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.

As an email marketing vendor that represents a multitude of email service providers, ClickMail Marketing is in the unique and objective position to help you take a critical look at the over 100 ESPs out there, ensuring you find the one that’s the best fit for your company. We do that by covering the 20 factors you need to consider, and helping you determine which factors matter the most for your company to improve its email marketing results. We’ll teach you how to evaluate the ESPs and even provide you with a scoring sheet.

Find out more by clicking here. Especially if a new ESP is on your to-do list for the coming year!

You can also download the email marketing whitepaper either before or after the webinar at our email marketing library: click here.

Integration means getting information in and out of the application, so your email platform can work with programs like Web analytics, CRM, CMS and custom reporting dashboards. These days your subscribers are less tolerant of generic “batch and blast” content. Email has to be more timely, relevant and personalized. And that often means email must be driven by data from outside the email marketing application via integration.

That also means your email service provider (ESP) has to enable this kind of API integration. If you haven’t looked into that yet, here are some questions to ask when you do:

• Does your ESP have pre-configured integrations with the platforms you want to integrate to?
• Is your ESP platform Web services compliant?
• What is the breadth of the API functionality?
• For pre-configured integrations, does it do everything you need it to do? Now and in the future?
• For custom integration, is the security and robustness of the API calls adequate?
• Does your ESP have the redundant, scalable infrastructure to support the integration?
• How many API calls are served and how many are served without error?

For more about integration, and 19 other factors to consider when choosing a top tier ESP, download our latest email marketing whitepaper. We’ve compiled a decade’s worth of experience as an email solutions provider into this one hands-on whitepaper, and even included a scoring sheet. If you’re shopping for a new ESP or evaluating your current ESP, this email marketing whitepaper is a must read.

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!

In a ClickZ blog post by Bill McCloskey titled “Is Your E-Mail Getting Delivered on Prime or Subprime IP Addresses?”, ClickMail Marketing’s newest email marketing whitepaper is held out as a useful tool for improving deliverability. In his blog, Bill points out the importance of email deliverability calling out a few key points from our whitepaper, but also the importance of IP reputation to deliverability.

Read the ClickZ blog post about our newest email marketing whitepaper. And download the whitepaper, complete with a useful checklist for comparing the 20 critical factors among differing email service providers.

What’s a conscientious email marketer to do? Just pay attention.

Everything you need to know about relevance, etc., is available to you. Your customers and email subscribers are constantly telling you what works and what doesn’t. You just have to listen. Listen and you’ll know what type of content is most relevant, how often they want to hear from you, which subject lines get the most opens, what type of calls to action get the most click throughs…and more. Look at unsubscribes, forward to a friends, click throughs, responses, conversions, and any other data for insight.

If you’re using any kind of decent email marketing company or email service provider (ESP), you should have more than enough data to sift through and learn from. Every email marketing campaign you send out should be analyzed after the fact, lessons gleaned, and adjustments made for the next one.

Don’t stop reading the case studies, email marketing blogs like this one and definitive resources like MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments. You must always learn and improve and you can only do that by keeping up with all the moving parts that are email marketing. But look first and foremost to your own audience for the real, most applicable knowledge. Because in the end, they are the ones who will spend their money with you, or not. They are the ones who matter most. And they’ll tell you what you need to know if you just listen.

If your email marketing company or ESP is falling short, and failing to deliver the types of data you need to adjust and improve your email marketing ROI, then it’s definitely time to download our latest whitepaper and evaluate your current ESP…or choose another.

Yet there is an email service provider that best fits you and your company’s email marketing needs. You just have to know what matters most to you when choosing an ESP, which strengths are absolutely critical for your business and which weaknesses you cannot endure. This means you have to start your ESP search internally, by delving into what drives your email marketing program goals now and in the future. You must also take a hard look at your company’s capabilities, including that of your staff and any existing technologies you may want to integrate with.

This might sound like a lot of work, but now there’s a resource to help. After a decade of helping clients choose ESPs, we as an email marketing advisor have learned priceless lessons about fitting the email service provider to the business. And we’ve compiled that knowledge into one comprehensive and free to  you email marketing whitepaper: “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP.”

