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Email done quite well
Is loved by ISPs
And subscribers too

Okay, so I'm not the Shakespeare of the haiku world yet. If you can do better, your creativity could win you a one-year membership in the Email Experience Council, a $399 value and a great way to connect with your fellow email marketers, download resources and improve your email skills.

To say nothing, of course, of the thrill of seeing your content entry displayed on the eec site for the world to appreciate and envy (more on that later).

It all started when a group of self-described "email snobs" started talking via Twitter and blog posts/comments about the language we use to talk about email marketing. Some of the conversation was inspired in part by my latest Email Insider column, "Warning: Blasting May Be Harmful to 'Our' Health."

On an email discussion list, someone posted a response to the conversation about language in the form of a haiku, which begat more haikus and eventually drew the eec into the fray. Now the eec is sponsoring the (sort of) official 2009 Haiku Slam, with eec members voting on the winners.

We're still working out the details, including the page at the eec site where you can view other entries. In the meantime, you can track various fun and serious discussions on email marketing via the hashtag #emailsnob - or Twitter search. Follow me - @LorenMcDonald – and @Silverpop and other participants, and we'll pass on the particulars as they become available. Feel free to contribute to the discussion, too.

Once you have crafted your contest entries, send them to Ali at the eec - aswerdlow at the-dma.org. Post 'em in the comments section here, too, if you're especially proud of them.

Here is another of my planned entries that might inspire your own creativity or your competitive spirit:

Blasts are from the past
And relevance they will kill
ROI, think not

Now, put down that coffee cup and start haiku-ing!


- Loren McDonald, Silverpop, an eec Silver Sponsor

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More than ever, consumers are thinking about the necessity of their purchases before they part with their hard-earned dollars. Adding to the problem, 65% of Americans believe they are bombarded with too much advertising, according to the Art and Copy trailer.  This becomes a major issue for email marketers who are trying to walk the fine line between inundating the inbox and delivering timely messages.

So, how do you convert consumers from window shoppers to buyers when there are so many companies vying for their affections? Simply step out from behind the corporate curtain and create a connection that's rooted in authenticity. One way to do this is to put a face with the name.

As the fashion visionary and Creative Director at J.Crew, Jenna Lyons is the ideal voice for the brand. By devoting an entire email to Jenna's Picks and supporting the story in-store, in the catalog and online, J.Crew is inviting people into her office to see what inspires her. Adding the quote from Jenna is yet another way to personalize the content and up the authenticity.

The founders of Serena & Lily take this a step further by devoting two separate emails to their distinct styles: Serena Hearts and Lily Loves.  By incorporating a quote for each top pick, they create a conversation. Without the quotes, it would be a list of items without any personality. Of course, in both of these examples the assumption is that the quotes are real, and if they truly want to emanate authenticity then the words should be unedited, as though part of an interview or casual conversation.

Ann Taylor recently introduced their subscribers to Lisa, their new head designer, in a gorgeous email.  It includes a quote, a pic of Lisa, and swatches from her inspiration board. Unfortunately, the story ended there. Clicking on the CTA under Lisa's photo dropped you straight into the shop path. Building out an online landing page where people might be able to learn about Lisa's inspiration would have been a spot-on execution.

Catering to the true fashionista who scours the web looking for the latest trends, Tobi delivers all kinds of editorial extras into this email.  From taking subscribers behind the scenes at Velvet to strolling the San Francisco streets with their resident style scout, Tobi turns shopping into a full-on fashion experience. (On a best practices note, they fall short in some key areas, including SWYN and FTAF, which are major misses, especially when you consider the great content.)

At the other end of the authenticity spectrum, we have Old Navy's Super-modelquins campaign.  Basically, their public-facing spokesperson, who supposedly embodies the Old Navy brand, is actually...a mannequin. While they've done their best to create personalities around these characters and make them more "human", the fact remains that they are plastic, so this comes off as fake and, to be honest, a little creepy.

