Archive for the ‘Measurement’ Category

Will Facebook Email make Email Marketing Shexzy again

Posted: November 15, 2010 by captaininbox in Data and Targeting, Deliverability, Email Marketing, Measurement, Social-and-viral
Tags:


According to just about all of the major media sources Facebook intends to launch it’s own fully featured email client as part of the Web 2.0 Summit on Monday 15th of November.

Facebook calls it ‘Project Titan’ and Tech Crunch & the Guardian are calling it the ‘Gmail Killer’.

The email account name will most likely be your own vanity url. So if you haven’t got one already you’d best hurry up in case someone gets the name you want! Some rumours have already confirmed that fb.com has already been purchased by Facebook, presumably for this purpose.

This biggest effect on Email Marketing is the rumour that it will be 100% permission – you will only be able to send email to people who have already given you permission. Things like being friends or fans on Facebook will decide senders’ permission to email a Facebook address.

Challenge for Marketers

Many people have stated that this new level of permission will be the biggest challenge to email marketers ever. With the emergence and popularity of web-apps like Otherinbox which sit in front of multiple inboxes to protect the users of non-permission emails, Facebook’s uber permission stand should not be a surprise.

Recipients are voting with their clicks and they only want email that they have asked for. With Facebook already being a central hub where people have a lot of control over who can see and interact with them, it is likely that many Facebook users will welcome this.

I don’t see this as a challenge, people should know early on that people who are fans on Facebook are people that have gone out of their way to engage with you and are real fans.

Users will have the control over permission, so there will be a larger consequence to getting it wrong and marketers will have to keep the content good to keep the fans in.

The email community who already struggle enough to segregate well should welcome this kind of automatic targeting and now Facebook might do a big chunk of it for you!

Shexzy Email

All of the press is all about Facebook, Twitter,  Google, Apple and Microsoft. With Facebook getting into the email domain, there will be more focus on Email Marketing in the main stream media and those who hold the purse strings will once again be interested in email marketing.

Thus making it shexzy again.

I’m personally very intrigued as to how it will all actually turn out.
Also: the Facebook Search Engine which will apparently use friends’ preferences as well as the user’s to provide results & FBmail will also apparently integrate with Microsoft’s Office Online.

Moving out from Facebook.com to the rest of the internet would put Facebook head to head with Google. This could be a very big leap for Facebook, hopefully not too big in one go but if all of the rumours are even close to right, digital marketing could change a great deal and Email Marketing will be right in the shexzy middle of it.

Email Radio: Luke Glasner’s five favourite email marketing metrics

Posted: September 24, 2010 by captaininbox in Data and Targeting, Email Marketing, Measurement, ROI
Tags: , , , , ,

Luke Stat-Walker Glasner (now a qualified Jedi Master of Stats) properly annihilated Email Radio a week or so ago with his awesome metrics action. I know I often do a write up but I’ve listened to it 3 times now and I can’t do it the justice that Luke himself has.

I do intend to really get to grips with it and make a detailed account of how I will use it. Also I had my guys at Pure360 listen to it to help them get more budget.

Basically on the back of Mark Brownlow’s statement that email is not sexy enough to get the budget from the big boys, they don’t need to hear about open rates and clicks, they want to know if it is profitable.

Luke picks it right up where it left off and tells us how to connect with the bosses and get the internal recognition we need to get budget. We prove profit and we get budget..

Everyone who does email marketing should read this post.

Tuesday we had the pleasure of welcoming email marketing metrics Jedi Luke Glasner of Glasner Consulting to eMail Radio. It was a fantastic show which has gotten raves from those lucky enough to catch it live! If you missed it, you can check the podcast out here! We asked Luke about his five favourite metrics and he’s obliged with this post.

There are many metrics worth tracking in email from average revenues to spam complaints, but which are the ones you need to track for your programs?  Here are five metrics that I track for my program’s success that you can use in yours.

Read more at www.theemailguide.com

Listen to this podcast again

If you target well you get to make your emails Shexzy

Posted: September 23, 2010 by captaininbox in Data and Targeting, Email Marketing, Measurement, Message Content and Design
Tags: , , ,

This month I had the usual chats with people about getting better engagement from their emails. The place I tend to start is the creative, mainly because it is the easiest thing for someone, not as advanced with email as I, to interact and empathise with. Subsequently they are “more inclined to fix an email than ‘faff’ about building a targeted list” as one of them told me recently.

So normally it begins with the pre-header and building for Outlook’s imageless preview pane: keeping the images smaller in the top third, getting more text in etc. etc. the stuff we all say everyday.

