Just when I thought I knew everything, now they say maybe what you know isn't true! Nice post today on MediaPost's Email Insider.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear
by David Baker, Monday, November 20, 2006

The moral of this urban legend is, use best practices, studies, and guidance from the experts as a starting point, but don't consider their advice to be absolute. You need to adjust your e-mail for your target audience and for what you want to achieve. Most importantly, test, test, and test some more.

Some notes for retailers...

Ok, now I spend a lot of time talking about best practices, such as having a consistent mailing schedule, personalizing whenever possible, putting your company name in the subject, keeping important information "above the fold," etc. I'm still learning myself every day as I work with my clients and scan the news and blog reports. Today I came across some best practice information including statistics on "send to a friend" (the November 2 post) for online retailers. Although this is a great way to build your email list, many emailers aren't using it yet, and those that are don't always have the process down pat yet. By the way, in case you didn't know it, Email Analyst has shown a direct correlation between email sends and web traffic.

One of the things I hear people say most often is that they don't have enough email addresses for email marketing, aren't happy with the current size of their list, and don't know how to grow their list. Lisbuilding is a hot topic, with many articles available; here's a great article on collecting addresses online that's part of a tutorial on "Internet Based Moms." Another important part of listbuilding strategy is collecting addressed offline. A strategy should be in place for collecting addresses constantly, both online and offline. The holidays is a great season to build lists offline, since you will undoubtedly be running into a lot of potential and existing customers at parties. So if you've been waiting, now is as good a time as ever to get started with your email marketing efforts!

Amazing statistics reported in the DMA's latest research report on direct marketing (available here), in the words of Bill McCloskey, CEO of Email Data Source:

The ROI for e-mail marketing was $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all non-e-mail-related online marketing was $22.52, less than half. And yet marketers only spent around $300 million on e-mail marketing efforts, compared to $12 billion for non-e-mail-related marketing--$12 billion to get a return that is less than half of what can be achieved in e-mail.

We also know that the return on e-mail is much higher for companies that segment their e-mail marketing offers, so the $57.25 is really just a drop in the bucket compared to what the ROI potential is for e-mail.

We also know that, especially for retail, e-mail is considered the largest demand-generating medium for online retailers.

So where is the disconnect: e-mail provides over twice the ROI, but companies now invest only 02.5% of what they put into other Internet marketing channels? Someone is getting taken for a ride.

Here's something else I stumbled across again today on Spamhaus, their definition of "Closed loop opt-in," which I like:

With Closed-Loop Opt-in the Recipient has verifiably confirmed permission for the address to be included on the specific mailing list, by confirming (responding to) the list subscription request verification. This is the standard practice for all Internet mailing lists, it ensures users are properly subscribed from a working address and with the address owner's consent.

In case anyone missed this article in my delicious links, here's a great clip from a Mediapost article entitled "You're invited to email's coming out party - Again!" from June 20 that I particularly like:

Today's e-mail is not the e-mail you used to know. Today's e-mail has emerged as the cornerstone of digital media and digital relationships--and is now the way that over 60 million people communicate with their friends and family on a daily basis.

E-mail has become much more than a commoditized messaging platform; it is the glue that bonds the customer to the brand in a digital world. Ninety-five percent of companies who market use e-mail as a key marketing vehicle. If your company is not using e-mail in a strategic manner, or does not recognize that EVERY e-mail you send or respond to is an opportunity to deliver on the promise of your brand, you are clearly missing the party.

In the new world of e-mail, there are seven key strategic elements that need to be considered when planning a program or campaign:

1. Your growth and maintenance plans for your prospect e-mail database. 2. Your opt-in methodology and early engagement strategy. 3. Your e-mail "promise" and the way the brand is represented. 4. Your header information and deliverability score and reputation. 5. "Above the fold" placement of imagery that drives action and use of relevant content. 6. The Web site/landing page engagement flow and interaction. 7. The strategy for integrating the precious content in your e-mails with other digital media: blogs, rss feeds and communities.

I have had a lot of people ask why it's necessary to be so strict with permission. At Innucopia we are very strict with permission, and require that Addemar is used only for sending mails to recipients that have already given permission to receive the correspondence in question. Addemar is for building and maintaining relationships with customers. We believe permission is a matter of respect to your customers, as well as a matter of following best practices that are in place to ensure that your messages continue to be delivered and not blocked.

