Recent Posts

We just sent the follow message to all our clients and I wanted to share the news with the EEC community as well.

—Deirdre Baird

================================================
ALERT: AOL disables images in AOL.com & AIM.com starting today!
================================================
Dear Pivotal Veracity Clients,

Today, May 22, AOL officially introduced and rolled-out a new interface for customers who access their email using AOL.com & AIM.com. In addition to a number of other changes to the interface, AOL has decided to disable images in both of these web-based email clients.

As a reminder, images have always been OFF by default for AOL 9.0 (AOL’s desktop email software) but, prior to today, images were ON by default in AOL.com and AIM.com. The new interfaces for AOL.com and AIM.com now turn images OFF by default exactly like AOL 9.

Turning Images back On
Just like AOL 9.0, images will be turned back ON in AOL.com and AIM.com by any of the following:

the recipient enables the images by clicking the SHOW IMAGES link for THIS MESSAGE or THIS SENDER that appears for each email, OR

the recipient adds the mailer’s from-address to their address book, OR
the mailer’s IP is on AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

Implications
Mailers should expect to see a drop in open rates due to the new interface. Since open-rates are typically tracked via an invisible gif (image), when images are disabled, this method of open-rate tracking will result in no opens recorded when images are disabled.

Be proactive in getting images back on! Encourage your recipients to add your from-address to their address book; if your from-address is in the address book, your images will automatically display. In addition to an explicit add-to-address book campaign, strive to keep your spam complaints and unknown user rates low so you qualify for AOL’s Enhanced Whitelist.

eDesign Optimizer already enhanced to show the new AOL.com and AIM.com rendering
Yup! We have already enhanced eDesign Optimizer to incorporate the new image settings for AOL and AIM and have updated screenshot intelligence accordingly for the new interface.

Sincerely,
Your Pivotal Veracity support team

more » | comment »

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

Chad White: Reportlet - Personality Goes a Long Way
Learn how retailers do when it comes to projecting a human face in their emails.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

more » | comment »

“Content is no longer king,” Craig Spiezle, director of online safety strategies and technologies at Microsoft, told Email Insider Summit attendees last week. “If you don’t have email authentication, your emails are going to be throttled.”

Spiezle then told the audience about a large flower retailer that used a new domain to send out its Mother’s Day campaign this year, sending millions of emails from a domain with no reputation. “Did we deliver those emails [to our Hotmail users]?” he said. “No we did not.” And now they have a warehouse of wilting flowers, said Spiezle in a matter-of-fact tone that said, It serves them right for what they did.

Deliverability was a big topic at the Summit, which is unfortunate. Content is the rightful king. Content is strategic, while deliverability is simply tactical. A focus on deliverability is a distraction and takes us farther away from C-suite conversations we want to have about email by turning email into an IT discussion.

Spiezle, who presented email authentication as the golden path to deliverability, said that 43% of legitimate email volume is certified by Sender ID, and he later told me that adoption is north of 85% among volumne email marketers and that 9 million domains have been authenticated. And among the major online retailers that I track via RetailEmail.Blogspot, Sender ID adoptin is at 59% while DomainKeys adoption is at 48% (read reportlet on DomainKeys adoption among retailers). So authentication is rapidly approaching the point where if you don’t have it then you’ll be in the minority.

While authentication adoption is growing, some audience members were angry, saying that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and AOL make permission-based marketers jump through too many hoops, have different standards and don’t allow marketers to transfer their reputation from one IP address or domain to another. Spiezle said that they were working on this last point, saying that “reputation should be portable.”

However, Spiezle and Miles Libbey, office of postmaster at Yahoo Mail, who also spoke at the conference, really had no satisfactory answer for their varying standards. Spiezle said that Microsoft will protect its customers and Yahoo will protect its customers. There’s clearly an opportunity for collaboration to create a single standard that would make it easier for legitimate marketers to send their email and customers to receive it.

At the end of the conference, Bill McCloskey, CEO of Email Data Source, astutely remarked that while everyone claims to be protecting the customer, that’s not what’s really happening. That certainly wasn’t the case in Spiezle’s flower retailer example, said McCloskey, who said that his first thought after hearing the story was that there were a lot of mothers that didn’t get flowers this year.