Without a doubt, Banana Republic has a lock on classic and affordable go-to-work styles. While their emails are always polished to perfection, they feel the same week after week, whether they're featuring white shirts or the must-haves for fall. They get points for creating cool extras, like the City Stories short film competition and the Mad Men walk-on competition, but lose points for never letting their customers into the design studio. What was it that inspired them to make the white shirt the big staple for fall? Wouldn't it be fun to know?

Knowing who you are as a company and inviting consumers to see the face behind the name will help you navigate away from the corporate speak and towards a more casual conversation. In other words, keep it real. No one wants to feel like they're buying something that's generic and mass produced. By giving them a story behind the product, you're creating a connection for your consumer to carry with them every time they button up that shirt, slip on those sandals, or wear those must-have jeans.

- Darrah MacLean & Lisa Harmon - Smith-Harmon

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Christine Borgia from AOL announced this week that the long-standing Report Card program has come to an end.  For those of us who have been in the email marketing world for any period of time, we know this marks the end of an era.  I go way back with AOL from my previous role running email operations at Travelocity.  I started back at the dawn of “email time” in 1999.  I had the privilege of sending AOL Travel email, in addition to my regular Travelocity mail.  This gave me some insider type access to the Postmaster Team at AOL.  I won’t tell you that everything was always smooth.  In fact, I had a pretty rocky year, one that I’ve tried to delete from my memory banks.  Looking back, that was when the discipline of deliverability was born.  AOL was way ahead of the curve in the implementation of the Report Card program.  If you aren’t familiar with the Report Card, here’s a sample:

You are receiving this message via AOL's automated "Report Card" process because our available data indicate that in the last 24 hours your domain's mail stream has exceeded an inbox complaint rate of 0.30%.  This email is only an indication that your domain's mail stream has exceeded a pre-defined complaint threshold; it is not necessarily indicative of a spam problem. We send a report card to every domain that exceeds this threshold, regardless of what type of mail is sent. We hope that it may be useful to help identify potential issues. For additional information please visit our http://postmaster.info.aol.com Postmaster website, where one can find a more detailed explanation of how the Report Card system works, AOL's technical requirements for sending email to us, AOL's best practices guidelines for bulk-mailers, and more.

This was really great stuff!  Imagine an ISP sending you an email each day warning you that you had slipped into the danger zone.  You didn’t have to build any reports, aggregate any data, or haggle over “hanging spams!”  This kind of service just isn’t around anymore, and I fear we took it for granted.  It means we’re back to “new school” techniques with AOL.  Their feedback loop program is top-notch and has always been the leader in FBL technology.  (You are signed up and watching your FBL complaints/statistics…aren’t you?  Of course you are, because we all know that complaints are the bellwether statistic for email marketers.)

Goodbye, AOL Report Card.  I will miss you.  Actually, I will miss those days from long ago when a day without a Report Card meant we had aced our promotion.  We were good enough, smart enough, and AOL liked us!!


- Kevin Senne, Director, Deliverability & Social Networking, Premiere Global Services, Inc.

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In what we believe to be the first collection of bounce codes in one public location, the Get Satisfaction site is now the official home to the eec’s Deliverability Roundtable bounce string project.  It is the culmination of many months worth of effort from industry veterans with experience in email deliverability and the technical aspects of sending and receiving email.  We decided to place it here since the site allows for dynamic updates as codes change in time and also provides a forum in which users can discuss deliverability issues and receive insight from folks in the industry. 

Why is this useful?
The most common form of communication for an ISP to communicate with a sender on a one-to-one ratio is a bounce message.  If an email is successfully handed off to an ISP, a success bounce is issued (250 ok).  However, if the message is not successfully handed off, an ISP will usually put pertinent information into a bounce message letting you know what the issue is and, in an ideal setting, what you need to do to avoid that bounce in the future.  The more failure bounces you collect, the less mail is getting through to your recipients.  If you’re concerned about the highest level of delivery penetration, you’ll review the bounce codes to spot trending and actionable items you can do to get your mail through to an ISP.  That’s where this site comes into play.  We’ve amassed a list of the following ISPs that have standard bounce codes you should be aware of.  If you see a bounce from one of them, you should check the Get Satisfaction site to see if more information is available. 

