Email Marketing

I often get emails from professional services companies looking for someone to write their firm’s newsletter. They don’t have the time or resources to do it themselves but they know in the back of their minds that they need to do something to keep in contact with prospects and clients.

Generally, firms are looking for one of two options:

1) to buy already published articles - perhaps written by a trade organization
2) to pay someone to research and write articles for the firm on an ongoing basis

The advantage of the first is that it’s cheap and fast. The advantage of the second is that you are paying for unique content.

The problem is that by outsourcing your newsletter, you are missing a great opportunity to show your prospects and clients who you really are.

Professional services firms have a hard enough time differentiating themselves from everyone else. By publishing a newsletter, you have the chance to humanize your firm. A good newsletter is relevant to your readers’ interests while demonstrating your expertise. And it lets prospects and clients see who you are through your writing style and opinions.

The truth is that people do business with people they like and trust, not because your firm has over 100 years of experience or that you provide the highest level of customer service at affordable prices. That’s just marketing hype to them.

And they don’t have time to read something unless it is relevant to them. Sure, staying on top of the latest news in the industry helps you showcase your expertise, but readers don’t care unless that news impacts their business.

A great newsletter can show prospects and clients that you understand their concerns and can help them solve their problems. And your firm is in the best position to know what content is relevant to their needs. What questions keep popping up? What issues are they concerned about when you talk to them? Those issues are where your articles should focus.

Yes, if you were to pay an outside marketing firm or freelance copywriter to look into these issues, they’d probably uncover them - but it would take time. You already know what they are and can easily address them.

Yes, writing a great newsletter takes some effort. But it can be much more effective and rewarding than the alternatives.

Clickz.com reports a new study by Osterman Research found that 44% of computer users have reduced their use of e-mail and the Internet in the last 12 months.

Over 80 percent of e-mail users believe the parties most responsible for spam are product vendors who employ spam advertising tactics and Internet service providers. However, only 26 percent of e-mail users believe ISPs have been effective at addressing the spam problem; 11 percent believe vendors have been effective, the survey found.

Respondents, however, didn’t simply blame only vendors and ISPs. Almost 70 percent of people surveyed assumed personal responsibility for stopping their spam problems, more so than their company employers (62 percent); the federal government (45 percent); or state or local governments (32 percent).

Yes, despite what you’ve read recently in the news, Can-Spam legislature is working!

According to an article today on Clickz.com:

The FTC shut down six businesses and froze the assets of five individuals this week. All were behind the sending of sexually explicit spam. The sleaze factor is what made the headlines. What should make all you marketers, affiliates, e-mailers, and business owners sit up and take notice is what was buried several paragraphs down. Of all the individuals named in the suit, only one actually sent any spam.The others landed in legal hot water because they paid him to do it.

“It’s not just people who push the button to send the spam who can be held liable,” said Eileen Harrington, associate director of the FTC’s Marketing Practices Division.

Add that to the recent lawsuit filed last week:

The men allegedly set up a number of Nevada-based shell companies to distribute spam, according to the suit. Together, the companies made up the fourth largest illegal spam operation in the world, according to a statement by the Texas Attorney General.”We’re very excited by Attorney General Abbott’s action,” said Aaron Kornblum, internet safety enforcement attorney for Microsoft. “This set of defendants sent out tens of millions of illegal messages through our Hotmail (free Web-based email) system to our customers.”

Kornblum said Microsoft worked with the Texas Attorney General’s office for almost one year on the case.

And the AOL statistics through November 2004 that report

according to AOL members, spam has been drastically reduced in the past 12 months by over 75 percent.

and we may win the war on spam yet!

Clickz.com just published an interesting article on email metrics and what you might expect. Author Jeanne Jennings writes:

Average open rates for house lists are running in the mid-30s (34.3 percent, according to DoubleClick). The range I’m seeing, based on public sources and my clients’ performances, is the mid-20s to just over 50 percent.

Average click-throughs for house lists (calculated as a percentage of messages delivered, not the percentage opened) are running in the high single digits (DoubleClick reports 8.2 percent); the range I’m seeing is just over 1 percent to just under 20 percent.

