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It seems like I have been working in the email and digital marketing space for as long as I can remember. I still think back to the days when I was working at NASCAR.com, and we realized the value of personalization in emails and noticed significant increases when we simply mentioned a fan's favorite driver – let alone if we put their photo in the message rather than the generic NASCAR.com logo.  A lot has changed over the years, yet it seems like many of us in the delivery space are still talking about the same best practices over and over.

As I look back at all of the various suggestions and recommendations that I personally have given over the years, there are two pieces of advice that I still believe are the most important for everyone to remember:

1. Don’t compare yourself to others; focus on what works for your business model and customers
2. Relevancy is the key

First, let’s talk about how much we all try to keep up with the Joneses and how it can actually hurt us more than help us. In just about every aspect of our lives these days, we seem to want to compare ourselves to each other. It might be comparing your house to those in your neighborhood, or maybe you are a car person and you always need to have the nicest car. I think this tendency comes from a need to feel like we are doing better than others – and the same thing happens in the  digital marketing space. Too many of us want to look at what others are doing and then assume that we should be doing the same thing—if company X can send mail like that, I should be able to as well.

A perfect example of these type of observations and wanting to be like everyone else in the industry is when marketers come to me (or others) and say something like “Well all these other daily deal sites send messages to their entire list every day, I think we should do that too.” The problem with this perspective is that many times it doesn’t make sense for their business model. Maybe the company doesn’t have a model that generates enough new and relevant content to send to all of their users at that frequency, which takes us to my next point—it is all about Relevancy.

I can still remember talking with Dave Lewis over 5 years ago, when he was one of the few people at the time that was really talking about relevancy. Every time I say the word, I hear it in his voice. At the time, I didn’t always understand all the nuances, but as time went on, I soon became an equal proponent of relevancy.  In short, sending messages to users that don’t connect in any way will not help your brand and may actually hurt it. If you continue to send irrelevant messages, fewer people will open them and more will eventually unsubscribe or even mark your messages as SPAM.

So try to think back to when you got started in the digital marketing world---has anything changed in the way you view things? Are you still telling your executives or your co-workers the same best practices as you were back then?

It was recently announced that BigPond users will be migrating to utlize the Windows Live mail platform beginning in April. This is good news forsenders as BigPond did not have any type of Feedback Loop or other items such as are available through Microsoft's systems. Click Here for more information.

This could be the beginning of a new trend as many broadband providers around the world see email as a cost center and can likely out-source it to larger providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and others at a fraction of the cost. Stay tuned for any additional developments.

As I am sure many of you have already heard, there is a new industry organization that is made up of ISPs and senders to help fight against phishing attacks on our end users. DMARC, which stands for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance", is a technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse by solving a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols.

This is a great step forward in the continued efforts to help protect all users. The technical specification seems to be fairly easy to implement and we are currently testing it with one of our customers already. As we continue through this test I will provide more information as well as any other additional industry news.

For more information please go to http://www.dmarc.org/

Without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions. Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements. 

Some simple actions to be considered: 

1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small 
pull down menu that appears, select "settings" 
2. Then click "Account" on the left/bottom 
3. In the column next to Account, select the option "Manage Social Advertising" 
4. Finally un-tick the box "LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising" 
5. and Save

Now that the holiday season is over and we are all getting back into the normal swing of things, a lot of digital marketing folks are beginning to look at their email marketing lists and trying to figure out how to winback some customers who haven’t engaged with them a while. This is a common challenge across the industry, and I have heard many different recommendations from a number of experts in the field.

There are a number of steps you can take to prep for these types of programs and help ensure a successful campaign to win back your customers. While the creative and actual messaging is essential for a successful program, it's important to remember that all your efforts in those areas won’t matter one bit if you don’t put in the effort on the front end.

These three steps will help you prepare for this year’s big win-back campaign.

1. Determine What an Inactive Customer Means to You
If you're advising a client on a winback program, don't make the common mistake of making suggestions before you completely understanding their business model. It is extremely important to carefully examine their customer lifecycle and go backwards.

I will often hear experts say that if someone hasn’t opened or clicked on a message in 3 to 6 months (or some other arbitrary date range), you should simply remove them from your list. While this might be a decent starting point for the masses, I believe you could be missing out on some valuable customers. Let’s say for example that you send a monthly newsletter.  Are you only going to give the person three opportunities to engage with you before you start asking them to come back? In their minds, maybe they never left and were just busy working on some high-level projects that prevented them from focusing on the information you have sent them.