• Hotmail/Live
• Comcast
• ATT/BellSouth/SBC
• Yahoo
• AOL

Who should use it?
Anyone who has a responsibility around message delivery, most likely your IT or development team, will want to take a look at this.  Bounce messages are collected at the email server level so, unless your email application allows easy access to data in a useable format, you’ll need to have someone review the bounce messages at the server level to see the actual ISP message. 

How do I use it?
Let’s say you send out a mailing today.  After watching the initial delivery numbers, you see that Yahoo has taken a dip in delivery (meaning there’s a delta between the delivery numbers you’re seeing and what you usually expect).  Either by using the ESP’s delivery tools or by having someone on your team provide the information, you discover there’s an accumulation of the following bounce strings queuing up on your outbound email server. 

“451 Resources temporarily not available - Please try again later [#4.16.5]” 

You then go to the new bounce site and search for this string.  You should find the following match: 

“What does bounce code 451 Resources temporarily not available - Please try again later [#4.16.5] from Yahoo mean?” (check it out). 

After you click on the link, you see that this is a bounce message Yahoo! will serve up if their servers are over capacity and are pushing back on mail to allow them to catch up.  This is not a sender related bounce but rather a Yahoo! infrastructure one – all you can do is retry the message later and hope Yahoo! has some available cycles at that time (which you should be doing on most soft bounces anyway). 

See?  It’s that easy.  And in most cases there’s a link to the ISP’s postmaster page which will provide further information on what to do or context around why you’re receiving this bounce. 

How can you help?
There is no uniform standard amongst ISPs mandating that certain bounces be stated a certain way.  As such, you see a huge variety of bounce messages and what information an ISP will provide.  Also, as ISPs deem necessary, bounce codes change over time making existing ones outdated and adding new ones.  Please help the email community stay on top of the changes by contributing to the GetSatisfaction bounce project site when you see new bounce codes that aren’t listed or know one that’s already listed has changed.  By making this an industry effort, we can ensure all of us are up with the latest news.  Feel free to ask questions on the site as well.  We have a few deliverability folks monitoring it.

Who put this together?
The following folks were involved with this project and we extend our gratitude!

• Joshua Baer - Founder & CEO - OtherInbox/Chief Evangelist - Datran Media
• Dennis Dayman, VP, Privacy, Eloqua
• Michelle Eichner, VP, Pivotal Veracity and Co-Chair, Deliverability Roundtable
• Stephanie Miller - VP, Global Market Development - Return Path
• Jack Sinclair - Co-Founder, COO & CFO - Return Path and Co-Chair, Deliverability Roundtable
• Chris Wheeler - Director of Deliverability - Bronto Software
• and other members of the eec Deliverability Roundtable

- Chris Wheeler, Director, Deliverability, Bronto Software and Member, eec Deliverability Roundtable

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Not every email marketing best practice is an obvious one. In fact, in our experience at ClickMail Marketing, there are quite a few best practices that companies seem to look over or deliberately ignore. The result? The opposite of best practices, or what we kindly call “common email marketing mistakes” rather than worst practices.

In an industry where a half a percentage point can make or break a campaign, it’s our opinion that tweaking and optimizing every possible factor is worth the effort. With that in mind, I asked our staff to compile a list of the top 10 mistakes they see when deploying email campaigns on behalf of clients. The good news is that they only came up with nine. And the even better news is that these are all easy best practices to adapt and adhere to.

