Email Marketing Vendor Questions Email Marketing Policies

I have a confession to make: Ever since I first heard about the major ISPs measuring engagement as a way to determine if your email is spam or not, it hasn’t sat quite right with me, but I wasn’t sure why.

And I’m not talking as an email marketing vendor. I’m talking as a person who gets emails.

Finally, I just read something in Email Marketing Reports that explains my unease with the concept.

First, a reminder of the concept: If you email a subscriber and they don’t open or interact with your email, the ISPs are going to take note and will begin to assume your emails are not wanted by the recipient…and they are therefore spam and you should be blocked.

That just didn’t sound quite right to me, I confess. And a portion of Mark Brownlow’s article explains why: We don’t open every single email, every single time, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear from that business at all!

For example, I get promotional emails offering photo books on sale. Right now, I don’t have a photo book put together and am not ready to order, so I’m ignoring the emails for now. But on my to-do list for the end of summer is to pull together photos…and order me some photo books! Now, if my ISP decides that my lack on interaction with a company like MyPublisher.com means I don’t want to hear from MyPublisher.com, they are wrong! I most certainly do want to hear from that company. I’m simply not ready to order from them…yet.

So the question is: Are the ISPs going too far to “protect” consumers with these new measures? Should we as consumers speak up and say “wait a minute”? After all, it’s not as if we don’t have—and use—our own tools for getting rid of emails we don’t want. We are free to unsubscribe at any time from any email.

I don’t know, and maybe I’m overstepping my role as an email marketing vendor. But I always see both sides of the coin: that of the email marketing vendor and that of the email marketing recipient. As an email marketing vendor, I definitely understand why the ISPs are doing what they are doing. And certainly consumers have clamored for more protection from unwanted emails.

What do you think? Post a comment or send your thoughts to blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

In large part, that’s due to the ISPs continuing to try and serve their users, not you and me as the email marketers. Just like Google’s main job is to serve the searcher, not the business that wants to get found, the ISPs are focused on helping their users have a better experience at the inbox.

With Hotmail’s new email coming this summer, we could see even more gray…and I don’t mean cloudy days. Hotmail is now talking about “graymail,” meaning email users signed up for but no longer want. Guess that adds another gray area for the email marketer to contend with! After all, that user did want to hear from you at some point! He or she said “sign me up,” but now he or she has changed their minds.

In the past, that would mean the user either ignored your emails, unsubscribed from your emails, or reported you as spam. Now, Hotmail will make it easier for them to get rid of you and never hear from you again.

How do you fight against being graymail? Relevance relevance relevance! The only thing you can do is make sure they want to keep hearing from you! Never have email marketing best practices been so important. Learn them. Implement them. Adhere to them.

Hard work? Yes. Black and white? No. Worth it? Heck yeah!

On those days when it all gets a tad too serious, this email deliverability consultant suggests taking a humor break with Mark Brownlow’s famous inboxes.

That’s right, take a peek into the kinds of email marketing that shows up in the inboxes of famous people like Darth Vader, Sauron, Julius Caesar, Elizabeth Bennet (from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”) and now Satan too.

For a quick humor break, whether your current conundrum is email subject line best practices or you’re trying to compare email marketing services, start with Julius Caesar’s inbox, then follow the links to the others. Guaranteed to make you smile if not laugh out loud! And it makes you think too, as you dig deep to remember who Octavius was and why he’d be emailing Julius Caesar to fix his gladiator set!

Let’s make regular humor breaks a regular email marketing best practice, shall we? We’ll do our part to find more email marketing humor for you, if you’ll do your part by sharing funny stories with us too.

Our blog is an excellent source of information for the email marketer, as is our email newsletter and our whitepaper. 

Below is a snippet from the whitepaper Driving email marketing ROI after the inox, illustrating a critical and often overlooked aspect of email marketing and design: email html is not the same as the html you use for a Web site. If your email marketing design is built as if it’s a Web page, be careful.