This free whitepaper presents 20 critical factors for you to consider when choosing an ESP, including why each factor matters and what to look for. We’ve also included a scoring sheet you can use to evaluate ESPs against these 20 factors. This new email marketing whitepaper will help you take a thoughtful, informed approach to your ESP selection, so you can compare apples to oranges and still make a wise choice.

Whether you’re in the market for a new ESP now or want to see how your current one stacks up, you’ll find this whitepaper an invaluable resource. Download your free copy right now!

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).

This new email marketing whitepaper offers one more way to tweak your email delivery rate and therefore your email marketing ROI. It’s simple. It’s common. And apparently it’s working. It’s that line of text at the top of each email asking the recipient to add you to their address book (so you don’t end up in the junkmail folder).

This is common practice, and easy to do, and according to the whitepaper, consumers do it: “It appears that this messaging has succeeded in influencing behavior, as 53% of permission email recipients have added at least one company to their address book.”

Of these 53%, “On average, the consumers in this group estimate that they add 25% of all the companies sending permission email to their address book.” That’s a one in four chance that your company will get added to the address book, and therefore into the inbox.

And what’s one way to make sure yours gets added? Relevant content that subscribers want to get.

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).

This new email marketing whitepaper offers one more way to tweak your email delivery rate and therefore your email marketing ROI. It’s simple. It’s common. And apparently it’s working. It’s that line of text at the top of each email asking the recipient to add you to their address book (so you don’t end up in the junkmail folder).

This is common practice, and easy to do, and according to the whitepaper, consumers do it: “It appears that this messaging has succeeded in influencing behavior, as 53% of permission email recipients have added at least one company to their address book.”

Of these 53%, “On average, the consumers in this group estimate that they add 25% of all the companies sending permission email to their address book.” That’s a one in four chance that your company will get added to the address book, and therefore into the inbox.

And what’s one way to make sure yours gets added? Relevant content that subscribers want to get.

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:

·    Modifying the email design template
·    Use of a third-party accreditation/reputation service
·    Adopting authentication (SPF, SenderID, DomainKeys)
·    Switching from a shared to a dedicated IP address
·    13% switched from in-house to an email service provider (ESP)
·    Another 13% switched ESPs

All of these can help improve your email delivery, but reputation is king in the world of email marketing. And that makes the webinar a preview to our February ClickMail Marketer newsletter on taking care of your sender reputation to increase your email delivery rate .

Keeping your reputation clean will increase the likelihood that ISPs will let your email through. But managing that reputation can be complicated. There are several critical factors that ISPs consider when determining your sender reputation. This month’s newsletter goes over some of those factors and what you can do about each to make sure you look good to the ISPs.

Read the latest ClickMail Marketer by clicking here.

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.

We’ll also be giving away our brand new email marketing whitepaper, “Choosing the Right Email Service Provider: The top 20 factors to consider when shopping for a top tier ESP.” It will literally be hot off the presses next week. Be one of the first to get a copy! In it, you’ll find the 20 most important considerations when you’re searching for a top tier ESP.

And we’ll be signing up email marketers for our 30-day test drive. As purveyor of the nation’s largest selection of email service providers, we make sure you will be matched up  with the best ESP for your business. One way we do that is by letting you take an ESP for a test drive. Whether you’re shopping for a new email service provider, or you’re curious how your current email provider stacks up against the others, Let ClickMail Marketing set you up for a free test drive of an email provider for 30 days. With the test drive, you can log in, play around and really take an email service for a test drive, not just see the “showroom model.”

Find out more about the Email Evolution email marketing conference at . We look forward to seeing you there!

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.

Loren McDonald of email service provider Silverpop offers advice on dealing with list churn. Using a relationship analogy that starts with dating and ends (sometimes!) with divorce, Loren shows how to manage your email marketing campaigns to decrease your rate of churn.

As he points out, “retention isn’t as sexy as acquisition,” but in reality, the more emails you lose, the harder you have to work to replace them to keep your list growing. Wouldn’t you rather lose fewer emails and watch your email list grow faster?

Read Loren’s article and remember you can always turn to ClickMail Marketing for help or advice, even if you just want to find out if your own rate of list churn is something you should live with or try to change.