Below are the common mistakes seen by the staff at ClickMail, and what you can do to avoid them:

Common email marketing mistake #1: Sloppy Copy

• Check your spelling. Copy and paste into Word and run spell-check if you need to. Also check the spelling in your links. If your URL is wrong, so are you.
• Read the copy. Don’t scam, skim or skip over. Reading is the only way to ensure proper use of language like “their” vs. “there” vs. “they’re”, missing words, incorrect punctuation or poor sentence structure. Best practice: Print it out to read on paper. Even better best practice: Read it out loud.
• Employ a second set of eyes for final review. Once you’ve written, read and edited the same piece of content many times, it is no longer fresh to you and errors are easily overlooked. Ask someone else to run spell check and read the copy. You may be surprised to see what you missed.

Common email marketing mistake #2: Crummy Coding

• Set the pixel width to 600. This prevents the need to scroll to the right—and the potential to lose interest if someone feels they have to do too much work to read your email.
• Don’t use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in your HTML coding. It is stripped out by many ESPs, meaning your message can be lost. Even if you’ve spell checked it and done all the best practices described above!
• Many ESPs also suppress images by default, as do email clients (about 80%). Do not create your email message out of one big image or your subscribers may only see a blank page with a little, tiny red X. If you use any images, to be on the safe side, utilize a View Online feature so they have another way to see images if they are suppressed.

Common email marketing mistake #3: Cold Calls to Action

• Your call to action (CTA) should be in text format, not an image because—as mentioned above—images are suppressed by default by many email service providers and email clients.
• Include two to three instances of your CTA above the fold (in the first 300 pixels). Make sure to include at least one graphical and one textual CTA.
• The top one-third and the left-most area of your emails are the most valuable real estate. Try to place a CTA those areas, in text and as minimal images.

Common email marketing mistake #4: Poor Subject Lines

Your subject line should be seven words or less (or 35 characters). Most people know this but might not know that the following conditions in a subject line can be flagged as SPAM:

• Percent of Capital Letters: Too many uppercase letters compared to lowercase letters
• Repeating Capital Letter: Too many upper case letters in a row (e.g., SALE)
• Gaps: When the words have gaps between letters like s*t*y*l*e
• Repetition: When letters or characters are repeated (*****)
• Special Character Flag: Overuse of special characters (e.g., & $ # @ ( )[ ] !)
• Punctuation Flag: Too much punctuation (…) or the type of punctuation (!)
• Word/Space Ratio: Spammers use blank spaces to catch the recipient’s attention resulting in a high ratio of spaces to words
• First Character Flag/First Word Flag: Subject lines starting with a special character or punctuation. Words like “Free”, “hey”, “Sale” etc.

Common email marketing mistake #5: Obscure “From” Label

Your From address is key information used by subscribers to determine if your email is spam or not. If it’s not relevant or recognizable, they may mark it as spam, or just delete it without opening it.

Common email marketing mistake #6: Floating From Address and/or Domain

Keep a static “From” address and/or domain, and ask to be added to the recipient’s Safe Sender list at the top of each email.

Common email marketing mistake #7: Lazy Lists

• Utilize the Forward to a Friend (FTF) feature to organically grow your list.
• Practice good and consistent list hygiene. Most people know to honor opt outs in 10 days to be CAN-SPAM compliant but you should also clean your list(s) of hard bounces after each send, plus monitor soft bounces and remove from your list as needed.

Common email marketing mistake #8: Competing Links

Don’t include competing links, period. Unless it’s a newsletter, most emails should be single subject with a single call to action. If it’s a sale, link to the appropriate sale items. If it’s an invitation, link to the registration page etc.

Common email marketing mistake #9: Unfair Unsubscribe

The unsubscribe link must be the first step, per CAN-SPAM. Don’t make people jump through hoops to opt out.

Now, I hope you read the nine common email marketing mistakes above and nodded your head in agreement, confident you’re innocent of all.  If not, if even one of those nine listed tripped you up, go fix it now and increase your ROI later as a result.

- Marco Marini, President & CEO, ClickMail Marketing

Marco Marini is an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over a decade and half's-worth of experience in the field. Before taking over as CEO, he was CMM's VP of Marketing & Operations. Marini has also held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada.

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