The Whitelist

When a Dirty In-House Email List Costs the ISPs Money, It’s Time to Clean Up!

If your in-house email list hasn’t had a good scrubbing lately, it’s time to clean house. A clean list has always ranked high among email marketing best practices, but now even more so as ISPs crack down on email marketers who waste their time…and their money.

As an email marketing agency focused on numbers and deliverability, we understand that it’s hard to see the size of your list shrink when bad or dormant email addresses get removed. It’s worth it though. Remember, your goal is a quality list, not a quantity one. You’re far better off with 5,000 names that respond to your content than 15,000 that don’t.

Scrubbing your in-house email list might mean fewer names, but it also means higher ROI from your email marketing because you’re marketing to a more responsive audience. In addition, you’re improving your email delivery rate by improving your sending reputation. And you’re pleasing the ISPs, who are the ultimate gatekeepers between you and your prospects.

ISPs still see emailing to bad and inactive addresses as sloppy and careless on the part of the marketer, and they will be more likely to flag your emails as spam if you continue to do so. But now we’re seeing the major ISPs thinking of these unnecessary emails as an expense too. If you’re already annoying an ISP because you’re carelessly sending to people who haven’t responded to your emails in over a year—showing an obvious lack of interest in your content—imagine how annoyed they’ll be when they think of those wasted emails as costing them money to boot?

The answer was and still is good list hygiene. Start with email marketing best practices that require an opt-in. Use a Preference Center to give subscribers control. Then keep your list squeaky clean with regular scrubbings.

Your list will be clean, your subscribers responsive and the ISPs pleased. What more could you ask for?

Get tips for scrubbing your in-house email list.

As if MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2012 didn’t offer enough quality information and learning resources to tempt you to Las Vegas from February 10th to 12th, consider this: You’ll be able to get one-on-one coaching too.

That’s right. In addition to the sessions and speakers–plus networking with your email marketing peers—you’ll be able to delve deep into your organization’s own individual email marketing challenges by sitting down with an expert to discuss one of 12 different topics:

1. Email Design and Creative

2. Email Deliverability

3. Measurement

4. B2B Email Marketing

5. Mobile Marketing

6. Social Media and Email Marketing

7. Landing Page Optimization

8. Advanced Email Marketing Strategy

9. B2B Lead Optimization

10.  Search Engine Optimization

11. Email Content Creation

12. Email Marketing Value Propositions

Best of all, three of our email marketing agency team will be among the email marketing experts doing the coaching: Cameron Kane, Michael Kelly and Grant Johnson. These are three of the smartest guys in the industry, with decades of hands-on, in-the-field experience.

Learn more about the topics above and the experts doing the coaching. You’ll see bios and photos for Cameron, Michael and Grant, so you’ll know what kind of insight they’ll offer.

Then get your email marketing consulting scheduled. To book your one-on-one coaching time, click the link to schedule an appointment online. You will be able to schedule online at the registration desk during the Summit as well, but we recommend scheduling ahead of time because appointments are taken on a first-come, first-served basis.

Now for the close, if you’re still on the fence about the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012: What if you could save $700 on the registration fee?

If the sessions don’t hook you, the experts don’t sway you, and the personal coaching can’t convince you, then maybe a $700 discount will. Yes, $700, courtesy of email marketing agency ClickMail. To get your discount, register for the Email Summit and enter priority code 185-ST-1003 at check out. That’s it.

Oh, and get your coaching scheduled. A.S.A.P. Before all the slots are filled and all the expert advice goes to your competitors instead.

Email Marketing in 2012: A Few (More) Predictions for the Upcoming Year

One thing about being an email marketing agency: One must always have a finger on the pulse of and an eye on the blogs of the industry! Email is blessed with so many knowledgeable, insightful people who can look at the big picture and help guide our everyday strategic and tactical decisions. ClickZ is a wonderful resource for this kind of insight. In particular, ClickZ’s latest blog by David Daniels has some predictions for you for 2012, a few of which intrigued us enough to expand upon here.

We like David’s statement about behavioral segmentation. As an email marketing agency, we’ve been pushing segmentation as an email marketing best practice for years. Why? Relevance. Segmenting means targeting. Targeting means relevance. Relevance means increased email delivery rates and higher conversion rates. As David describes it, behavioral segmentation is even more useful because it is based not only on demographics, but on a customer’s past behavior, making it a predictor of future behavior too:

“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior and the marketer’s ability to digitally understand customer’s desires and actions begins with segmenting audiences based on click-based engagement.”

As this becomes a standard email marketing best practice in 2012, it will also become a competitive advantage. Make sure behavioral segmentation is something your email marketing team is at least considering in the very near future.