That’s what’s wrong with the current state of deliverability—it doesn’t always serve the customer’s best interests. Even though these customers opted in and wanted to receive these emails, they were blocked. If the ISPs truly care about their customers, then they’ll work with legitimate marketers to simplify the rules so that their mutual customers can be better served. Then we can get back to talking about content, customer-centricity, user-friendliness and other more strategic issues that can take email to a higher plane.

—Chad White

more » | comment »

There’s a disproportionate amount of importance on about 5% of an airplane pilot’s job during a typical flight. For uneventful flights, the pilot spends 95% of the time in the relatively unchallenging activity of keeping the plane in the air. The other 5% of the time is spent during the takeoff and landing. But who wouldn’t argue that this 5% is significantly more important than the other 95%?

Sitting in an airport now, I’m reminded of email’s most important aspects—the subject line (takeoff) and the landing page (aptly named!). Unfortunately, many marketers neglect these elements, spending just a few minutes before hitting SEND to write a quick subject line and doing nothing to customize the landing page.

Unlike airplane flights, email takeoffs and landings should be much more than 5% of the time for each campaign. We regularly see subject line testing revealing a 5% to 30% difference in open rates and response. With that sort of value on the table, there is absolutely no excuse not to take advantage of it, even if you just split the mailing of your house file. For acquisition email, test two subject lines to a portion of the file, then optimize the winner to the rest in order to earn the benefit.

Landing pages can make or break your conversion. In a recent acquisition campaign, the offer focused on a very specific promotion—get the Sunday paper for just $1. The design and copy was very explicit and clear around this offer, but the landing page didn’t mention the $1 offer at all. It said, “Enter your ZIP code to find the best subscription deal in your area.” Huh? Where’s my $1 offer? Not surprisingly, 80% of the visitors to this page abandoned.

With the same offer, some simple changes to the landing page to make it match the offer resulted in a 400% improvement in the conversion rate. That’s an investment I’d make every day!

—Stephanie Miller

more » | comment »

I am a huge fan of email marketing and really believe in its strength and ability to deliver a dynamic offer in a quick and to-the-point manner. So I wanted to add a personal case study to show how great a medium email marketing is for companies to produce sales in an immediate nature.

As we hopefully all remembered, this past Sunday was Mother’s Day. It’s a day to say “thank you” not only to the women who put up with our crap and issues for the better part of our initial lives, but also (in my case) to the woman I hope to drop my kids off with for hours at a time so I can play golf or have some alone time with the wife. It’s also a day for me to celebrate my wife, the amazing mother of my two children, so she knows how much I appreciate her (all the time).

But on Wednesday of last week it occurred to me that I had yet to think about buying a single gift for anyone. My mind raced while I was at work—what should I get, when should I get it, where should I get it—and I could feel myself drawing nothing but blanks.

Then suddenly the skies opened and the sun shined down on me as I opened up one of my consumer email accounts. I had at least seven emails waiting for me from companies I had purchased from in the past, all with amazing Mother’s Day offers and ideas for the clueless like myself! This was relevant email times 10! Not only relevant with the offer, but relevant with the timing of that offer—combine those two things together and you truly capitalize on the value of email marketing.

So I opened every single email, clicked on every link I could find, and let the companies walk me through what they were offering. It was like having seven different personal shoppers at my disposal. All the advertisers did a great job of making the Mother’s Day offers front and center to the landing page they took me to. Free two-day shipping was referenced numerous times in numerous places, clearly showing the value and benefit they planned to offer me for making a purchase. Because they took me to a specific page with Mother’s Day offers and specials they did the one thing I think any consumer appreciates—they made the buying experience and searching experience easy.

The moral of this short story is that many of the fundamentals we all read about as it relates to email marketing—relevance, timing, value, clarity, offer—were all spoken to in the messages I received. It really gave me the motivation to take the call to action. So companies are getting it. They’re getting what they need to do and how to use those things to their benefit. This then will grow their sales and continually enable them to build their brand online. I ended up buying four things from two different companies, and the reality is that if I hadn’t received those emails, I wouldn’t have purchased anything from any of them.

Kudos to them!

—Rob Fitzgerald

more » | comment »