2. Examine the Content You Are Sending Them
If there's one term that has been repeatedly drilled into my head more than any other in the many years I've been in this industry, it's "relevancy."  If you are not sending your customers relevant offers and information, how can you expect them to be engaged with your brand and marketing campaigns? Take a look back at the last 6-12 months and see if your campaigns are still offering your customers something that they can’t get somewhere else. Is the information that you are sharing with them meaningful and important to them, or are you simply sending everyone the same offers with no regard for past engagement?

3. Don’t Send Win-Back Emails from the Same System as Your “Master” List
One of the most important things to think about and prepare for when creating a re-engagement campaign is to make sure you have a separate IP for sending these messages. Because of the nature of the campaign, you are likely to see a higher than usual unknown user and complaint rate. By creating a separate sub-domain and sending off of a separate IP, you are less likely to negatively affect the rest of your email marketing messages.

After you've taken the three steps above, it is time to focus on the messaging, creative and potential special offers you are going to employ to get your customers engaged with your brand again. Remember, doing the work on the frontend will save you time and agony on the backend.

One final note: when creating a re-engagement program, make sure to not overwhelm your customers with too many messages. If they have already become inactive for whatever reason, continuing to send them more and more mail is not going to get them to come back. In fact it will likely cause them to mark all of your messages as spam, which would be worse than simply losing them as a customer.

A well-planned and executed winback campaign is certainly worth the effort, and these three steps will help get you started.

Good Luck and Good Sending.

One thing that has always been extremely important to me my entire life has been teamwork. From the time I started to play sports I realized how important teamwork was in order to be successful. However, as we get older, we often forget this simple fact. In this day and age, even when we look at our favorite sports teams, most of the time we focus on one or two key players that are the stars and not the rest of the team that helps them achieve their star status.

What does teamwork have to do with deliverability you might be asking yourself? Well, everything. No matter what your focus is within the digital marketing eco-system, you are on a team and must work with others to ensure that you are reaching your customers and sending them relevant campaigns.

More times than I would like to admit, I have worked with various companies that had no idea who, or what departments, were creating and sending email messages. The problem with this is that if there is not a single vision and global understanding of how your customers are being communicated to, there is a chance that you will lose them as a customer in the long run.

This could happen for a number of reasons; most commonly this is due to over-communication. Without a global view of the various campaigns that are getting sent to each and every customer, there is a good chance they might find the number to be too high for their liking. Because of this, I usually present a number of opportunities to clients in order to reduce the likelihood of this occurring.

1. Perform a messaging audit. For most larger companies, there are different departments that are sending campaigns promoting their particular piece of the business. Many times there are opportunities to work together and combine various programs that potentially can increase your ROI.

2. Control message frequency. Determine the maximum number of messages a customer should receive from your organization in a specified time period. When I first started in this industry many years ago, I would have never believed that there would be an entire business model based on sending daily emails to the company’s entire list. But organizations like Groupon, LivingSocial and others have made this acceptable. The key is to understand if this will work for your business model and if you are setting the proper expectations with your customers. If your company is sending out campaigns from so many different departments that even you aren't aware of them and are surprised to see them,  don’t you think it is likely that your customers will be too?

3. Create a preference center. Allowing your customers to determine the types of messages that they wish to receive as well as how often they want to receive them enables you to maintain that customer in your database with less of a chance of losing them to an unsubscribe or a spam complaint.

As we all work hard to get through this holiday season, remember that you must respect your customers and the valuable space that they are allowing you to take up in their inbox. In order to continue this relationship, it is important to understand how your entire company is communicating with them, and work together as a team to keep them as a customer.

Don’t think that these are things that you can do on your own—you need your entire team. Together, you can continue to be successful as a brand and as a digital marketing organization, because you will continue to reach your customers' inboxes.

As we head into 2012, you should take a close look at your email list hygiene practices to make sure that you are maintaining a good sender reputation and maximizing deliverability. Good list hygiene combined engaging emails and sender authentication will help you build a solid email reputation with your top ISPs.  

List hygiene may not be the most exciting aspect of email marketing, but it is essential for good deliverability. Simply follow the seven tips below to get your lists in order for the New Year.

