The eMail Guide has been a member of the only council for the email marketing industry, the eec, since its inception. We’ve found there are great benefits to joining -  access to research, articles and case studies, discounts to major email marketing events and contributing content to the EEC website such as the book showcase page or articles and links. Being able to download and display official EEC branding in your communications is also nothing to sneeze at either.

Though we already think the association is excellent and worth joining we went ahead and asked Ali Swerdlow, Marketing and Sponsorship Manager for the eec, for discount code to share with our community ~ and here it is: use EmailCo10 on the eec website to become a member and save 10%! Thanks so much Ali and the eec, and keep up the great work.

From www.emailexperience.org:

The eec, the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association, is a global professional organization that strives to enhance the image of email marketing and communications, while celebrating and actively advocating its critical importance in business, and its ROI value. We are committed to regularly conducting a broad series of email initiatives for a variety of organizations that highlight the positive impact and importance of email as a marketing tool, communications vehicle and branding device. Additionally, eec members are setting the standards for email through our Member Roundtables and Advisory Committees. The eec members who belong to our organization are representative of other trade organizations, agencies, advertisers, technology partners, clients and companies focused on the potential of email marketing.

It has been a few months since I was turning knobs of the pneumatic tubes of The eMail Guide and I must admit I like what I see – growth and change and development. Not so fun when my teenager is going through something like that, but as far as Jeff and Jim go it is terrifically exciting.

The design of the website is now much more streamlined and focused on its message of being a search engine for the email marketing industry. One aspect I immediately appreciated is that the user interface experience is much more intuitive and visually clear – searching service providers and email marketers is the focus of the design.

Having visited many, many industry blogs I am glad to see the design and scope of The eMail Guide Blog is significantly different than the main website. It certainly helps to focus on the content and clarify the take-aways in each post with such a snazzy look and feel. The buzz and engagement on the four Twitter profiles is a good example of this energy, and I can’t wait to see how the LinkedIn page for The Email Guide will develop.

There is a whole whack of exciting features with the blog now – please though, I implore you to send better music requests to Jeff because he cranks the volume here in the office. Maybe some 1980′s French coldwave? No?

I missed the connections I made here very much while I was busy working on some artist websites and getting some lovely paintings and drawings done. As many of you know I am an artist and curator and being an administrator in the cultural sector is what led to my experience and interest in eMail marketing.

Most artists and galleries need help with design and marketing but after one day back at The eMail Guide I was already making connections that were teaching me new things like Leanne Wildermuth at www.intricateart.com did with a WordPress coding question I had.  A great example of the power of community for professionals,  Leanne had been through the same coding situation and took the time to help me find the right solution. (I was also blown away by her blog – call to actions are clearly defined in a super nice template design)

This typifies what I love most about working at The eMail Guide – that I learn something new from all the people I interact with everyday and look forward to learning a lot from Jeff and Jim and connecting with the email marketing community.

Take-Away: Engaging your community with answers and questions pays dividends for everybody concerned. Just like the iPhone question we helped answer recently for so many community members.

It`s time to Refill armadillo

It`s time to Refill armadillo

What brought about this positive and thoughtful change in my approach? Everything I learned from the email marketing blogosphere of course.

We have covered the Retail Email blog indexing the holiday prep emails earlier this month, and subsequent holiday guide they have kindly provided for downloads. Now I am seeing a lot more activity coming down the RSS pipe. Here are a few interesting recent articles to get you primed and ready to get, well, primed and ready for the holiday season.

Holiday 2009 Planning Checklist: Plan for Success by Kelly Lorenz on August 24, 2009

Holiday SEO: Using Amazon Bestsellers for Keyword Research Posted August 24, 2009 by Linda Bustos

Increase Your Holiday E-Mail Frequency By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Aug 12, 2009 Sponsored by iContact

1. Email Marketing Manager, Customer Contact Strategy, Yahoo! Inc Sunnyvale, CA, 94085, USA

The Email Marketing Manager is responsible for developing and implementing corporate email strategies and programs that increase user engagement.  You will own the entire process for your campaigns from start to finish, including planning, creative development, production schedule, segmentation, testing, and analysis.   http://bit.ly/2PXYG

2. Senior Email Marketing Manager – VMware – Palo Alto, CA

The Senior Email Marketing Manager is a key player in the global programs marketing services team overseeing, coordinating and executing all Eloqua-related activities in the organization. He/she will develop and execute best practices in delivering field, email and direct marketing campaigns corporate-wide, and world wide. http://url4.eu/GyeV

3. Director, Email Marketing - Salesforce.com – San Francisco, CA

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in email strategy and execution, using analytics and insight to meet marketing program and business needs. The position is responsible for managing all customer- and prospect-facing email marketing communications and will work closely with the salesforce.com creative team on email design and copy. http://url4.eu/Gotx

4. Email Marketing Specialist – Modern Line Furniture – Rahway, NJ

We are looking for a dynamic Email Marketing Specialist, who will oversee all aspects of ModernLineFurniture email marketing and communications. End goal is increasing conversion, and improving the customer experience. http://url4.eu/Gkp1

5. Email Marketing Manager at Vail Resorts (Broomfield, CO)

Manage Vail Resorts’ e-mail marketing communications from strategy to deployment while supporting the Direct Relationship Marketing division of the Online Marketing & Sales department. http://ow.ly/kSpe

I keep thinking I will miss an important email from somebody who could of been the most important person in my life because there was one cent missing from the process.

