The Whitelist

Ready to Be Email Expert? Master Email Marketing Now!

Ready to take the next step to become an email expert? MarketingProfs.com is ready to take you there.

Introducing the Email Marketing Master Course, starting tomorrow, March 15^th. Launch your email expert training tomorrow through the 28^th, with online classes and a whole plethora of additional resources you’ll turn to now and in the months to come.

In just 13 classes, you’ll master subject lines, email copywriting, strategy, segmentation, list growth, list hygiene, how to improve email delivery, and more, so much more!

The instructors list reads like a who’s who of the email marketing industry: Morgan Stewart, Stephanie Miller, Heather Blank, Joel Book, Chris Baggott, Jeff Pedowitz, Tami Monahan, Chris Donald, Lynn Baus, Dela Quist, Craig Swerdloff, Austin Bliss and Tom Sather. Whew! You’ll not only learn from these master email experts, you’ll be able to ask questions of them and network with them online too.

Learn more about the Email Marketing Master Course, then go ahead and register today to start becoming an email expert tomorrow.

The State of Email Marketing for Small- to Mid-Sized Businesses

Email marketing tends to work a little differently for the small- to mid-size business. Compared to a mega corporation with millions of names on their in-house email list, the coffee shop on the corner and the printing plant just outside of town don’t have the means—or the needs—of the big businesses when it comes to email marketing.

But they don’t have to.

Smaller businesses can reap just as many rewards as big ones when it comes to email marketing.

For a new report on the state of email marketing for the SMB market, check out the latest study from GetResponse. It can provide insights and benchmarks for your own SMB email marketing, or help you help clients if you’re an email marketing agency.

The State Of Email Marketing in SMBs
2011 Report http://www.getresponse.com/learning-center/reports/the-state-of-email-marketing.html analyzes the trends and strategies being used by SMB email marketers of different sizes and different sectors.

Download the report here. http://www.getresponse.com/learning-center/reports/the-state-of-email-marketing.html

Will This Group Hit “De Mark” to Stop Phishing?

You know the saying one bad apple spoils the bunch? It’s true for apples. And it’s true for email marketing too. Anything that makes consumers suspicious of email is bad for all of us, no matter how rigidly we adhere to email marketing best practices or how squeaky clean our sending reputation. Phishing is one of those bad apples.

When the bad guys are phishing, they are trying to get user names, passwords, account numbers and other secure information by pretending to be a legitimate business.

One group is taking on phishing using existing technology: DMARC. DMARC won’t stop the bad guys from trying to get consumers’ personal information by some other means, but it will stop them from being able to masquerade as a legitimate business such as banks by using that bank’s domain name.

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. It’s a technical specification created by a group of organizations that:

“…standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication using the well-known SPF and DKIM mechanisms. This means that senders will experience consistent authentication results for their messages at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and any other email receiver implementing DMARC. We hope this will encourage senders to more broadly authenticate their outbound email which can make email a more reliable way to communicate.”

In short, DMARC gives your company control over its domain. That won’t stop someone from phishing using a similar domain name to yours, or some other underhanded way, but they won’t be able to use yours. And that will eliminate at least a few rotting apples from the bunch, we hope.

Learn more about how DMARC fights phishing at http://www.dmarc.org.

The New Trend: “Servant” Marketing From MarketingSherpa

Direct marketing, inbound marketing, permission marketing, content marketing and, of course, email marketing. You’re familiar with all of those. But as marketing continues to evolve, so too does the way we refer to—and think about—it and email marketing best practices.

Introducing “servant” marketing, the trend featured in the just-released excerpt from the Email Marketing Handbook: Second Edition.

Dubbing it “servant” marketing turns marketing itself on its head, fully and finally, perhaps, shifting the focus to a subscriber-centric approach to email marketing.

Writing in the “From the Author” section of the Email Marketing Handbook: Second Edition, W. Jeffrey Rice Senior Research Analyst for MarketingSherpa, describes the trend as follows:

“The trend towards ‘servant’ marketing focuses on creating opportunities to invite customer engagement, rather than tearing the door down. This strategy uses the both user-submitted and behavior data, to provide meaningful guidance in a manner that reveals a brands humility, transparency and desire to improve the lives of its community members. As this strategy matures, the attention shifts from individual tactic metrics, to overall engagement metrics uncovering the total time spent actively participating with the brand.”

