Rocky Mountain High

Last month we took our best email experts and hit the road to bring fresh, new marketing ideas to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This month we embark on the next leg of the tour.

Next stop is the Mile High City on May 27. Not only will you learn best practices from our expert team of Return Pathers, but you will get first hand knowledge and advice from other email marketers just like you. On tap for Denver, are email marketers from Memolink, Shop at Home, Sierra Trading Post and LifePics who will share their experiences on how they cope with everyday email challenges to drive revenue for their businesses. Best of all, it’s a great opportunity for you to get your specific questions answered one-on-one during our email expert roundtables.

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Ad:Tech Report: Predictions on the Future of Online Advertising

While Ad:Tech was a lively show this year – it was not quite as mobbed as it had been the last few years. You can make your own assumptions about the cause, but for me it is evidence that the marketing budgets of advertising services companies are tightening.

But what is not totally clear is, why. Are recession fears driving reduced revenue expectations for these advertising services companies? Or has the ridiculous number of conferences, seminars, and events finally reached an inflection point? My guess is both. But I am not-so-secretly hoping that we have reached a point where the industry cannot support this many events. My family is openly cheering for it.

Aside from a decline in sponsorship and attendance, here are a few trends we saw last week and predictions for next year …

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Incentive Testing for Fun and Profit

MarketingExperiments just published two fascinating case studies on the use of incentives to drive email capture and free trial conversion.

Incentives have a mixed history in the annals of interactive marketing. The truth is, they work. And, as MarketingExperiments shows, when they are optimized they work really well. But they have been abused by some marketers and, if used poorly, can actually degrade performance.

That said, you gotta read this report now. It’s really fascinating.

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Court Affirms Comcast's Right to Keep Inboxes Safe from Spam

This week the industry is, once again, abuzz with talk of the e360 lawsuit against Comcast. e360 was attempting to use the federal courts to force Comcast to accept unwanted mail, and the judge has ruled on the case. As email technology guru John Levine wrote on Friday morning, “it’s a fun read.”

Here at Return Path, I read Judge Zagel’s order twice: first from an anti-spam perspective, and then again thinking about how it might affect our clients. Some marketers will surely find reasons to fear this judgement – but they shouldn’t. This is good for them, too – because by protecting the ISPs’ good-faith efforts to protect their users from objectionable email, Judge Zagel is protecting the inbox against the really bad stuff. Inboxes that are filled with scams, spams, and things that look like they might be scams or spams, are simply unusable. The only way for people to be able to find, read, and respond to the messages they want to receive is for the inbox to be free of the junk they don’t want to receive.

Marketers who follow best practices, who respect their subscribers, and who (to put it simply) follow all the other advice we give, can and should continue to do what you’ve been doing. You’ll get to the inbox, just like today. …

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Focus on Subscriber Experience: Learning a Lesson from Evite

This past Sunday the New York Times Magazine ran a column by Virginia Heffernan ranting about Evite. Her complaints about the party-planning service were many, but one sentence really jumped out at me:

“And why, for the love of both partying and efficiency, aren’t the details of an event — the time and place — in the subject line or at least the email itself?”

The reason, according to Heffernan’s column, is that Evite wants to drive page views, which translate into ad dollars, by forcing recipients to click through to the party details page. In this case, what’s good for the business isn’t good for the consumer. …

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Pulling the Trigger on Trigger-Based Campaigns

As every marketer continues on the quest for higher response and ROI, triggered campaigns centered around website behaviors (previous purchases, abandoned carts, browse history, etc) are becoming more and more popular due to their high subscriber relevancy and response. However, in the whirlwind to implement such high impact programs, it’s easy to lose focus on the subscriber experience. To truly optimize results, and foster your relationship with the subscriber, keep these three tips in mind …

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Acquire New Customers with Four Fun Mother's Day Marketing Ideas

What are you planning to send your Mom this Mother’s Day? Candy? Flowers?

Excuse me for saying so, but BORING! Now think about how many other people are out there struggling with the same boring ideas. We think this makes Mother’s Day an ideal holiday for a little bit of acquisition magic. People look to email to give them fresh, new ideas. Take advantage of that by putting together an email campaign aimed at acquiring new customers who are looking to be the favorite kid this Mother’s Day.

Be bold: Remember, you are trying to appeal to folks who are tired of sending the same old, same old gifts. …

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Trust in Email Begins with Authentication

Unfortunately, forging From: or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It’s one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of internet email technology — though of course that’s only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s.

Since then, things have changed — and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. Before you can answer the question “can I trust this message?,” you first have to ask “who sent it?” — but before authentication, there was often no way to know for sure.

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IAB Lead Generation Best Practices: Transparency is the New World Order

Earlier this year the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a set of best practices for online lead generation. As I’ve written about in the past (here, here and here), online lead generation is a smart strategy when it is executed well. But when you work with shady partners who are more interested in fulfilling invoices than in creating great subscriber experiences, your ROI and even your brand reputation can suffer.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that we at Return Path have been involved in the creation of these lead generation best practices. And we are proud of the contribution the IAB has made to the overall health of the lead generation industry. It reflects our view of the world …

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Counting the Loose Change

Our good client Andrew Magpantay, Senior Product Manager at Reunion.com, coined a great expression when he spoke at our client seminar in Los Angeles on Thursday. He said that reconnecting with non-responders on the file is like gathering up the “loose change.” Sure, there is some value there, and if you have a lot of it lying around it adds up to real dollars, but the risk is that complaints rates are higher from these subscribers and there is a risk of spam traps from old addresses. To extend his analogy, the trick is to figure out if it’s worth the work to overturn the couch for a few dollars.

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