David is also the bearer of good news, predicting businesses will pay a little less attention to the glitz and glamour of social media marketing campaigns and get back to measuring concrete results: “the focus will rightly turn to the return on investment of those social efforts.” David expects the kinds of reporting and analytical features we’ve come to expect from email marketing solutions will be adapted to measure results across channels. That kind of insight will only improve our tactics and techniques as email marketers, resulting in deeper knowledge about the effectiveness and inter-relatedness of each marketing channel and—ultimately—a higher ROI.

David also predicts security, breaches, and legislation will increase in 2012, a scary thought and something to consider as you plan out your year. He is also optimistic, saying marketers will understand the penalty of emailing to dormant addresses, a topic near and dear to our email marketing hearts because emailing to dormant addresses can have a negative impact on your email delivery rate. (Get tips on scrubbing your in-house email list for improved email deliverability.)

Let’s close with where David starts his post, about the longevity of email. As we keep saying, email is still alive and well and David concurs. So let’s just make that a given. Email will continue to offer the best ROI, to be the glue that holds other marketing channels together, and to be the foundation upon which countless marketing campaigns will be built…through 2012 and beyond. Long live email!

Christmas Cookies and Email: Lessons to Be Learned!

Here at ClickMail, we might be gearing up for a busy year as an email marketing agency, but we take the time to enjoy Christmas cookies! Baking and eating the seasonal delights got us thinking—as usual—about a mouth-watering analogy, how we can learn from Christmas cookies and baking and apply those lessons in 2012.

The symptom: Missing ingredients

If you’ve ever been halfway through baking cookies and realized you would need to run to the store—again—you can sympathize. It’s hard to make butter cookies without butter, gingerbread without molasses, and macaroons without coconut. In fact, it’s impossible. Knowing what you need ahead of time means a successful result.

The lesson: Have all the pieces in place.

When you’re shopping for an ESP or digital marketing services, you want to be sure you’re buying all of the functionality you want now…and those features you’ll want in the future. In the age of engagement, capabilities like integration move beyond extra to expected. Be sure you have all of the ingredients in place before cooking up your new email program.

The symptom: Uneaten cookies

Is every cookie gobbled up, each type as popular as the other? Or do some cookies sit for weeks in a red-and-green container, ignored and stale, until finally tossed at Easter?

Until recently—this year, to be honest—we’ve been making the same cookies at our house every year, year after year, whether they were eaten or not. The sugar cookies and the snowballs would disappear before we even had a chance to toast the new year. But the gingerbread men and cinnamon stars languished untouched. Despite the effort put into making the dough, then rolling out, cutting out and baking the cookies, they were unappreciated and uneaten. We kept making them because we were too tradition-bound to be sensible.

The lesson: Do what works now, not what worked then.

In email, we avoid the uneaten cookie when we test, stay fresh and stay up-to-speed with the latest trends, tools and technologies. The trick is not to do something because that’s the way we’ve always done it, like baking cookies destined for the waste bin. Keep up with the trends, then test, test and test again to be sure you’re delivering tasty morsels of email to your subscribers.

The symptom: Weight gain, oh no!

Too many cookies = too many pounds. I’m sure we’ve all noticed there’s a direct correlation between the number of lemon bars consumed and the snugness of one’s jeans!

The lesson: Email as often as works, no more.

Eating too many cookies is bad for you. Emailing too often is as well. The first will gain you pounds, the latter will lose you subscribers. We lack a hard and fast rule about email frequency, however, just like I can’t tell you how many cookies is too many. That’s because, like the cookies, it depends. A 200-pound teenage boy can consume far more spritz than a 90-pound grandma.

Your subscribers differ in tolerance as well. Some will welcome the semi-weekly email from you while others prefer a monthly contact. Make everyone happy with a preference center that gives the subscriber the control. Who knows? They might gobble up your email messages and want to hear from you as often as possible.

That’s the Christmas cookie lesson from this email marketing agency. Take a look and put these three lessons to work for a successful 2012.

Oh, and has anyone seen the last rumball cookie? I had dibs.

Oldies but Goodies: Top Email Advice From Past Posts

It’s that time of year, one of looking forward to what’s to come while looking back and taking stock of what’s been. It’s with this retrospective thinking that we took another look at the many posts our CEO has written for the Email Experience Council (EEC).

Over the past two years, Marco has contributed invaluable information to the esteemed EEC blog, information still valid and useful on the eve of 2012. Below you’ll find a list of the posts, linked to the content. Take a look and find the email advice you just might need to put into play during the year ahead.

