It’s the Friday before Christmas. You’re wondering how soon you can slip out unnoticed, or when somebody’s going to open that box of wine in the breakroom fridge, or better yet – how many times you can upload pictures of your friends to Elf Yourself. I know your type… I’ve been you or managed teams of you.

Well, hold out for this last dose of pre-holiday email marketing wisdom. To recap, over the last 12 days, you’ve learned:

1. Introduce marketing into your transactional email strategies to improve the inbox brand experience.
2. Create handheld-friendly content to accommodate this growing audience of email recipients.
3. Test delivery time for global mailings to receive higher response rates.
4. Be selective with partnerships designed to increase emailable audience and temper new addresses into databases over time.
5. Perform a legal gut-check on all email programs for the New Year.
6. Use in-message segmentation and behavioral targeting to increase relevance and reduce the likelihood of unsubscribe.
7. Set frequency standards and know the value of an email address to your organization.
8. Know which email metrics matter to your strategy and how to communicate them internally.
9. Reduce jitters by using an all-encompassing pre-launch checklist.
10. Determine your top domains and throttle for improved delivery results.
11. Develop a subject line strategy and incorporate best practices to increase open rates.
12. Improve

Yes, today’s tip is to IMPROVE. The best way to improve any email marketing element is to test. And testing is easy. Many times we read how email is such a black art and impossible to manage alone. To those articles and authors I say “get over yourself!” Email campaign improvement is not only possible, but probable if you test.

Run A/B tests on subject lines, segments, or queries. Build multi-variant tests on copy or image use. The possibilities are endless and the results successful. StrongMail’s Message Studio 4.0 has testing capabilities, as do other email marketing tools. So lack of technology is no excuse not testing. Testing takes minutes to perform and results are reported in real-time. So lack of time is no excuse for not testing. You’re reading my blog. So obviously lack of creative thought and intelligence is no excuse for not testing. In all seriousness, testing is THE solution to many problems. Consider it the I Ching to email marketing.

Have a happy Christmas, happy holidays and happy emailing!

Over my decade + in the email marketing space the number one question I’ve been asked by marketers seeking to improve campaigns is some version of “What should I put in my subject line?” This is the area where everyone imagines a silver bullet – the ONE word that guarantees delivery, open and action every time. Like an envelope to a direct mail piece, a bow on a present, or a label on a foreign bottle of wine, the subject line tells the recipient whether or not to OPEN the email. Subject lines must be: direct, relevant, timely, and impactful.

Regretfully for the weary, there is no silver bullet for a subject line that guarantees 100% delivery, open, and action. There are a few tricks to follow that have proven successful. But in this channel as in ANY marketing channel - test it. Don’t trust my word alone. Test and see if these best practices work for you too:

Recycled or fresh? – Programs test very well with a consistent, reusable subject line. For example, “Your December Statement Reminder” and “New Music Tuesday” are archetypal program subject lines. If your program strategy does not have a regular sense of frequency and familiarity to it, go ad-hoc and write subject lines unique for every mailing. However, if you’re going with the program model, don’t vary. Research shows it’s the anticipation and recognition of the program subject line that keeps program opens high over time.

ALL CAPS still suck. Initial Caps Represent the Subject Line as a Title of a Story Still to Come – Init caps test well when a unique subject line is written for promotional campaigns. They look polished and stand out in an inbox full of common person-to-person email.

Use action words – Let the recipient know the offer and provide a sense of urgency. For example, a recent email from Hallmark.com - “$10 Coupon Inside - Last Chance to Save.”

Free: The Sequel – "Free" used to be an awesome subject line word, then content-driven filtering became all the rage. Then, use of the word “free” in your subject line was a direct trip to the spam bin. Reputation means more now and therefore if your offer gives something free, don’t’ be afraid to flaunt it. For example, a recent subject line from Red Envelope.com – “FREE 2-day shipping when you use your MasterCard card -- ends 12/20.”

Use the right personalization – First name usage is still a characteristic of spam. However, conditional content-driven subject lines are very effective, yet uncommonly used. For example, I sent a recent iTunes Newsletter directly to the trash because no product in the subject line interested me: “New Video Spotlight: Pirates of the Caribbean, John Lennon, Saving Grace, and more.” I’m a very frequent iTunes purchaser, and this would have been a great opportunity to cross sell a new product or upsell the rest of the "Samantha Who?" season I need.

I love subject line writing (save your slams, I’ve heard them all before) and consider it a challenge to be creative, direct and actionable. Try your hand at applying these tips and let me know if you’ve found some new tips of your own.

The “D” word used to freak everybody out. Deliverability was the guiding force behind most – if not all – email marketing decisions. I’m not going to over-simplify something complicated that requires guidance and assistance, but I’m not going to scare the %$#@ out of you either. Best practices (for more of those, see Spencer) guide how best to get delivered. At the start of any deliverability discussion, you must know who you’re trying to communicate through. You’re communicating WITH the end recipient, but you’re communicating THROUGH a receiving domain. And you’re doing so at their mercy.