The latest metrics confirm something I’ve seen throughout my career: Third-party lists don’t perform nearly as well as house lists. The gap in e-mail lists is very pronounced, with third-party lists seeing open rates of one-half to one-third less than house lists (less than 20 percent on average, often less than 10 percent). Click-throughs on these rented lists are also lower, with a range of zero to just over 2 percent.

From my own experience, I’m seeing similar results with the average open rates (the number of unique users that open your email / everyone you sent the email to). I’ve even gotten as high as 55% on a few emails!

In terms of click-throughs (the number of unique users that click to your website / everyone you sent the email to), I’m seeing closer to 15% to mid-20% for a number of highly targeted lists. I’ve found that the less targeted the list, the lower the click-through rate.

Checking Your Own Metrics

Just because you send an email newsletter doesn’t mean people are actually reading it. Email metrics give you hard data to analyze whether people are even opening your email and which links and features are most popular.

If you’ve been running an email list for any length of time, you’ll have a great source of data to look at trends. I find that it’s always interesting to analyze the email contents if I get extremely low open rates or extremely high click-through rates. Often the low open rates seem to correspond to the date/time when I sent it. High click-through rates are great real time data to judge what readers are interested most in.

How Can You Check Metrics?

If you’re still sending email through Outlook, it’s probably time to try an email hosting provider that offers metrics as part of their services. I’ve been using Topica, though there are a number of others.

There are a number of benefits to using an Email Service Provider including:

• Ongoing monitoring of email metrics
• Automatic management of any unsubscribe or contact information changes
• Automatic management of any bounces (and I’ve been seeing about 4-7% per emailing, so it adds up)
• CAN-SPAM compliance to meet government and industry standards
• Setting consecutive autoresponders for automatic follow ups

It seems most companies still aren’t. A recent white paper from Arial Software detailed the results of an audit they conducted of 1057 organizations with a prominent online presence - including Fortune 500 companies. The results were not good at all.

They found that only one third of online businesses send emails that are CAN-SPAM compliant. The main reasons why most newsletters fail the CAN-SPAM compliance test include failing to include an unsubscribe link and not clearly identifying the source of the email.

So, how can you make sure that your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant? Here are 5 email best practices:

1. Always offer the ability to unsubscribe.
2. Include your organization’s name in the FROM email address and at the top of each email message. You should also include your company’s postal mailing address in your email.
3. Use a double opt-in policy - when someone enters their email into your form, send them an email asking them to confirm their subscription by clicking a link in that email. Only subscribe them when they click that link.
4. If someone unsubscribes from your list, remove their email immediately.
5. Don’t send an excessive volume of emails, but do try to publish on a regular basis.

One of the major challenges for B2C email marketers is getting email successfully delivered to AOL users, who can make up anywhere from 20-25% of their email databases.

If AOL users make up a portion of your email base, Clickz.com has published a 2 part series on how to increase your delivery rates.

AOL User Preferences

According to a 2003 Lucid Marketing Study, AOL users share these preferences:

• 90% of respondents access e-mail primarily from home.
• 77% rank “message loads fast” as of primary importance for e-mail messages received.
• 53% prefer plain text messages over HTML.
• 58% always use a dial-up modem (this number declined since last year, of course, but clearly a significant percentage of subscribers connect via a dial-up).
• 62% always or sometimes access e-mail via AOL’s Web site.
• “Message loads fast” is at least 62 percent more important than “no scrolling” and “customized content” for users.

Helpful Tips

• apply for inclusion on the AOL whitelist
• AOL will block messages if they include improperly formatted links , such as using the IP address instead of a domain name in hyperlinks or using bad HTML or bad link syntax
• create an AOL specific message
• AOL has endorsed the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and asks current and prospective whitelist members to set up SPF records
• sending messages in plain text, RTF, or even HTML without images
• AOL allows approximately 16 characters in the sender field and around 50 characters in the subject
• As most AOL users open e-mail at home, optimum send times might be early mornings, evenings, and even weekends
• Because AOL includes a “report spam” feature, even the best permission-method marketers may receive AOL spam complaints.

» Read Article: Tips for Increasing AOL E-Mail Delivery Rates, Part 1
» Read Article: Tips for Increasing AOL Delivery Rates, Part 2

A recent white paper by email provider, Return Path, found that if you want your email to be read, send it Mondays between 6-10AM.