• Four Common-Sense Tips for Using Social Tools in Email Marketing

• Make It a Mobile Mentality

• What Are the Standard Features Any Email Marketing System Should Have? It Depends

• Build vs. Buy: The real cost of building an email solution

• Relate to Customers With a Relational Database

• Triggered Emails Are on Target for B2B Email Marketing

• Save Time and Money by Integrating Your Email and Blog

• Pull the Trigger for Targeted Messages and Higher ROI

• Will ESPs Evolve Into Marketing Automation Solutions?

• Five Steps to Building a Preference Center

• How Social Networking Can Magnify the Power of Your Email Campaign

• Key Email Marketing Trends to Act on in 2010

• Your Preheader Text Could Be the Most Important Part of the Body of Your Email

• Introducing the new ROI: Return on Interaction

• Managed Email Marketing: The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Email Marketing

• Is Email Video Ready for Prime Time Viewing? Or Still Just a Pilot Program?

• Suggestion: Real World Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

If you didn’t find the content you needed here, then maybe a callout to ClickMail should be on your list for 2012. Call on ClickMail any time, for your most successful year yet.

Mobile Marketing: New Report Has Stats You Need Now

Is 2012 the year you tackle mobile marketing in earnest? Definitely download the new mobile email marketing report. You’ll get statistics that matter and can guide your mobile marketing plan.

The “Mobile Email Opens Report” from Knotice, offers crucial data for marketers because the mobile email open rate is a measurement of email opens occurring on mobile devices and tablets compared to the opens on desktops and laptops. It’s not your typical open rate measurement, comparing open rates to email delivery rates.

Although the report is rich with data, for us as an email marketing agency, the insights from these numbers are a reminder of the importance of providing an optimized mobile email experience. Although overall mobile marketing open rates are up, increasing by over 51%, that doesn’t correlate with an equal increase in click throughs, perhaps because of the lack of optimized email.

This study shows that as much as we want recipients to re-open our emails when back at their desks, to have a better user experience and increase the likelihood of a click through and conversion, in reality:

“Only 3.09% of the 701 million emails sampled were opened on both mobile devices and desktop (same email opened on each). And of that 3.09%, only one-third are opening on mobile device first, viewing the same email on desktop later. This further reinforces that the concept of “they can read it later on a desktop version that renders better” just isn’t happening with consumers.”

Those numbers mean 97% of the time emails are ignored or deleted if not optimized for mobile devices.

In addition, the report clearly demonstrates that the email click to open rate on mobile devices is far lower than the rate on desktops and laptops. The way to improve the click to open rate is by offering an optimized mobile email experience. If your company needs guidance in revamping your email marketing program for mobile marketing, turn to ClickMail.

The need for an optimized mobile email user experience is only one of the many insights to be gleaned from this mobile marketing report. Draw your own conclusions and guide your 2012 mobile marketing plan using the reports easy-to-read data for:

• Overall mobile email opens by device and OS
• Mobile email opens by 11 industry segments
• Mobile email click activity by industry segment
• Mobile email click activity by OS
• Mobile email activity by time-of-day
• Comparison of tablets and smartphones

Mobile marketing has arrived and it’s time to address it as a separate marketing channel, not simply email delivered via a smartphone. The Knotice report concludes with this reminder for all marketers to take to heart while planning for mobile marketing in the upcoming months:

“If marketers are not prepared for mobile users and adapting their programs and platforms accordingly they risk turning away significant business opportunities, and perhaps worse, losing a long-term customer to a competitor who has embraced mobile as a key component of their digital programs for 2011 and beyond.”

Download a pdf of the mobile email marketing report.

Avoid Common Email Marketing Mistakes With This Timely Advice

December is coming to a close as the year 2011 winds down. And that means now is the time for taking stock of your email marketing program. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to give you any overwhelming challenges or painful to-do lists, not with the holidays upon us. No, we’ve got some great, concrete advice for you to get your email marketing program off to a successful start in 2012 with not a lot of effort.

That’s because Scott Hardigree of Indiemark has written a thorough and useful post on improving your email marketing program, just in time for you to take stock at year’s end.

From the first impression to marketing automation, from focusing on the wrong things to ignoring the right things, Scott points out the most common mistakes we see as an email marketing agency…and how to fix them.

We particularly like his statements about first impressions, because the old adage is so true in email: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Scott’s advice includes creating a really good welcome email, one that makes a good first impression and drives some ROI to boot. And he goes farther, suggesting a series of emails to tell your story and “onboard” these prospects, making them more likely to convert to customers later.

In the comments below the post, Scott says the second most common email marketing mistake he lists is probably the biggest, and we as an email marketing agency must agree. The mistake? “Not working hard enough where it really matters,” says Scott. He correctly states that with the demands email marketing places on our budgets and time, we have to prioritize so we spend that budget and time wisely.

In particular, Scott recommends investing more in list growth, because “email marketing is largely a numbers game.” The key is the quality list over the quantity list, as we’ve pointed out often in this email marketing blog. That’s where it truly requires an investment in order to make that quality list growth happen.

