Blogs

I had the opportunity to speak at the Canadian Marketing Association annual meeting in Toronto this week, and the topic was email marketing ROI. As some of you may know, I was a CPA before I jumped head first into digital marketing and, in particular, email. So I feel just as at home in Excel as I do in email marketing applications. Now, I know what you are thinking -- how does one go from accounting to blogging about email marketing? Well, it probably has something to do with the fact that I was a terrible accountant. However, I was able to learn a few things that have served me well over the years, and believe it or not, a few of the lessons provide insight that is easily applied to the email channel and how we can look at calculating program effectiveness. Read the full article at my MediaPost Email Insider Blog!

Technology types have been talking about "the cloud" for quite some time, but the term has gone mainstream in recent months. The problem is that not everyone has the same definition or understanding of what it means. A recent Wall Street Journal article emphasizes the confusion with a quote from Oracle's Larry Ellison, "I have no idea what anyone is talking about. It's really just complete gibberish."

While Larry was aiming for high drama, the ambiguity surrounding the term is caused in large part by a rush of companies co-opting the term "cloud" to apply to a very general definition that encompasses any system that processes and serves up information from a separate location. Defined broadly in this way, the Internet is in the Cloud, as is any type of Software as a Service (SaaS) arrangement. However, the current buzz isn't around either of these topics (companies like Salesforce.com have been doing SaaS for years), it's around "Cloud Computing."

Companies with enormous computing infrastructures (e.g. Amazon.com) have begun allowing other businesses to utilize these systems for their own computing needs, which introduces a new and flexible model for deploying technology. Using virtualization technology, these cloud computing providers enable any company to provision a piece of their IT infrastructure and immediately deploy technology in an extremely reliable, flexible and infinitely scalable environment.

In the world of email marketing, that means that companies can now migrate from an expensive and inflexible email service provider to a dedicated email marketing application that they own, and that runs in the cloud. As a result, companies get a powerful, future-proof solution that combines the cost benefits of a software solution with the ease of ownership of a SaaS solution.

In addition to enabling technology ownership without any onsite IT resources, cloud computing by design offers a scalable environment that you can expand or contract as your business needs dictate. This flexibility gives you the power to only pay for what you need at any given point of time.

StrongMail is proud to be the first and only email marketing solutions provider to offer its software via a licensed model in the cloud. Unlike traditional ESPs, StrongMail offers dedicated email marketing solutions that are perfectly suited to take advantage of cloud computing. For maximum flexibility, StrongMail can be deployed fully in the cloud or een "split" so that sensitive data is kept behind the firewall while email delivery and management takes advantage of the full resources of cloud computing. In fact, in 2008, Gartner Research predicted that "The use of on-premise technology in conjunction with cloud-based technologies and platforms will extend what is possible using the cloud," and that's exactly what StrongMail has done.

Whether you take advantage of cloud computing for email marketing or any other application, this new model gives companies a compelling way to leverage technology in a way that's best for their business. If you're interested in learning more about the benefits of applying cloud computing to email marketing, please contact us at (650) 421-4255.

It seems our clients are becoming more and more focused on automation. How can email marketers leverage technology to automate communication workflows, enhance relevance and in general, do more with less? Read my latest Email Insider Blog for some ideas on how StrongMail's clients are marching towards email marketing automation.

With the hundreds of emails that I receive on any given day, an email looking like this would get passed over very quickly in my inbox.

With so much competition in a person’s email inbox, it is critical to design your email to be effective with images on and off. With the images turned off, the majority of the email above does not tell a reader who it's from or what's the call to action.

Let me walk through an example that highlights the potential impact.

 > One in five emails is invisible and ineffective due to blocked images.
    - Email Experience Council (Jan 2007)

> Let's apply the statistic above to a mailing with 1 million delivered messages. 
    - 800,000 delivered with images on
    - 200,000 delivered with images off / blocked

> Assume 50% of emails with images off / blocked were opened.
    - 100,000 total emails potentially looked over in your readers' inboxes.

