The Whitelist

After years of thought and planning, The ESPinator is now live.

What is the ESPinator?  Thank you for asking.  The ESPinator is an online system, used to choose the Email Service Provider that best suits the needs of a particular company.

Why did we build it?  Here at Clickmail Marketing, we’ve noticed the trend of most ESPs using the samed buzzwords, making similar claims, and generally dazzling the audience with MarketingSpeak.  It is neigh impossible for most people to separate the many ESP marketing promises from their functional realities.

By way of example, just about every ESP claims they can integrate everything seemlessly, but some do it much better than others.  One ESP may have built an elegant connector to a CRM system whereas another requires the use of a technical sledgehammer to make it ‘fit’.  For an email marketer to make a sound decision, a lengthy RFP process has been necessary.  No longer.

Clickmail used its in-depth knowledge of ESPs, stripped off the many layers of marketing lacquer, and judged each ESP on an apples-to-apples basis.  Over 200 questions and criteria were analyzed, weighed and rated.  The result is the ESPinator, a system designed to replace a long RFP process with an hour long questionnaire.

There are currently eight ESPs rated and loaded into the system: ExactTarget, BlueHornet, Acxiom, eDialogue, Responsys, Yesmail, WhatCounts, and Lyris; and we plan to add an additional 24 ESPs to the mix over the coming weeks.

Try it, you’ll like it.  Tell us what you think!

As summer weather winds down and the mornings get chillier, we find ourselves wearing sweaters and jackets, layering for the cool morning, but ready to peel off that extra clothing when the afternoon heats up.

This is an effective way to moderate one’s comfort via clothing, but an ineffective way to “dress” your email. Your email should be scantily clad, no matter the weather or temperature.

Is your email dressed in layers? Do you have multiple calls to action? Are you trying to cram all your information into one promotional email rather than enticing people to click through to a landing page? Is your email design overly busy? Is your email marketing message unclear?
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At ClickMail these days, it seems not a day goes by without mention of Twitter. Kind of odd for a company focused on email marketing!

As we’ve cautioned before in this email marketing blog, we as an email marketing vendor would prefer to see you focus on getting your email marketing program nearly perfect before investing time and money (i.e. payroll) in Twitter. Nonetheless, companies will Twitter rather than fall behind the social media curve.
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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.

Time and again in this email marketing blog, we preach relevance as key to email marketing ROI.

But what is relevant? Relevant to me could be ridiculous to you.

Regardless of varying interpretations of the word’s meaning, the concept remains critical to your email marketing success. So let’s clarify.

Relevant email marketing means your email marketing subscriber gets emails from you when she wants, how she wants and with information she wants.
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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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A year ago, Marco Marini transitioned from VP of Marketing and Operations to CEO of ClickMail Marketing, an email marketing vendor. We decided it’s time you learned a bit more about him…

Marco is an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over 15 years of experience in the field. Before helping to found ClickMail, he held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada. Marco’s strengths and experience are varied, including demand generation via direct marketing, email marketing, and database marketing.
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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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