Inbox or No Inbox?!?!

With great flair and charisma, Chad Malchow, Return Path’s VP of Sales, played game show host in a fun, interactive game deemed “Inbox or No Inbox”. The format was that of a familiar, popular TV game show – and in this version, the audience got to participate. Three contestants were pulled to the stage from the audience and asked individually to choose a briefcase containing an Email Marketing question.

Each question was given a dollar value ranking from $100 to $25,000. Once the question was asked, the audience first was polled while the contestant determined her answer. Then, the audience response was revealed and the contestant was given the opportunity to change her answer or “lock in” her previous choice.

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What ISPs Think About Your Email

The fourth session of IN: The Email Reputation Conference featured a panel of speakers from ISP’s Comcast and Time Warner/Roadrunner. The conversation started with some statistics about the mail that an average ISP receives. For many, these were surprising numbers, as most marketers didn’t realize the discrepancies in volume between legitimate and illegitimate senders:

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Why Reputation Matters

Return Path CEO, Matt Blumberg opened IN: The Email Reputation Conference with an interesting audience-participation exercise. In an effort to engage through interaction, he introduced the “Perception Analyzer”, a device that instantly polls the audience. He used this cool, techy tool to evaluate the nature of conference participants, and gathered some interesting results:

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A Lesson from The Onion

In a recent article featured on The Onion, Presidential candidate Barack Obama expressed his personal frustrations in receiving an onslaught of emails from the polictical association MoveOn.org. He subscribed to the organization’s email program 4 years ago, but continues to receive email after months of deleting it without reading a single message. He finds the content uninteresting and not valuable, and the frequency (3x a week) highly irritating. Of course it’s immediately obvious why this is so funny – MoveOn.org has gained a reputation as a very aggressive email marketer.

But, aside from being so funny, The Onion spoof offers a good object lesson for marketers. Because it’s all too easy to think, what’s the big deal if people delete your email daily without reading it? But this piece hits a nerve because it articulates …

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The Importance of Minor Body Parts

Having recently experienced some health issues that caused a variety of challenges in my daily life, I’ve come to abruptly realize the importance of minor body parts. For example, when your entire foot is numb, attempting to wear a shoe with a heel strap is more challenging than you would imagine. Since you cannot feel whether or not the strap is secure around your heel, you are left feeling terribly insecure and checking to be sure your shoe is still on your foot rather frequently. This unfortunate (although sometimes amusing) experience lead me to think of the important, often neglected, minor parts of an email. Naturally, we marketers focus on optimizing subject lines, headlines, creative design, and content – - these areas typically return the most for our investment. However, there are some rather “important minor body parts” that we should examine more regularly …

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And The Walls Came Tumbling Down

The culture of most multi-channel retailers is one of great suspicion and possessiveness, created through silos within every function of the company. Whether it’s marketing and merchandising at odds with each other, or IT operating in their own world, or even accounting — seemingly lost somewhere in the abyss — these silos make working together extremely difficult. Factor in the business need to implement a major initiative (like holiday sales), and the divide becomes a chasm. What is the root cause of this discord? And, does it really have to be that way?

The answer here is two-fold …

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Dad, can I borrow $20?

When you were a teenager, how often did you ask good-ole Dad for money? You’d borrow $20, go out with friends to see a movie or go shopping, spend every last dime and look forward to doing it all again the next week…. Those were the days, right? Well, it seems that some marketers loved it so much that they are managing their email programs with the same mentality. While living in the present and begging for money to fund each and every need was generally the accepted behavior of a teenager, corporate executives don’t enjoy playing the role of “good-ole Dad.” Nowadays, it literally pays to do a bit of planning before you ask for more funding. Consider these alternate tactics to get incremental monies for your program …

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Christmas in June

Yes, it seems to be that time of year for retailers…time to start planning for holidays promotions. (Can you believe it – already!?!) In the blur of deciding on campaign themes, offer strategies, and creative approach, don’t forget about the Shopper, who is at the center of this whirlwind. To optimize success in the inbox, take a few minutes to consider subscriber feedback from last year’s campaigns (via Return Path’s 2007 Holiday Survey). Implementing adjustments now, during the planning period, is most efficient — as this is the ideal time to affect change:

Relevance is still key. Nearly half (45%) of subscribers ignore every email if prior value has not been proven. And, 58% use the subject line to determine if the message will be of interest to them. Don’t give in to the temptation to “batch-and-blast,” which may negatively affect subscriber response and your brand perception.

More isn’t necessarily better. 29% of subscribers deleted messages …

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Research Study: Creating Great Subscriber Experiences

With all the industry buzz around relevance, you would expect that the email marketing programs of most major US brands would be fairly sophisticated. Best practices, like sending a welcome message and targeted segmentation would be common. Preference centers would be everywhere. But, our recent study of 61 top-brand marketers found that wasn’t typically the case. (And, we’re talking about companies like Best Buy, Nike, Sony, and Disney, to name a few.) In fact, we were rather surprised by the findings:

Anyone home? A shocking 60% of the companies in our survey did not send a welcome message. Of the 40% that did send a welcome message, only 33% sent it within 24 hours. The remaining 7% took anywhere from two days to three weeks.

Blackhole? The shock of the missing welcome messages was compounded by the astonishing number of companies …

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From the Email Insiders Summit: The 18-24 Perspective – Is Email Archaic?

One of the most interesting sessions at the Email Insiders Summit was a glimpse into the perspective of the 18-24-year-old demographic. To kick off the conference sessions, MediaPost invited three students from Ball State University to participate in a panel discussion about their communication practices, and how email fits (or doesn’t) into those habits. For the audience comprised entirely of email marketers, their answers weren’t exactly welcome news:

• Social networks (primarily Facebook) have a monopoly on the 18-24-year-old attention span. These young people use Facebook as their primary communication method, not email. One panelist noted the efficiency of the channel to communicate instantly to all of their friends and contacts – - everything from causes supported to birthdays to events they are attending. For most, whenever they were online, they were logged into Facebook. …

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