However, in the hope of motivating people to want to segment better, there is the opinion that for certain, special emails, that would go to already very engaged subscribers, the image blocking would not be a problem.
This would be because the recipients know that brand already so you only have to worry about the subject line to make them prioritise it. Many recipients will already have safe listed the sender and the others probably just load the images without thinking anymore.

At that point, you have the freedom to be creative, as long as you satisfy various filters’ image to text ratios.

The kinds of email I am talking about are normally things like:

  • Invites to special events with a very targeted audience.
  • People who go to the same thing every year.
  • People who always interact with the emails.
  • Special offers on products that people have on their wish lists.
  • There are also niche lists for scarce things like Pure360′s Scally Rally list for instance.

When there is scarcity and people will be more engaged, you have more freedom to be creative…
…as long as you make the experience good and avoid the junk filters.

In some ways, that can even be a goal for marketers…

Luke ‘Stat-Walker’ Glasner (Jedi of Metrics), tells us to look at the money because that is what the bosses see.
If you can prove profit each time and then make it better, you’re all talking the same language, showing good results and everyone’s a winner.

Too often we only look at the open rates and click throughs, with only one list all getting the same email.
If you target correctly and aim to get more engagement, then send the engaged a prettier email next time, in the knowledge that they will see it all, your life is easier and you should get better conversions.
I’m sure there was a shorter way of saying that?

Then tie that in with Luke’s approach: you are onto a winner and your emails are shexzy!

Can Email Marketing give you Google Juice

Posted: September 14, 2010 by captaininbox in Email Marketing, Measurement, Message Content and Design, ROI, SEO
Tags: , , , ,


If part of the reason that email is forgotten over Social is because links from social media provides google juice where links from emails apparently do nothing, is there anything I can do about it?

I haven’t really got a clue about SEO and trying to Google-it gets me hundreds of pages selling it to me but rarely anything useful. I asked a couple of SEO people who said that because traffic from inboxes aren’t from real web-sites so it can’t help rankings.

I’m not so sure. If the traffic was actually from an inbox I could see it. However, traffic from a marketing email goes to the ESP who hosts the tracked link. It’s the ESP who then reports on the click and redirects to the website.
Bit.ly swaps links and counts the clicks before redirecting to the website and that still gets you Google Juice.

So my first question (of many) is: Why don’t redirects from ESP servers get Google juice when bit.ly links do? or do they?
According to Google anything that does a 301 is followed then Google Juiced but that could only be when the famed Google Bot parses the tweet on-line and not when someone clicks it and gets to your site?

If email links can help search rankings we should really tell someone!
-

Anyway, I’m fairly sure that direct links count especially internal links from one page in your web-site to other pages within your web-site…I’ll come back to that.

Now when someone uses the social share or SWYN in your emails, the link that is shortened and shared is actually the view in a browser link from the email but with the optout link disabled and extra tracking so the ESP knows it’s from SWYN and usually which social site etc. That way it can track who shared, where and how many clicks it got form which network.

So basically it’s the same as a send to a friend and counts each link click in the email by the people who got there from the social site but like Google Analytics it just gives the numbers not the individual tracking.

  • Is there SEO there? Dunno! It’s a publicly accessible webpage but with an obscure url.
  • It maybe hosted on a delegated subdomain of the sending brand’s home domain, does that make a difference? Dunno!
  • The links will essentially be from a sub-domain of the main web domain so would they then count as internal links? Dunno!
  • For Google to even know about it would the external view of the email need the GA tacking JavaScript in it? Dunno!
  • Or is it all rubbish and as long as you have the Google tracking codes in you get something? Dunno!

What if you actually take the code from your email and paste it into a page on your website and them make the SWYN links in your email link to that page, probably bit.ly shortened, then all social traffic could count the same as any other social traffic to your blog posts etc. Also, as the content of your email will be full of links to other pages within the same site it will be full of internal links, more Google Juice.

So really the question left is about the subdomain, if traffic from the subdomain carries the same weight as traffic from the domain, which ever way the subdomain is delegated, it’s easy. As any brand aware marekting is far more likely to tie in an sub-domain than plug in a brand new domain – if their hosting packages allows them to delegate it.
If not you will have to chose between the Google Juice from the self hosted email content and losing out on the deep tracking, or keep the deep tracking from the ESP hosted view in a delegated subdomain and not get as good Google Juice from the internal links

Or am I talking absolute gibberish?

PowerMTA interview on twitter: email marketing deliverability awesomeness

Posted: August 4, 2010 by captaininbox in Best Practice Strategy, Deliverability, Email Marketing, Measurement
Tags: , , , , , ,


Port25 did a very cheeky little twitter interview last night (19:00 UK-Time) where Fred Tabsharani (@tabsharani) interviewed Russ Fletcher (@fletchster) about the up coming V4.0 of Port25′s magnificent #PowerMTA.