Speaking of investments, reading through Scott’s advice will go quickly, and will be well worth the five minutes you spend on it.

Then if you find you need help implementing any of his advice, you know where to turn: Turn to ClickMail. We’re here to help you identify and overcome not only the most common email marketing mistakes, but the lesser-known ones too.

ClickMail Marketing Ranks On Yet Another List!

Email services provider ClickMail Marketing, offering the nation’s largest selection of email service providers (ESPs), has made yet another list! As recognition for our rapid growth over recent years, we’ve been ranked as being one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States. In September of this year, Inc. Magazine announced that ClickMail made its estimable annual list of 5,000 fastest growing companies, joining ranks with other notable companies like Intuit, Microsoft, Timberland, Patagonia, and Oracle. Our most recent recognition comes from the San Francisco Business Times as ClickMail Marketing achieved a high ranking on their list of the 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies in the Bay Area.

The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal has also ranked ClickMail Marketing as one of the top 50 fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley, and CilckMail has achieved the additional honor of being recognized as one of America’s 13 Fastest Growing Email Marketing Companies.

Email solutions provider ClickMail’s rapid growth is reflected on the following 2011 business lists:

• The Inc. 5000 List of the fastest-growing companies in America.
• The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s Top 50 Fastest Growing Private Companies in Silicon Valley
• The San Francisco Business Times’ ‘Fast 100′ list of the 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies in the Bay Area

Serving clients as an email marketing vendor and email marketing consultants, ClickMail Marketing has achieved its rapid growth organically, with a unique position in the market place as a vendor-neutral email solutions provider. With over a dozen ESP systems in our portfolio, we offer the nation’s largest selection of ESPs so that we can ensure the best match is made for every client. We also pride ourselves on our excellent support team that works with our clients on fulfilling their specific email marketing needs, from increasing email deliverability to achieving maximum ROI.

ClickMail named one of America’s 13 Fastest Growing Email Marketing Companies

After reaching #2,109 on the esteemed Inc. Magazine’s list of 5,000 fastest growing companies, ClickMail Marketing has been further honored as one of the top 13 fastest growing email marketing companies in America, as noted by EmailExpert.org.

As Shar VanBoskirk, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., wrote in a April 2011 report entitled The Future Of Interactive Marketing: “Interactive marketing has come a long way in a short time… and now represents 15% of all advertising spend…” it’s no surprise to find a number of marketing automation companies and ESP’s climbing the Inc. 5000 list.

ClickMail strives to stay abreast of the rapidly changing world of email marketing and brings the latest in new services and email technology to our clients. From building an online tool for selecting a new ESP to acquiring the Bay Area’s Strategic Design Group, ClickMail has been creating new tools and offering new services that help our clients keep pace in the ever-evolving email marketing industry.

With over a dozen ESP systems in our portfolio, we offer the nation’s largest selection of ESPs while staying vendor neutral and flexible so we can recommend the right one for specific client needs. In addition, ClickMail always offers flexible contract terms on all ESPs so our clients can be assured they have the right system in place. From increasing email deliverability to achieving maximum ROI with your email marketing program campaigns, let ClickMail Marketing help you with all of your email marketing needs! Contact us today!

ClickMail Makes Inc. Magazine's List of 5,000 Fastest Growing Companies

We are so proud to announce that Inc. Magazine has ranked ClickMail Marketing #2,109 on its annual list of 5,000 fastest growing companies. We are happy to join other notable fast-growing companies recognized by Inc. magazine like Intuit, Zappos, Microsoft, Jamba Juice, Timberland, Patagonia, Oracle and more.

ClickMail strives to stay abreast of the rapidly changing world of email marketing and brings the latest in new services and email technology to our clients. From building an online tool for selecting a new ESP to acquiring the Bay Area’s Strategic Design Group, we have been creating new tools and offering new services that help our clients keep pace in the ever-evolving email marketing industry.

“We are constantly striving to help clients improve the return on investment in email messaging and infrastructure,” said ClickMail CEO Marco Marini. “This ranking reflects the efforts we’ve made over the past few years to expand our offerings and provide more full, end-to-end service to our email marketing clients.”

With over a dozen ESP systems in our portfolio, we offer the nation’s largest selection of ESPs while staying vendor neutral and flexible so we can recommend the right one for specific client needs. We offer flexible contract terms on all of our ESPs so that our clients are assured they have the right system in place. We also pride ourselves on our excellent support team that works with you to help fulfill your specific email marketing needs, no matter what they are: from increasing email deliverability to achieving maximum ROI with your email marketing program campaigns. Let ClickMail Marketing help you with all of your email marketing needs! Contact us today!