If you’re a B-to-C email marketer, your list of top 5 domains probably looks like this: 1. Yahoo!, 2. AOL, 3. MSN, 4. Gmail, 5. Regional domain such as: Comcast, Road Runner, or a “Bell.” If you’re a B-to-B email marketer, anything goes. Today’s installment of my “12 Days of Email Marketing Tips” is to make a list of your top receiving domains so you can effectively throttle email on a domain level to ensure you’re sticking to receiving organizations rules for inbound connections and deliveries.

The StrongMail Deliverability squad provides the ISP rules, all you do is work with them to ascertain who you should throttle against and whose rules you should pay the most attention to.

Domain throttling is much more than a feature on an RFP checklist, it’s a requirement for sending through many ISPs and greatly enhances your ability to make it to the inbox. No wonder lords leap over it!

Pushing the “send” button on an email marketing campaign is the perfect combination of power and fear. With the click of your mouse, you are communicating with thousands – even millions – of opt-in recipients.

Avoid mistakes, the ensuing campaign “pause” and obligatory remarketing message to those affected by a mistake (although these “oops” messages get high open rates) by using this quick checklist. In the past, I’ve created customized checklists for a client to accommodate specialized internal approvals, so use this as a guideline to make your own:

• Double check data source to ensure recipients are coming from the right source
• Double check query to prove count is correct and segment is as planned
• Review content in most popular receiving email clients
• Check links and naming
• Check for operable unsubscribe
• Check for all necessary CAN-SPAM elements
• Send live test campaign to test account
• Check subject line (make sure the word “test” or any other non-live word is removed)
• Run final count
• Check start and end dates
• Send pre-mailing alert to internal teams to make them aware of a large mailing
• Push send

Brad Paisley says he’s “so much cooler Online.” But how does he know? Really. Email marketers know by examining their email metrics and reporting data. However, what metrics matter most and which should we forget?

As the email channel has advanced, sending and response data is everywhere. We can look at it across a campaign, program, recipient, link, or time period. Needless to say, there’s a lot of data and some of it is worth more. As email marketers, we comb through specific data points in search of trends and opportunities. But what does your boss care about? What should you look for? What should your web team look for? Use this handy guide on metrics and who care about them, then apply your internal reporting accordingly:

Your Boss: She cares about what her boss cares about and what his cares about. They all care about answering the problem your email program was invented to solve. If it’s sales, give them sales data from a campaign vs. last year and trend data from the last 5-10 campaigns. If it’s web visits, give them click-throughs over last year. Top sellers or most pages viewed tied to an email are also quite popular with this audience, but not always. Save bounce by domain and bounce per campaign for your own enjoyment. She doesn’t want to explain to anyone with a “C” in their title what a bounce is. That wouldn’t be pretty at all.

Your Customer Database Manager or CRM Manager: He cares about email address attrition numbers in their totality. In other words – the total number of people lost from the database over the last month, quarter, year. This sets the strategy for the number of new addresses that needs to be acquired. Customer data points from segmented campaigns are also important to him.

Your Web Team: These guys like to know what to expect. Are you sending a large campaign with a message that includes lots of links to super deals? Tell these guys before the campaign goes out. They need to keep the website up and running and maintain any ecommerce systems associated with it.

You and Your Email Senders: Everything interests you, right? Bounce reports, DNS errors, FBL returns, clicks, purchases, et.al. are your livelihood. However, the least important metric… opens and clicks over time. Every report looks the same ( \ ). Opens and clicks happen within 48 hours of sending the mailing so don’t be surprised if every time you run this report it looks like a backslash or the right-hand-side of a bell curve.

I’m inspired by the sales and deals at my favorite online retailer, so today’s installment of the “12 Days of Email Marketing Tips” gives you two tips for the price time of one.

This year, JupiterResearch reported 53 percent of email recipients unsubscribe when the offer or content is not interesting to them while 40 percent unsubscribe because we send to them too frequently. Both of these can be overcome. We may never achieve 0% unsubscribe, but we can improve our programs to reduce the number of recipients who break-up with us.

Problem - Offer and content is not interesting:
In-Message Segmentation: Replace content portions of your messages to include only content you can use your database to key from. For example, I live in Atlanta and frequently travel to San Francisco. Please only send me the routes relevant from my market. Wading through fare pairs of Dallas to Seattle mean nothing to me except more work and aggravation to find the fare pairs I truly care about. Recipients will tell you what they want to know about. Ask them. Opt-in is not the time to be timid. If your programs are already in-progress, try a survey.

Behavioral Targeting: Sounds sexy, effective, and hard to do! I talk to all sophistications of email marketers and all admit it’s challenging. Just because something is hard – don’t give up. As they say – if it wasn’t hard everybody would do it! I always advise marketers to start with email metrics such as opens or clicks and remarket. Remarketing on click-throughs is easier when you categorize links and key off those categories when including content blocks.