Saturdays and Sundays are the worst days to send out email. Return path believes this is because many spam filters use the email’s time/date to determine whether it qualifies as spam.

» Download White Paper: Email Deliverability Rates Impacted by Time Campaigns Sent

Today, Yahoo upgraded its free email service in anticipation of the release of Google’s Gmail. It is now giving users 100MB of space (compared with Google’s 1GB). Google’s Gmail has been criticized in the past for privacy concerns because each email will be scanned by a computer that mines for keywords. Google will then place targeted ads in each email based on those words. Yahoo is betting that by increasing the amount of email space they offer, space will become a commodity and users will look to other things such as their privacy policy and content when choosing which provider to use.

“With the new Yahoo Mail, consumers won’t have to think about mailbox size,” said Yahoo vice-president Brad Garlinghouse.”When they judge webmail value, they’ll continue to look at all the things that make Yahoo Mail number one, including privacy practices, superior spam and virus protection and integrated calendaring and alerts.”

• Yahoo acts to head off Google webmail challenge
• Hands Off My Google
• Authentication: A Good Start, Not a Final Answer

Since the Do Not Call registry went into effect, there’s been talk of a Do Not Email registry that would follow in its footsteps to eliminate spam. However, today the FTC rejected that idea. The commission chairman noted the following today.

“A national registry was a great solution to unwanted telemarketing calls,” said Timothy Muris, the chairman of the commission at a news conference today. “At this time it’s not the solution to unwanted e-mail.”

One potential problem to spam is focus on an authentication system that can determine whether an email actually came from a false address. Bill Gates had mentioned some type of email postage system earlier in the year.

» Read NY Times article: Federal Agency Declines to Create Do-Not-Spam Registry

Most marketers take an integrated approach that uses both email and direct marketing to reach prospects. This article lists the benefits and draw backs of using email, and why you should still incorporate direct mail into your marketing campaigns.

Benefits of an Email Campaign

• It’s far cheaper. Using production costs only, Gartner estimates around 10 times cheaper, but if you include creative costs & backend, you’re still looking at somewhere between 2-5 times less cost.
• It’s quicker. Email campaigns tend to be quicker to execute and to get results, which can be tracked immediately after responses are sent out, whereas direct mailings can take several weeks to get any kind of feedback. This quick response time allows marketers to customize and adjust their campaigns to maximize effectiveness.
• Email can be more easily personalized to include recipient’s name and other information.
• According to Gartner, the response rate to emailings is not significantly different from direct mailing campaigns, with both being around 1%. Obviously, the more targeted your campaign is, the better your response rate to either campaign will be.

Why Not Solely Use Email

• There are a growing number of people that consider all commercial email “spam” and will not even look at commercial email. There are also numerous websites that advise those who want to eliminate spam to set up an email account solely for their online identity - one email address they use for all online transactions and postings. Odds are that you are not going to reach these people through an email campaign regardless of what you do.
• There are still people without email, though that number is diminishing rapidly. However, some still only use their email addresses for work and will not give them out to commercial vendors or publicize them. Others change email addresses frequently so many of the email addresses may not even be valid.
• Direct mail tends to be more easily customized when you have a specific target in mind. If you want to target a group of executives at specific companies, sending direct mailings will probably be the easiest way to reach all of them. Yes, they may all have email addresses, but you may have a very difficult time hunting them all down or finding a list that specifically targets them.
• Direct mail also has the potential to capture your audience’s attention immediately. Whereas, emails can easily be deleted without even reading the content, direct mail has that 1-2 second potential to grab the attention of whoever is handling the mail.
• Marketing research shows that opt in emailing yields higher results than traditional commercial emailing. However, does everyone on your mailing list make up the entirety of those you want to target? Some of your potential customers may have already opted out & won’t receive the information. Others on your list may be students interested in the industry in general, competitors monitoring your strategy, or people that aren’t anywhere near the geographical region you are targeting.
• Does it fit with your branding strategy? Will your organization benefit from an html or plain text email vs a direct mailing that may have a punch out business/reminder card they may keep with them? Email tends to be deleted or forgotten about, but a physical direct mailing may serve as an attention grabbing reminder, a pin up on a bulletin board, or a conversational piece among office members.