In this example, wouldn't you want to have an extra 100,000 people read your email? Especially when this can be easily accomplished by tweaking your template so it still offers valuable information when images are turned off.

In terms of ROI, a few small adjustments to your emails will allow you to see improvements across every category.

According to a recent article by USA Today, the number of domain extensions available could skyrocket exponentially in 2010. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently announced plans to release the ability to buy any web address extension that you can think of, ranging from a to z. This means that marketers will be able to buy domains like www.airfare.deals, www.luxury.goods or www.tylenol.pm and use them as both their website and email sending domains.

Some marketers are worried that this will indefinitely open up the number of domain names that squatters can purchase and hold hostage for exorbitant ransoms, viewing this as “a form of extortion.” And certainly, email marketers should keep an eye on this to thwart potential phishing attempts coming from domains such as www.americanexpress.cam. However, given that more than 50% of registered domain names leverage the original .com and .net extensions, I think it’s safe to say that they’ll continue to represent the lion’s share of the market and resonate in consumer’s minds.

In my opinion, this change is more of an opportunity than extortion. Here’s why:

- The endless number of possibilities presents a creative opportunity so vast that it would take some pretty deep pockets to buy all of the domain names that a brand marketer could possibly create.
- The fact that these domain names aren’t branded in the consumer consciousness make them a risky investment for a squatter.
- Visitors aren’t likely to visit these pages unless the person who owns them spends money promoting them.

And in that last point remains the key. Whatever you decide to purchase, make sure that you promote it clearly and widely, or it will likely go the way of the last 18 domain endings that were released. What remains to be seen is how the search engines will treat these new URLs. Will they give prominence to the .com and .net domains or give all domains prominent ranking as it pertains to a specific keyword? Either way, this will be a very interesting and important development to watch.

By Peter Norton

As I speak to clients and prospects, one of the top questions I’m inevitably asked is what they can do to grow their list. While there are numerous ways to do this, I always like to respond with a question of my own: "Do you have any old email files?"

Almost every company I ask has an old list. And, I am not talking about a few thousand email addresses; many were in the hundreds of thousands to a few million. Not surprisingly, none of them wanted to admit that they had so many potentially good email addresses just sitting there.

Companies list several reasons for having these old files, and the top explanations include:

1. These were there before I started. (My favorite)
2. We did not know what to do with inactive emails, so we put them on one list.
3. They were incomplete. (missing first name or missing zip code)

So, my next question to these clients is simply "Do you have a plan for the list." The two most popular responses to this question are "No, because we don’t think we would be able to do anything with it" and "No, because using it would hurt our reputation."

"Fear not email marketers!" I typically exclaim. A strategic, well-executed re-engagement campaign can turn those dusty old filed into gold. The following example is based on actual results from one of my clients.

Example Re-Engagement Scenario

1. The client had an inactive list of opt-ins that had not responded to an email in over one year.
2. List size= one million.

Example Re-Engagement Strategy

1. Created a mini-series of 4 - 6 emails/surveys sent only to the inactive, opt-in list.
2. Delivered the emails over an IP that was different from those used for main list.
3. The purpose of this program was to recapture a portion of the lost audience.
4. Analyzed results after each mailing and made necessary tweaks for the next email in the series.
5. Provided a powerful incentive (if they did not respond, it’s safe to assume they never would.)

Re-Engagement Results

Here are the results achieved by following the strategy outlined above.

   1 million inactive opt-ins @ 90% delivery = 900,000 delivered
                                        15% open rate = 135,000 opened
                                   10% click through = 13,500 clicked through to offer
                                  5% conversion rate = 675 purchased
   675 purchased @ $100 conversion value = $67,500 total revunue

While these results might seem high, remember, they are the actual results from a past client. For such little effort, they were able to grow their list and create net-new revenue.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you go rushing off and start mailing to your inactive lists. You must be careful and take a methodical approach. However, after properly vetting the opportunity and executing it correctly, the gains can be quite rewarding!