1. Scrub Your Lists Regularly. Keep your email lists clean by regularly running them against a register of known bad domains and removing duplicate addresses and role accounts. You can automate the latter by adding “info@*,” “sales@*,” and other common addresses to your suppression list. Your email system may also enable you to automatically suppress bad domains and role-based distribution lists.

2. Remove Bad Domains. Bad domains should be removed immediately. Closely review your failure reports, identify bad addresses and evaluate whether they are the result of a data capture problem or a non-existent domain.

3. Review Data Capture Processes– List hygiene starts with collecting good data. Make sure your sign-up forms prompt users to fix incorrect email address or syntax errors before they are submitted.

4. Actively Manage Hard and Soft Bounces – In addition to having established policies for automatically removing hard-bounced addresses due to bad addresses and unknown users, you should have similar policies for removing soft bounces after a pre-determined number of consecutive failures.

5. Promptly Remove Unsubscribes – Don’t wait the 10 days allowed by CAN-SPAM to process unsubscribes. Remove unsubscribed addresses immediately to avoid users hitting the “this is spam” button and damaging your sender reputation.

6. Mark Inactive Addresses for Reengagement – Transfer inactive addresses to another list that is designed to reengage them.  A good rule of thumb for identifying inactives is no more than 12 months – but 6 months can be preferable depending on factors related to the seasonality of your business.

7. Sign Up for Feedback Loops and Whitelists – Sign up for available feedback loops at your top ISPs to monitor the number of spam complaints generated from your mailings. Similarly, maximize your inbox delivery by signing up for whitelists offered by ISPs and other providers.

There is a great article talking from Mashable today discussing what the new FTC settlement means for Facebook and other social media websites with regards to privacy. While Facebook will have to go through a third party bi-annual audit it seems that they have already learned from their past mistakes, but this ruling is important for other social networking sites to learn from.  For more informaiton click here--http://mashable.com/2011/11/29/facebook-ftc-settlement-2/

As a member of the EEC, I am an active member in a number of their groups, including the Speaker Bureau and the Deliverability Roundtable. Both of these groups have some fantastic people involved in them, but we can always use more. So take the time, become a member, and enjoy getting to know your fellow email experts and help drive the industry in the direction of the future.

For more information, please go to the Speaker Bureau and Deliverability pages. Make sure to check out any others you might be interested in as well.

Email marketing success is dependent on many things, not the least of which is understanding the latest innovations and changes to major email services…and Hotmail certainly qualifies as a major email service.

Just recently Microsoft announced some major changes to what their webmail services such as Hotmail will look like and how users will interact with their email moving forward. One of the biggest reasons Microsoft made these changes was because they realized that getting rid of true spam was not enough. They understand that many people report legitimate emails, such as newsletters, offer campaigns and even notifications. Users might do this for a number of possible reasons

1. They no longer want to receive the email and do not trust the unsubscribe links
2. They feel it is easier to check a large number of emails at once and mark them as spam rather than going into each email and unsubscribing.

Microsoft calls this type of mail graymail, and they have created new ways to help users organize their inbox and remove the clutter. Previously Microsoft had implemented the “Sweep” feature which allowed customers to automatically move specific emails to different folders. They have now taken that technology a step further by creating a specific "Newsletter" folder where they will automatically put newsletters it delivered to users.

Another item that will potentially change the graymail issue is the implementation of the one-click unsubscribe. By utilizing this process, Microsoft will ask you if you want to unsubscribe from the mailing. Microsoft will then respond to the marketer notifying them to remove the user from future mailings. For any mailings received from the marketer after this process was put in place, the mailings will be automatically sent to the Junk folder.

Finally, another change that Microsoft has implemented is the ability to flag emails. Much like Gmail’s labels, or Outlook's flags, this functionality allows users to no longer have to mark messages at unread in order to go back and follow up on items but create flags in order to help them better organize their messages in their inbox.

As a marketer, these changes should not change your approach to your email marketing campaigns. As we have always said at StrongMail, it is all about relevancy. If your campaigns are not relevant to your users, you will not see the returns you are looking for. But if your customers find your campaigns relevant they will look for those emails no matter where they land within their mailboxes.

In addition to deliverability news found here, you can also stay connected to the Email Marketing Insights Blog for more of the latest news in email marketing.