Of the 252 pages that make up the handbook, the excerpt includes only the first 9 pages, but that little excerpt is more than a taste. It introduces the trend. And it includes the six steps email marketers can take to tap into the trend of “servant” marketing:

1.    Identifying impact and purpose

2.    Email marketing integration

3.    Content creation

4.    Quality list growth

5.    List hygiene and monitoring deliverability statistics

6.    Testing and optimization

Plus the excerpt includes the full 8-page Table of Contents, giving you an overview of all the rest of the email marketing best practices information included in the full handbook.

Get the email marketing handbook excerpt for free today.
 Seriously consider purchasing the entire, invaluable guide tomorrow.

Standard Email Metrics Why? Because It’s not all the S.A.M.E.

We see it as an email marketing agency just about every day: A marketing team tries to choose a new email service provider (ESP), yet is frustrated by the apples to oranges comparisons one must make in an industry that lacks standardized metrics.

That’s why we publish and keep up-to-date our Digital Marketing Solutions guide. And it’s the motivation behind our creation of the ESPinator online ESP selection tool.

Providing you with these tools ensures your ESP choice is the right one for your organization and its email marketing goals. Yet more standardization is needed and we applaud the Email Experience Council’s (eec) efforts to bring this about via S.A.M.E.

S.A.M.E. stands for Support Adoption of Metrics for Email. S.A.M.E. came about when the eec tasked its Measurement Accuracy Roundtable to create a set of standardized metrics for industry adoption. The standards were developed and a seal created that an email marketing provider like an ESP can use to promote both adherence to the standards and the eec’s auditing of the ESP to ensure that adherence.

For ClickMail as an email marketing agency vs. an ESP, the metrics don’t apply, but we will be adapting the new reporting structure and ensuring our data on the ESPs we represent and resell includes which providers have met the eec’s requirements.

And soon enough, with the eec’s efforts and the voluntary adoption of S.A.M.E. by email service providers, those ESP comparisons might start to look a little less like fruit salad and a little more like apples alone.

Learn more about S.A.M.E.

For Better Subject Lines, Test Big, Test Thoroughly

Loren McDonald of Silverpop is right on target with his article about subject line testing (Subject Line Testing: Tips for Getting It Right).

A couple of his tips really jumped out at us, however, as worthy of emphasizing.

As an email marketing agency, we are adamant about encouraging our email marketing clients to test, test and test again. From the subject line to the call to action to the email design to every other variable, we know there’s always room for testing and tweaking to improve. And in email marketing, even a half of a percentage point improvement can translate into big percentage of increase in ROI!

While we encourage testing, in particular A/B split tests, we want to reiterate some of the advice Loren is giving here in order to improve not just your email marketing program but your testing itself too.

Test the big ideas first

You might want to test “20% off” vs. “save $20″ but Loren points out that sometimes you must take a step back and test a bigger concept first. It could be a price discount is outperformed by a different offer, say a selling proposition or benefit like getting promoted, saving time or losing weight. Test to determine the big idea first, then refine your testing to refine your subject line.

Test all the way through

Loren makes a really good point here, that a higher open rate might not reflect a higher conversion rate. One subject line might garner more opens, but another subject line with fewer opens might still garner more sales. Test all the way through to know what’s really happening, because you’re after more than opens: You’re after ROI.

Read the full article on subject line testing. And for help when you set out to do your own email subject line tests, turn to ClickMail to help you get the best results.

Are you headed to Vegas this week for MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2012? If so, you’ll be in good company…very good company.

Very good and very big company: Last year, 826 email marketers attended the event! And this year, the organizers expect an even bigger turnout.

Can you imagine? Almost 1,000 of your email marketing peers, all learning together, networking, sharing stories and making great connections that will last months and even years after the conference ends.