In the end, the key to relevance is more data than copywriting. Remember the 40/40/20 rule of direct marketing and apply here.

Problem - We send too frequently:
Email and Greed: Let’s face it - email is inexpensive compared to other marketing channels. Plus, it’s wicked fast. You can literally send a campaign in seconds from your desktop. How many times have you received an internal email or a cubicle drive-by from your boss lamenting that sales are down and the cure is yet another email campaign? This lack of strategy and forethought results in recipient fatigue, spam complaints and list attrition. Set standards and frequency caps per program type and stick to them. In my experience the only way to defend this long-term is to know the value of an email address for your organization. Place a number on it and the loss of an address to an unsubscribe becomes tangible and real.

Join me next week for the exciting conclusion of my “12 Days of Email Marketing Tips.” I promise to do my best to cleverly tie eleven pipers piping to a tip. Suggestions welcome.

No offense to my StrongMail associates and industry colleagues who presented at the Email Insider Summit this week, but the absolute best session was an interview with Kevin Olsen, Director of Consumer Protection for the state of Utah. The session’s post-lunch time slot and perfect ski conditions made for a smaller audience than earlier sessions, but for those attending it didn’t disappoint. Olsen talked about the Utah child email registry and the role his office plays in enforcing it and all email related laws in his state. With several marketers asking what these laws were and how they could learn more about them (eek! This is where I cringed), I determined an email regulation download was in order.

So today’s tip is a reminder that we do not live in an unregulated industry in the US or abroad. I encourage you to take inventory of all email programs and run them through a legal gut-check. Below you’ll find links to email laws for US, EU, and AU. Use these, and the advice of an attorney, to ensure your email programs are compliant. Keeping compliant and understanding email laws will ensure protection of the channel into the New Year and beyond. Plus, you get to keep those gold rings instead of hocking them to pay an avoidable fine.

US: CAN-SPAM

Utah Registry and Suppression Purchase

Michigan Registry and Suppression Purchase

EU Directive on Privacy and Email

Each EU member country has their own law related to the Directive. Visit this page on the EU CAUCE site for a list of all links.

AU Spam Act of 2003

Today's installment of "The 12 Days of Email Marketing Tips" provides a tip on list build and co-marketing in your email programs. Several emailers at the EIS this week talked about their company's strategies for list build through partnerships. They all agree that choosing the right partner makes all the difference in getting more opt-ins from the partner's audience. Many of them had learned this lesson through the trial and error of picking partners that didn't fit their audience and vice versa.

Once finding a partner bird worthy to flock with, the next challenge becomes address and data inclusion. In my experience, this works best when the new partner data gets tempered into the email or customer database over time. This will help you manage deliverability reputation and introduce yourself to this newly opted-in audience over time with the least risk.

Forrester reported earlier this year that list build/attrition is the primary concern of email marketers. Partner opt-in programs are a safe way to add new addresses to your promotional email programs. Just pick the right partner with the right audience and temper that data into your programs.

Tomorrow I'm going to "bling" some gold. Out!

Today's email marketing tip has nothing to do with French hens of any number, but was a sweet excuse to use Babblefish to prove my point. Over the years, I've worked with dozens of email marketers sending in multiple languages to foreign countries. These email marketing campaigns are coming from the US, sent by US-based in-house email marketing teams or their agencies. Add translation services to the regular tasks associated with getting an email campaign out the door (testing, coding, images, etc.) and time zone scheduling likely gets lost in the chaos. Campaigns sent to arrive at times optimized for each market outperformed those sent at random times. And often, those random times are the local times of the marketing department clicking "send."

Test send time related to each market. Once optimized time is uncovered, ensure you have enough time in your project to account for the addition of the translation services, and stick to your timing schedule. AS we all know, time of day likely has more to do with campaign success than day of week.

OK, I promise not to belabor the 12 Days of Christmas metaphor, but love and turtledoves go together and love is truly what I feel for my handhelds (iPhone, and to a lesser extent my BlackJack). In today's 12 days of email marketing tips, we're going to address your handheld audience. Your HTML emails are commonly opened on a handheld and there is little more aggrevating than thumb-scrolling through dozens of ugly HTML links before you ever see your first image or text block related to the message content. There are two possible solutions, pick the one easiest for you to implement:

Program a simple text message in the text window of your campaign management application (I'm hoping your choice here is the impressive Message Studio 4.0). Using the recipient agent data to determine what browser was used to open the message, flag that recipient record as a handheld user and always send them text.

Or you can host the HTML version of your message and ask handhelders to click to view the HTML. In either case, you'll need to include language at the top of the message and a link to encourage handhelders to click through. Addressing the environment your messages are being viewed in makes for an overall improvement in the customer experience.

I'm off to enjoy some egg nog soaked Cheerios while checking my iPhone email. Until tomorrow...