After two questions a couple of people butted in with their own questions, My alter-ego asked:
Q: “Hi @fletchster have you added any new features that maybe users have been asking/waiting for?”

A: fletchster: “We are always collecting feedback. 1 new feature born out of multiple requests is feedback loop response management.”

This is a big deal! While many senders large enough to need a PowerMTA box may have the technical skills to handle their own feedback loop management it does mean yet another system. You have your CRM/Profiling database, CMS, Email Software to tie that together and then PMTA to distribute. Normally you would have to manually bolt on the feedback loop management to the CRM/Profiling Database – OR if you have an ESP, that will look after it.
Having PMTA look after it could be a massive weight off.

Also, we’ve seen that some ISPs use different standards to respond to hard bounces, eg: some will use 554 for a spam complaint & 550 for user unknown and others will do it the other way around. It is annoying, even more so when one swaps without telling anyone! fletchster tells us that PMTA has the ability to have rules to handle different ISPs’ codes accordingly – genius!

The final question from tabsharani was:
Q: “What are the most effective and efficient ways to establish IP reputation, in our current deliverability landscape?”

This was the big question, and has us all on the edge of our seat, especially when tabsharani forgot to hash tag the question, so fletchster answered it before people following the just the hashtag saw what the question was (you probably had to be there though – in fact you definitely did)…

A: “In the current landscape, senders should:
1) Use a consistent IP address which is what providers will be monitoring over time.
2) They should also sign mail with DKIM to properly verify sending identity.
3) They should also make sure that FBLs and bounces are properly handled from remote gateways.
4) Senders need to improve content targeting to increase recipient interaction with their messaging as mailbox providers are starting to monitor such activity as a measure of legitimacy”

The usual 3 were listed and as convention has shown, the new 4th aspect of content targeting is there. It’s good that there is consistency.

Then we went onto the Q&A:
Q: MichaelWeisel: How do you see the industry changing re: reputation & deliverability & what are the most important strategies to use?

A: fletchster: I believe the biggest change is that mailbox providers are now looking at interaction metrics as another data point to use for assessing sender reputation and legitimacy. As such, senders will have to re-think their creative prod. processes.
- – -
Q: MichaelWeisel:
We have been pushing transactional to help build IP reputation, thoughts and reassurance this is a good idea?

A: fletchster: I’m not sure deliverability is determined in a transactional v. en masse sense. Rather, transactional content also argue that the way transactional mail is sent is inherently less likely to trip volume filters providers may have in place.

To which MichaelWeisel elaborated: Thought process is, by using existing forms for transactional yields higher % of “good” email addresses = better deliverability.

- – -
It was really good thing to do, I think the build up was a little quiet so the attendance was not as strong as it could have been. I only found out about it 5 mins before it started when I saw tabsharani’s tweet from half an hour earlier.

I think Port25 have the opportunity to really help good senders send good email and help improve deliverability overall. Giving people that opportunity to manage the feedback loops from PMTA and better handle the bounces supports the latest point that senders should focus on the people who really want the content. If you only send emails people genuinely want, they are more likely to get it when they want it and can then share it for you.

Well done guys. Apparently the full transcript will be available on emailexprt.org very soon – look out for the retweets!
-
Correction – as of 03:50 this morning (gmt – 05/08/2010) this post is the transcript :-)
“Transcript released from @Port25Solutions interview yesterday. http://bit.ly/aU7FxI #PowerMTA”

Also there is a Twapper Keeper of the entire tweeting: http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/PowerMTA

- – -

If you are a big sender, your volumes probably won’t warrant a pay per email ASP solution, check out Pure360 Unlimited: you can host the software on your own hardware, behind your own firewall, with PMTA. Pure360 will manage it with you and if you like, they can train people up on the way so you can take control of PMTA after 12-18 months and have full control over your deliverability. If you have the resources and the knowledge, Pure360 will manage the software for you and you manage the PMTA box. On top of that, the model means that you don’t pay for emails!

Ever wondered whether your email marketing results are effected by the weather

Posted: July 22, 2010 by captaininbox in Email Marketing, Measurement, Total Strategy


Pure360 recently did a study to investigate patterns of email marketing results
compared based on the weather.

It is a genius idea with some very cool results, including:
holiday, travel and travel product emails benefit from good weather,
property and vehicle emails benefit from bad weather
and they really drill down into how much the affect is.

It’s definitely worth a read…read on

-
From my point of view, I’m all for it – The more targeting you can do the better!

No longer is email about making the numbers as high as possible so you might get more people clicking,
it’s about getting the right content to the right people and the right time!
Any information we can get to help us achieve this is good information.

Older Entries