In our experience there's just no benefit in cutting corners. If you are a legitimate business accused of email spamming and blacklisted, ISPs may choose to block all email from your company, not just bulk. It's not so easy to move your whole company website in that case, plus it's horrible for your brand. Sending out unsolicited bulk email is not illegal as long as the CAN-SPAM guidelines are followed, but companies should seriously consider if it's worth the risk to entertain this strategy. I for one would never do business with a company that sent me unsolicited bulk email for which I did not first provide permission; I know I'm not alone in my distaste for this type of email. And even if you follow all the legal rules, customers can still blacklist you, perhaps because you're mailing them too frequently or otherwise dropping the ball. Companies have to consider not only legalities and best practices, but also the preferences of the customers.

As Bill Nussey put it in The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing, "Permission is the tool that turns prospects into customers, and customers into lifelong customers." And today, TRUSTe and Epsilon released a nice whitepaper on the subject.

More evidence of the fact that email marketing is not going away...the DMA recently release results from a study that showed that, despite many problems with spam, email marketing volume has increased by 30%.

Email has a long way to go as a marketing tool, not only from early adopters with the time and manpower to small organizations with limited resources, but also as a more and more strategically aligned concern. Interesting snippet today talking about some of the ways that companies can think about evolving their email marketing program.

"If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything." --Dr. Emmett L. Brown (Back to the Future)

"The world is flat." --Thomas L. Friedman

I'm a firm believer in the former (plus I love the trilogy), and I believe the latter is making it more and more possible for individuals to accomplish amazing things even with limited resources. This is part of the reason Innucopia provides information about "tools" that businesses can use to get up there with the big guys.

There's always a downside however. We must be vigilant and keep an eye out for the bottom-dwellers. As a specialist in permission-based email marketing, I cannot find an explanation as to why anyone would send spam when it's so much smarter and more effective, and probably no more costly, to send permission-based emails. I for one will never do business with a company that contacts me via spam (unless they want to turn over a new leaf of course). There is unfortunately not only spam to watch out for; there was a good article recently about all the scams out there that are looking to exploit people who want to work at home or otherwise broaden their horizons, and all the scams to watch out for.

Excellent MarketingSherpa article today talking about the high popularity of voice-over powerpoint online video presentations. This is a great tool and something that should be possible for any company at a good price. I'm going to be exploring some tools for this kind of thing...more to come!

Ever since I first read Kevin Kelly's "New Rules for the New Economy" back in 1998, his "follow the free" chapter has been stuck in my head. The other chapters are in there somewhere too still, since the book was fascinating at the time, is still relevant today, and many of the predictions and advices are playing out. Take email for example. Not too long ago many of us had no choice but to pay for simple email service, and today you can have as many email accounts as you like for nothing (let's not get in to the cost of time of spam and those issues). It's moved towards freedom in other ways as well, when you look at the move from 2MB in Hotmail to 2000MB in Gmail a couple of years ago. People are willing to pay now for premium services, but the basic service is good and free. There are many examples like that and it's ramping up exponentially. Not to mention the fact that Kelly follows his own advice and makes the entire book text available on the web.

This is always in the back of my head when I'm thinking of new things for Innucopia. People are used to having to pay for stuff, and many don't have the time or knowledge they need to know better. Sometimes they're getting taken for thousands of dollars for things like making a simple website. I agree that you shouldn't balk at paying for quality, but I don't like to see people hoodwinked. So, one of the main goals of Innucopia is to give people the knowledge they need to make more informed decisions about inexpensive and free web tools and services, for free. Knowledge is power!

This article announces the partnership between Addemar in Europe (Ideaxis) and the Leading Pan-Arabic interactive agency. More information provided in this article.

This E-mail Diva article links to a page that will check your email newsletter content free online, without any obligation. It also has information about Email Analyst, which is a tool that gives a complete overview of the email marketing competitive landscape.

People use the internet to seek out and hone the interests that guide their lives (see this article). Many websites and companies new to the internet must still figure out how this effects their business and how they can use it to their advantage. Email is a great tool in this aspect, since it gives businesses the capability to learn about their subscribers, what drives them, and what they need to feel satisfied. However, email is not as easy as pie (see this article). There are road blocks, obstacles, potholes, and lots of road signs pointing out the right direction and blocking the wrong ones. So, businesses that don't know how to read the signs may end up on the wrong path while their customers breeze by them for the next competitor.