomainKeys

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys

SPF

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
• http://www.openspf.org/

Sender Id

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_id
• http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologies/senderid/default.mspx

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

On this day - Thursday, April 10th, 2008 - I join Jeanniey and the eec in addressing the "email battle." I've heard some refer to email as the "digital glue." Think about email in the context of new technologies, widgets, killapps, fads, trends, etc.

For example, the interplay between email and…

1. Facebook/LinkedIn/MySpace
2. Email Marketers Club
3. Twitter (quickly becoming my new addiction)

Facebook/LinkedIn/MySpace
All 3 social networks have their own versions of inboxes. However, they all send emails regularly. Facebook sends, "…confirmed you as a friend…wrote on your Wall…commented on your…" while LinkedIn sends, "…invitation to connect…join my network…" emails. Yeah. You read it. Email.

Email Marketer's Club
The Email Marketer's Club was started about a year ago by Tamara Gielen as a "place where email marketers can network and share knowledge and information." The club is rapidly approaching 1,000 members. It was created through Ning, an online service that allows you to create, customize and manage your own social network.

Some mornings, I go directly to the Email Marketer's Club, but more often than not an email triggers my interest. I've set up reminders using the "follow" feature. I receive an email when someone comments on a forum post. Again. Email.

Twitter
Similar to Facebook, I fought the Twitter craze for several months. On March 27th, I broke down and set up my account. Twitter also leverages the power and ease of email with email updates such as, "…is now following you…direct message from…" Notice a theme? Email.

Email is the tool that other applications use - fall back on - to inform. As the digital glue, email serves as a reliable channel for critical communication. While these apps don't seem to overtly respect email as a medium, they all incorporate it as an integral component. Email.

Speaking of battles, Jeanniey and the "mystery army guy photographer" are onto something. A version of the little toy solider made it's way into the Bronto offices this week. First there was the roaming gnome, then the traveling Bronto, now…the traveling little army dude?

Check out other pictures here, here, and even here.

So, please help me and the eec dispel the myth of the "email battle." As G.I. Joe used to say, "Now we know! And knowing is half the battle."

DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto