The Whitelist

If you haven’t yet downloaded our email marketing whitepaper on choosing an email service provider (ESP), or even if you have, be sure to listen in on September 16th as we partner with the Email Experience Council to bring you “You Don’t Need ESP to Choose an Email Service Provider.”

Marco Marini, our CEO, and Michael Kelly, our Director of Strategic Alliances, will present the in-depth and groundbreaking information released earlier this year in our email marketing whitepaper “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP.” Presented Wednesday, September 16 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, the webinar is useful whether you’re shopping for a new email service provider or want to compare your current ESP to other email vendors.
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Is your email marketing all alone? Shame on you. It should be keeping company with your other applications, namely your CRM and Web analytics and other internal data sources. Only by integrating your email marketing platform with these data sources can you access the information that enables intelligence, more relevance and therefore more email marketing ROI.
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“If you build it, they will come.” That famous line from the movie “Field of Dreams” seems to hold true for great whitepapers too, with a little variation: If you write it, they will notice.

Since releasing our newest whitepaper this month, “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP,” hundreds of email marketers have downloaded it from our Web site, and wiped us out of our hard copies at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit. Now we’re getting recognition from noted email marketing experts too!
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Relevance. Timing. Frequency. Subject line length. Email marketing involves many critical factors. But hard and fast rules about adhering to best practices don’t exist, despite all the reports and case studies that purport to have all the answers. A 35 character subject line might work for one type of email, while another does better with 55 characters. Some audiences respond well to weekly email promotions, while another balks at anything more frequent than monthly. And so it goes.
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With over 150 email service providers (ESP) to choose from, how can you possibly select the best one for your organization, or be confident that your current ESP is the best solution for you? ESPs differ from each other in many ways, so you as the email marketer are challenged to make apples-to-apples comparison.
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Another nugget from Merkle’s new email marketing whitepaper says that line of text asking recipients to add your company to their address book really does work!

As an email marketing advisor, we at ClickMail are firm believers in doing everything you can to improve your email delivery rate. As we’ve pointed out before in an earlier email marketing blog post, even a slight change in your email delivery rate can add up to significantly more email marketing ROI. That’s why we encourage our email marketing clients to do everything they can to improve their email delivery, even if that means switching their email service provider (ESP).
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Another nugget from Merkle’s new email marketing whitepaper says that line of text asking recipients to add your company to their address book really does work!

As an email marketing advisor, we at ClickMail are firm believers in doing everything you can to improve your email delivery rate. As we’ve pointed out before in an earlier email marketing blog post, even a slight change in your email delivery rate can add up to significantly more email marketing ROI. That’s why we encourage our email marketing clients to do everything they can to improve their email delivery, even if that means switching their email service provider (ESP).
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Last week we sat in on ExactTarget’s email deliverability webinar, ‘Getting to the Inbox: Why “Send” Is Not the End and Reputation Is King.’

The webinar pointed out that as concerned as email marketers are with maximizing their email delivery rates, they still aren’t paying enough attention to reputation.

According to the webinar, actions taken by email marketers to improve email delivery in 2008 included:
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Next week we’ll be in Scottsdale, AZ for the Email Evolution Conference put on by the DMA. This is a can’t miss event for any and all email marketers.

First you can boost your email marketing knowledge by attending the sessions on Strategy and Theory, Case Studies and Action Items, and Channel Effectiveness. Then visit the Experience Hall, where ClickMail Marketing will be one of the exhibiting state-of-the-art email solution providers. Stop by booth 201 to find out how we can help you implement what you’ve learned about email marketing.
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Email marketing can be exciting, however sometimes you must tackle unpleasant topics like compliance or spam. List churn is one of those topics. Wouldn’t it be more fun to delve into integrating Web analytics with our email marketing program than to figure out why people decide not to hear from us? Yes. But list churn is not to be ignored.

Email marketing experts say you lose about a third of your email list each year to churn. What is churn? List churn is losing email subscribers. You might lose them because their emails bounce, they unsubscribed, or they reported your email as spam. But no matter how you lose them, what matters is that you lost them.
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