The Whitelist

ClickMail’s expertise is featured prominently in a story about problems with White House email communications by the Washington DC-based National Journal.  When the Journal needed an expert on email marketing and email best practices, the call went out to ClickMail CEO Marco Marini.

Read the full story here, as reproduced in the Journal’s blog on lobbying and advocacy, Under the Influence.

Think August is too early for holiday email marketing to begin? As a consumer and procrastinator, I say yes, but as an email marketer, I know many retailers think it’s just the right time to get top of mind in the customer’s mind.

But even if you aren’t sending out those first “think of us for gifts” type email marketing messages, there’s plenty of prep work you can do right now to make your holiday email marketing campaign more effective so you achieve better email marketing results.
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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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We’ve preached here and in our email marketing newsletter about the importance of an effective landing page as an email best practice…and that it must be a smooth transition from email to Web page so you don’t jolt or lose the visitor.

But it occurred to us lately that maybe we’ve focused too much on making sure they’re similar to avoid a disconnect between your email and your landing page. Maybe we haven’t done a good job of spelling out the differences between the email someone gets and the landing page that email drives them to.
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“Free” isn’t a word that plays well in the body of your emails as it can trigger spam filters, but it plays very well when you as an email marketer want to stay up to speed on email best practices and trends! You should attend as many webinars and conferences as your email marketing budget allows, but also look for free educational opportunities as you can as well.
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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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For retailers using email marketing, Christmas really does begin in July. That’s when we begin planning, preparing for–and hoping for–great email marketing results.

It’s not a new concept. I once read that the idea of Christmas in July came from Victorian times, when women would start making gifts in July, giving them several months to get their projects done. (Makes you wonder what they’d think of our Christmas shopping these days, on the Internet on December 20th, shelling out an extra $25 for rush shipping charges to guarantee delivery by Christmas Eve!) But it translates wonderfully from needlepoint on a pillowcase to email marketing campaigns because they both take planning and time, and the more you have of both, the better your results.
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Email best practices are those practices that improve your email marketing results, whether you’re improving your email delivery rate or your email copywriting or how your emails render in various email clients. As an email solutions provider, we at ClickMail are probably much more aware of how numerous these email best practices are, as we strive to make sure our email marketing clients learn them and use them.
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Next week Lyris sponsors a critical email marketing webinar featuring our own Michael Kelly. Titled “Reaching the Inbox – E-mail Reputation and Deliverability,” the one-hour webinar will take on email delivery and how your email marketing reputation affects your deliverability. The panel will cover:
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