The Whitelist

You simply can’t rest easy in this business of email marketing. 

Case in point: Smith Harmon released a short report on email rendering that shows most retailers failed a rendering test when viewing their emails in Hotmail using Firefox.

This is precisely why ClickMail Marketing preaches the following as an email marketing vendor:
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Although it was published a year ago, I only just came across this email marketing stat and it’s so relevant to our message, I have to share it with you!

According to an email marketing report published by Merkle last year at this time, subscribers who opt-out of permission-based email give to primary reasons for doing so:

• 75% said the emails lack relevance
• 73% said the emails are sent too frequently
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Have you ever gone to a dinner party that bored you but felt like you couldn’t leave?

Some unsubscribe processes are like that. And they are the opposite of email marketing best practices.

A few years ago, I subscribed to an industry newsletter to help me get a better understanding of the industry, as we were taking on a new client, and that knowledge was useful. After a few good years, the client went away. (It was a government client, and the contract changed hands.) I still get the email newsletter I signed up for all those years ago. Every time a new one shows up in my inbox, I delete it, I no longer need it.
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If you like numbers, and everyone in email marketing has to be a bit of a numbers geek, you’ll like this website! The Email Stat Center offers all kinds of numbers and stats that could help you possibly improve your email marketing ROI.

From branding to budgeting, from lines to subject lines, this website serves up numbers, stats and data on a full range of email marketing topics. Choose a topic, and you’re presented with a laundry list of stats.
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ClickMail Marketing is unique among email marketing vendors for several reasons. One, we are vendor agnostic, representing a dozen different ESPs and other email service providers. Two, we have the capability to do something as simple as build a landing page and as complicated as building a custom reporting dashboard. Three, we strive to objectively educate, through this blog, our email newsletter, and our email marketing whitepapers.

The latest of our email marketing vendor publications is the 2010 guide to choosing an ESP, newly published, newly available for download.
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Every email marketer wants to grown his or her in-house email list. But, as we’ve alluded to before in this blog, there’s a danger inherent in growing anything if it makes you too focused on the numbers (i.e. quantity) and less focused on the outcome (i.e. quality).

And that leads to slightly more aggressive approaches to garner more names that might grow your list but not positively impact your email marketing ROI due to poor quality names.
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eMarketer’s article on lack of the email best practice of testing, based on an eROI study, is interesting as an indicator of how we far we are from paying attention to high standards in email marketing. But beyond the numbers in the report are some scary possibilities…

“…37.1% of US e-mail marketers did not test their e-mail campaigns at all.”

That’s more than a third. That’s a scary thought. Is that because email is just so easy to do, and to do poorly, that email marketers tend to ignore email best practices? At their peril!
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Aside from being one of the highest rated ESPs in the industry (and we as an email marketing vendor are delighted to represent them), Silverpop is also one of the biggest producers of email marketing whitepapers providers (and we as an email marketing vendor are delighted to represent them), but they are also a leading source of whitepapers on email best practices that are easily read, understood and acted upon.
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Despite the hoopla and hype, there’s no way social media is replacing email marketing, as some doomsayers predict. For one thing, you can’t use a social media site like Facebook without an email address how else are you going to sign up and get notifications?

Email solutions provider ExactTarget has already proven people prefer to receive marketing messages via email, not social networking sites.
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Email marketing is equivalent to blowing smoke if you don’t have a growing, qualified in-house email list to market to. And therein lie two big challenges to your list: growth and quality. Some email marketers error on the side of growth and disregard quality in order to have a bigger list. But chances are that bigger list won’t produce bigger email marketing results!
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