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!

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?

If your email marketing is all bundled up, strip it down:

• Keep it simple
• Focus on one call to action (included 3 to 5 times)
• Stay clear and concise in your message
• Streamline your design so it complements, not complicates, your message
• Don’t think of your email as the sales vehicle, but the introduction. Your goal is clicks, not cash…yet

Don’t smother your email marketing with turtlenecks and cardigans or else your recipients will only see a bundle of clothes, not the body beneath it. And the body is what drives your email marketing results.

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.

So it’s our goal to give you an objective view on Twitter, especially from an email marketing perspective. (As we’ve said before, 80% of the population uses email. Less than 8% of those use Twitter. We’re just trying to keep your priorities straight based on these numbers.)

In Mark Brownlow’s Email Marketing Reports, Mark recently wrote a great comparison article on email vs. Twitter, comparing factors like:

• Response rates
• Relationship building
• Analytics and data
• Costs
• Acquisition
• Risk

As he points out, you don’t drop one for the sake of the other. But from where we sit as the email marketing experts, we’d still rather see you get email right…before you start the Twitter fight.

Read Mark’s article by clicking here.

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

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.

Notice I said subscriber singular? In the ideal world, one-to-one is how marketers communicate, and technology is making that level of individual targeting easier and easier. If I as an email subscriber am getting exactly what I as an individual want, what could be more relevant?

Do you give subscribers the option to choose how often and when they hear from you? Frequency and timing are part of relevance. Your email marketing is more relevant when it shows up at a frequency and timing of my choosing.

Can your subscribers choose between html and text? Deliver email marketing messages how they want and you’ll increase your relevancy score another notch.

What about the type of information you serve up? Does your preference center let subscribers choose topics or categories or types of email marketing messages? It should in order to be relevant to each subscriber.

Sometimes we as email marketers get caught up in what’s relevant to us: growing our in-house email lists, improving our email delivery rate, tweaking our email subject lines. But when it comes to email marketing ROI, what’s relevant to you is, well, irrelevant.

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.

Smith Harmon’s Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season has practical suggestions for gearing up, both by collecting more information about what subscribers want to get in their emails from you, and by having excuses to reach out to them, helping you be top of mind without starting the holiday shopping message too early.

Their email marketing suggestions include:

• Having subscriber update their preferences so you can increase your relevancy during the holidays, using a preference center
• Or get the same insight via surveys
• Update your Web site and improve the functionality, then email your list to publicize the improvements
• Request product reviews during the summer and fall so you can use them as part of your holiday email marketing campaign. Hint: You’ll want to offer an incentive too to increase the likelihood that people will contribute reviews
• Encourage subscribers to buy now to earn a discount during the holidays
• Promote your credit card or loyalty program

All of these suggestions are either good ideas or simply email best practices, and none are overly complicated. Too early for holiday email marketing? Maybe, but it’s never too early to prepare for it!

Download the full report here

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.

MarketingSherpa recently published some email best practices useful for anyone growing their email marketing list using tactics such as sweepstakes, co-registration and email list rentals. The article is definitely a must-read to make sure the names you do add to your list are more prospects than props.

Also included in the email best practice article is a caveat about continuing to qualify those names even after you have them through a series of welcome emails.

Read the article by clicking here, but hurry, it’s only open access until August 20th!

“…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!

“…the most common reason was that they simply did not know how (nearly 33%).”

One third of those in email marketing do not know how to test, a critical email best practice. How can that be? If they don’t know how to test, why are they in charge of email marketing? If they don’t know not to test, why not bring in an email marketing consultant to teach them?

“Another 27.4% reported not having enough time to do so.”

This is akin to saying you don’t have time to get the oil changed in your car, or getting your teeth cleaned. It’s something you have to make time for, no matter how unpleasant, or suffer the consequences later.

“A few (8.5%) said they did not actually see the value in testing.”

I’m relieved that this number is less than 10% but still surprised that it’s as high as it is. Testing is such a vital email best practice, it is just something you have to do.  Are these email marketers also spamming because they don’t see the value in permission-based email marketing, or being legal?

“More than 85% of those marketers who tested their e-mail campaigns scrutinized subject lines. Far fewer (54.8%) tested calls to action, and around one-half made efforts to optimize design and body copy.”

This is telling because it indicates that the email marketing folks are more interested in getting the emails opened and far less interested in converting. That might help your open rates look good, but it won’t do much for your email marketing ROI.

Studies like this are a chance to look in the mirror and see if we as an email marketing industry are really committed to email best practices or not. Based on these numbers, I’d say we have a ways to go.

See the eMarketer article by clicking here.

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.

Marco, with co founders Russ Cerminaro and Michael Kelly, started ClickMail back in 2000, with a vision to turn ClickMail into an email marketing vendor  that offers the nation’s largest selection of email service providers. They have succeeded with that plan! Now Marco is at the helm of this rapidly growing company, guiding ClickMail through growth to become a key player in the email marketing industry. Somehow he also finds time to contribute to the ClickMail email marketing blog and to leading publications such as DMNews.

Immensely proud of his Italian heritage, Marco loves Italian cars (especially Ferraris) and is fluent in English, Italian, French and working on his Portuguese.

And in June, Marco finally married the beautiful Cida. Need we say more?

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.

Why should this matter? A landing page is a Web page and that gives you much more flexibility. With email marketing, you have to worry about rendering and email delivery and open rates and calls to action and click throughs. And you have a limited toolbox as a result.

But your landing page isn’t limited by sender ID or ISPs or spam complaints. Your landing page is independent of the constraints on your email marketing. And that means you can and should use that to your advantage to try and drive that conversion.

Consider what you can do with in a landing page compared to an email:

• Images: They will show, unlike in email where they’ll likely be blocked. Use them to your advantage!
• Calls to action: You can have more than one! Yes, you drove the prospect to that landing page for one particular offer, but you can below or next to that offer either lead them to other places on your Web site, or offer them other products or services.
• Loads of info: You don’t want your email to overwhelm, but your landing page can be wordier. You’d likely want to do this below the fold, and below your call to action, but you can make it available…or offer links to more information.
• Flash and video: Although these are easier to offer in email than they used to be, that doesn’t yet mean they work in email marketing. But you can use them on your landing page without worry.

Yes make the email to landing page transition a smooth one. Make sure the design and message are in alignment. But then take advantage of the potential of your landing page to do much more than your email could ever do.