For example, there are several tags you want to avoid in your email design because they don’t function well in all email clients. Some will even get your email flagged as spam or kept out by an ISP. These tags can affect rendering, but really your first goal is to get your email delivered, so just don’t use them. The risky tags are:

• <Body> elements meaning background color on a page or setting page margins because it’s ripped out in Web clients: the open and close body tags are ripped out
   
• Page margins “0″
   
• Background images, whether for the page, a table, a cell; none of these are supported. You can use background colors for tables and cells but not images
   
• Layers are a fun way to control some functionality as well as layout, but they don’t work in email, so don’t use them
   
• Rollovers, at mouse state; these don’t work because they’re dictated with JavaScript, which you’re not using in your email, remember?
   
• Forms <form method=”get || post” action://…….>; if you have a post or even a get form method, it won’t work

For more email marketing and design information, download the whitepaper.

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.

Find the first on email rendering in Yahoo by clicking here.

Find the others at:

Email rendering tips for Gmail
Email rendering tips for Outlook 2007
Email rendering tips for Hotmail

And as always, remember that ClickMail Marketing is your email marketing  expert, and you can always reach out to us with questions about email design or any other topic at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

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.

But having seen many people stumble into an email marketing role, I have two questions:

1)    Who is responsible for making sure these folks educate themselves? I don’t mean doing the educating, as Loren asked. I mean who are they accountable to, to make sure they are learning all the ins and outs of email marketing, and keeping up with the constant changes?

2)    And at what point does this knowledge become required? If you’re working for a small business, or one that doesn’t place much stock in email marketing—to the point where email marketing is only one small part of your total job—then how much do you need to know?

I ask these questions because email marketing, for all the knowledge we’ve gained and all the smart folks we can learn from, is still an amateur affair for many businesses. I’m not talking about the Abercrombie and Fitch type companies, or Nordstroms or any other big corporation that uses email marketing with a skill and sophistication that reminds one of Michael Phelps swimming.

I’m talking about up-and-coming companies, or those with a few hundred employees that have yet to make email a considerable part of their overall marketing programs.

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.

 
As Mark Brownlow says in an article explaining image blocking, “It is entirely possible that the majority of people getting your commercial emails are using email software or a webmail service that blocks images.”
 
Mark’s article also explains how to deal with image blocking, but that’s not my point in this particular email marketing blog on email design.
 
My point is that it’s misleading to talk about email design and just show us the pretty pictures and sexy screenshots and not ever show us those same email designs with images blocked, alt text showing, or with bad email rendering in a different email client.
 
The email designs are inspirational, yes, but not educational until we deal with ALL aspects of email design, including blocked images. And in the email marketing world, that means what your email design looks like when with images render and when they don’t. The main goal of email marketing is not to be visual and creative and evoke ooos and ahs, but rather to evoke an action on the part of the recipient. Email design that’s only partly functional for only part of our audience does a disservice to our email marketing budget and our email list. The best email designs are the one where the message and call to action are clear regardless of the recipient’s email settings.

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:

• The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s ‘Fast Private’ list of the 70 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
• The Inc. 5000 List of the fastest-growing private companies in America.

The first two magazines won’t publish their rankings until October, but Inc. Magazine placed email solutions provider ClickMail Marketing as the 32nd fastest growing private Bay Area company, the 72nd fastest growing nation-wide marketing firm, and 773rd nationally among all privately held businesses.

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 agnostic email solutions provider.

Read the press release on email solutions provider ClickMail’s list success by following this link.

You might also be thinking, “Holy cow, we have to get on Twitter!” But we as we will caution you once again as we have so often in this blog not to jump on the Twitterwagon until your email marketing processes and email best practices are down pat.  

And I’ll throw out something else for you to consider before you start soliciting followers: Compare the ease of Twitter to the ease of managed email marketing. Do you see how easy it would be to focus your attention on that “marketing” channel instead of the challenging, at times exasperating email marketing channel?  

It’s good to keep in mind that email marketing continues to offer the highest ROI by far of every other marketing medium.  

Read the article, think on your company’s social media marketing strategy, but remember to put your time and effort into the marketing channel that has the biggest payback: managed email marketing.  

Read Bill’s article by clicking here