Really, if you’re not net planning on going, the question becomes: Can you afford not to?

Surely among those many hundreds of attendees you’ll find at least one of your competitors, if not more. Can you risk that?

We don’t think so.

Plus you’ll meet us in person while there. ClickMail will be at booth #39, offering the online ESPinator ESP selection tool, plus one-on-one consulting with our expert team.

Mobile Email Marketing: Holiday shoppers are phoning it in

A recent article on Reuters confirms what we at ClickMail Marketing have been writing about over the past several months: mobile is where the market is at now and it’s only going to grow.  As early as the June edition of the ClickMail Marketer we were discussing the importance of optimizing your email marketing content for mobile use. And with the mobile shopping boom exploding this holiday season, “mobilizing” your email marketing content is more important than ever.

“U.S. retail e-commerce holiday sales will rise 17 percent to $46.7 billion in 2011, while total retail sales will grow about 3 percent this season,” says an early December eMarketer forecast. And mobile commerce is growing even faster. The 300 largest U.S. mobile merchants will generate $5.37 billion in sales through mobile devices this year, more than double the numbers from 2010, according to a recent survey by Internet Retailer.

In addition, a recent survey by the National Retail Federation found that 40 percent of shoppers own a smartphone and over half plan to use their device to research products or make a purchase this holiday season.  Shoppers are becoming savvier and the immediacy created by constant access to research, reviews, and competitive prices from online and other retailers and reviews make mobile shopping highly attractive, even as shoppers browse the aisles in brick and mortar stores. If your email marketing best practices include optimizing your email marketing program for mobile screens, with mobile-friendly emails, landing pages, and simplified call to actions, you’re bound to be ahead of the curve in the increasingly mobile market.

As more users convert to smartphones and tablets, and utilize corresponding mobile applications to check email and perform transactions, mobile ROI is only going to climb. For help in creating a streamlined or otherwise mobile-friendly version of your email, don’t hesitate to contact ClickMail today!

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.

Improve Email Deliverability Through Optimal Email Frequency

It’s one of the top questions to plague email marketers: “What’s the best frequency for email marketing to optimize response rate?” Is there an generalized optimal email frequency: once a week, once a month, once a day!? Is less more or or is more more?!

As you might have already guessed, one of your best email deliverability tools isn’t actually an email delivery tool at all. It’s actually a skill: it’s knowing when to email people at the right time with the right message. How does that improve email deliverability? When you consistently tell people what they want to hear when they want to hear it, your emails are welcomed, not ignored or reported as spam…both of which can work against your reputation and cause email delivery problems.

In a recent compilation of testing results on the Retail Email Blog, they found that Monday, Thursday and Friday were all tied as the most popular days to send retail emails in the U.S. In addition, there is significant variability in email frequency, ranging from such high volume as nearly 5 emails a week in the peak-selling period before Christmas but dropping to an average of around 3 in other periods of the year. Another report by Econsultancy reported that the top 100 online retailers in the US sent an average of 132 emails to each of their subscribers in a year (averaging 2.5 emails per week and 11 emails per month). These numbers are interesting, but ultimately, what works for one online retailer may not work for a nonprofit informational newsletter. The key, as always, is through testing.

If your email frequency is too high, subscribers will tune out: deleting, unsubscribing, or (worst of all) reporting your emails as spam. All of which negatively affects your email deliverability. In order to determine your ideal email frequency, the best thing to measure is your total open and click rates under different email frequency conditions. Consider running an A/B split test with different email frequencies and comparing the results. Even if you’ve offered an opt-in frequency selection through your email preference center, some subscribers may still report they are receiving too many emails, even at the time of sign-up they thought they wanted to receive emails more often. That means that even with the use of an email preference center, it’s still important to test the results of your email frequency. In one study, 73% said that frequency was the main reason for opting out. Ouch! It’s clear that identifying the most optimal email frequency for your specific email campaign is critical to your overall email marketing success and email deliverability.

If you’re thinking “Oh my gosh, I need to start testing now, but have no idea where to start!” call on ClickMail for guidance oh implementing tests or setting up email preference centers.