The Whitelist

Even if you’ve already found the best email service provider (for you) and your deliverability is consistently high, to maximize your email marketing ROI, you still need to carefully consider your email rendering. And that means doing your research, because when it comes to email design and rendering, there is no “one size fits all.”  

Four blogs posted by ExactTarget delve into email rendering for four different major email clients: Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook 2007 and Hotmail. The blog posts are short and to the point and actionable…and email best practices you need to know.
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Recently I was reading a list of what email marketing folks need to know in Loren McDonald’s article “Email Success Requires Well-Educated Marketers” as published in EmailInsider. Loren’s articles are always insightful yet practical. He gives out information that matters, that you can act on. This article is no different.

He starts the article asking who is responsible for educating email marketers? The email service providers (ESPs)? The employers? And he lists all the facets email marketers should be knowledgeable about, including email design, email best practices, email delivery, email copywriting, email strategy and more. It’s an exhaustive list, but it’s right on: An email marketer worth his or her salt should be up to speed on every topic he lists.
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I’m CEO of an email solutions provider. I enjoy beautifully deigned emails. I like pretty pictures as much as the next person. But as the holiday email marketing advice continues and the many screenshots of retailers past email marketing campaigns are touted in email and blog and email newsletter advice, I get just a little put off by the little detail none of these people are mentioning: All that pretty email design means nothing when recipients have images suppressed or issues with email rendering.

Many, possibly most B2C email marketing recipients have images blocked, whether they know it or not. Plus B2C emails come up against rendering issues due to so many consumers using email clients like Yahoo or AOL.
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Are you wondering how to include mobile in your email marketing process? Are you stymied by the prospect of communicating to customers via the tiny screen of a cell phone or PDA? Do you even think mobile has a place in your managed email marketing program?

Unlock the mystery of mobile when speaker Michael Becker, VP Mobile Strategies, Mobile Labs, iLoop Mobile, Inc., presents before the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California on Wednesday, September 16.
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Part of your email marketing process has to be knowing your audience. After all, how can you have effective email copywriting if you don’t know whom you’re copywriting to? You have to know their pain points, worldviews, how they perceive the problem your product or service can help them solve, and their state of mind when they see your email.
 
As an email services provider, we give email copywriting a high priority because we understand the power of words in email best practices, from your From name to your email subject line to those first few words of text seen in the Preview Pane.
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Email services provider ClickMail Marketing, offering the nation’s largest selection of email service providers (ESPs), has made three different lists! As recognition for our rapid growth over recent years, we’ve been ranked by three separate business publications as being one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States.

The San Francisco Business Times, Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, and Inc. Magazine have all rated ClickMail Marketing high on their 2009 lists of fastest growing private companies.  Email solutions provider ClickMail’s rapid growth is reflected on the following 2009 business lists:
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Bill McCloskey at Email Data Source (EDS) recently published an article titled “Follow me” replacing “friend me”? on Twitter getting more popular than Facebook. According to a recent study cited by Bill, more companies had a presence on Twitter (54%) than on Facebook (29%). Of the 100 companies studied, about one-fifth used only used one social media channel (their choices being Twitter, blogging and Facebook). of the three channels. And they choose Twitter 76% by a landslide of, versus companies choosing only Facebook (14%) or only blogging (10%).  
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Pivotal Veracity gets to do something others in email marketing don’t: They get to sit down with the ISPs and find out exactly what’s on the email deliverability horizon. Now in a pivotal report by Pivotal Veracity titled, “What’s in store at the ISPs, 2009-2010,” you can learn what to expect in the coming year straight from the mouths of the major ISPs. In this report, we highlight some of the key changes occurring at the top ISPs and offer advice and insight to help mailers respond effectively for the remainder of 2009 and into 2010.

During their recent meetings with the major ISPs to discuss email deliverability, the Pivotal Veracity team asked about and now have reported on:

• The use of authentication (Domain Keys “DK”, Domain Keys Identified Mail “DKIM”, and Sender ID)
• ISPs’ plans to change the way they measure reputation
• Whether they intend to move to domain‐based reputation models (instead of the IP address‐based reputation models of the past decade)
• The increasingly important role individual end‐user actions have on deliverability
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B2B email marketing folks sometimes suffer email envy for their B2C email marketing counterparts. The B2C email marketing side typically has much bigger audiences to email, corporate firewalls as an issue, and they can be more creative in their email design and email copywriting. But that doesn’t mean the B2C’ers don’t still have email best practices to follow, as our latest email newsletter points out.

See the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer for tried-and-true email best practices from this email service provider. The email newsletter briefly touches on key email best practices for the B2C email marketer:

· Segmenting and targeting
· Relevance
· Optimization
· Testing
· Whitelisting
· Deliverability
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Transactional emails might be the most under-utilized of all email marketing tools. Taken for granted. Over looked. Dismissed. Maybe transactional emails are like the Cinderellas of email marketing! Poorly dressed in shoddy clothing, they do a lot of hard work that’s unappreciated, but they can also be dressed up and attract attention. In our case as email marketing folks, attention usually means sales.  

Transactional emails include:      

• Order confirmations       
• Receipts       
• Shipping confirmation 
• Billing notices        
• Regular statements 
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