You can read the post here

What Jeff and I liked about this website is the array of free, instant tools complementary for various email technical info such as Blacklists, Diagnostics, Analyze Headers, SPF Records and Free Monitoring. As you can see in the screen shot below, the Analyze Header info is pretty nifty.

We just added MxToolBox to our directory listings in the new category “Email Tools”, and we welcome suggestions for other similar sites.

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Email Campaign #1: Guerilla Magazine

Ok, full disclosure – I am part owner of this print and web magazine based in Ottawa, Canada.  I was not always, and originally was drawn to this independent cultural magazine due to the relevant local content. Originally founded by a pair of  McMillan Agency employees, the professional advertising design and slick, sparse approach to content applied to an arts model worked very well and established a look and feel that was unique and a distinctly “guerilla” persona.

What I love about the email campaigns is they are striking, completely unique and the message is conveyed instantly. It’s refreshing to look at one image for one second and instantly understand the message. It’s cool, it’s alternative, confident and low-commitment.  As an email campaign, it accomplished awareness of the brand without density or confusion though it does have a few areas that could be structured better. For example, there is no html text attached, the trade off being you know exactly how the message will look by being one single image. So why does this work for Guerrilla’s subscriber list? For the simple reason that a subscriber to a visual arts focused website is expecting image-based information. This is the sensibility implied with the email message and after five years of building a subscriber list, the average click through rate is over 40%.  If there was more content, I do not believe that this number would be nearly as high. Also important to note is that the list was built largely on sign-ups from the magazine’s live events – a great intake method often overlooked in favour of subscriber forms on a website.

As related to the current hot topic of video in email, there is a video on the landing page. check it out

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Guerilla Magazine

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Email Campaign #2: Akimbo

How large of a list does an information based website require to be a fully self-supporting business model? This may surprise my colleagues in the retail email marketing industry, but in the case of a visual arts press release website www.akimbo.ca that number is 7,400 subscribers. This is what I like to term as a “fanatical following” – you don’t need x% of a really large list to get great results, you just need a good sized relevant list.

What I wanted to point out about Akimbo’s emails is that they echo nicely some of the advice from yesterday’s Google’s Own A/B & Multivariate Test Results Webinar in which they established that large icons with bullet form copy increased conversions. Akimbo has strictly enforced this in their emails for many years – they will not take your money to advertise your cultural event if your presentation design will compromise the visual standards of the service. They also limit the size and frequencies of their emails, and deploy roughly the same time everyday.

Short, simple and sweet.

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Akimbo

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ThinkGeek Overlords

Don’t ignore this notice

Don't ignore this notice

During the course of the webinar, Trevor 1) Revealed Case Studies on A/B and multivariate tests that Google’s
run on its own sites. 2) Answered questions about Google Website Optimizer and at the end 3) Evaluated an attendees landing page.

One of the interesting conclusions looking at Google’s Website Optimizer conversion page tests was that bullet form calls to action are very, very strong – stronger than a video demo or tour of the website. The only change that provided stronger conversion rates were icons with calls to action attached to them.  The site may not even have those next time you visit -  they test about once a week and continually change and modify to improve conversions.

Trevor then reviewed a very large multivariate testing campaign for YouTube – about 1,024 variation test actually. Borders, boxes, colours and calls to action were mixed in three different areas designated for users to sign in or open an account. An increase of 17% based on YouTube’s traffic makes this kind of a colossal testing very significant indeed.

Trevor and Anne were then kind enough to review the conversion page for classmates.com, where I was pleased to learn that too many choices for payments and schedules seem to turn users off completing the registration process than a simple flat rate or maybe two choices.

What do I take away from this? KISS and tell – keep it simple, stupid. Test big changes first, and then test again. And test again.. and again. Then do it again. Keep testing and don’t always go with your instinct. The data will clearly provide the answer on what works and what does not.

One month ago there was an ultimatum thrown down for Facebook from waay up north. Comply with Canada’s private-sector privacy laws or else.  In this case,  “or else” refers to the Federal Court of Canada which could issue a court order for the California-based company to comply with Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act

The heart of the issue here is not (yet) the sharing of a user’s private data with thousands of third-party developers in over 180 countries, but specifically the confusing way Facebook provides information on how it shares your information and keeps user info regardless if they opt-out of the service or not.

Today, we should learn if Facebook has satisfied the Canadian Privacy Commission’s concerns. This is a first for Facebook and will provide a very import precedent for colossal social media platforms and the individual user.

I have to admit, this keeps bringing to mind the general advice I have been giving for years to anyone with privacy concerns;  “don’t provide any personal information online you don’t want people to know.” Perhaps that is overly simple but over the last 13 years I have never assumed anything in the cloud is completely private or secure. That’s the nature of the Internet – to provide and find information and something each one of us has to take responsibility for when faced with this choice. If a company asks for information you do not have to provide it – even if millions happily are.

Matt Vernhout announced a new team member today on his Email Karma blog – Scott Jamieson, formerly of SRJ Digital. Scott has an impressive track record of working with various ESPs and his experience in email marketing strategies is a boon for the Toronto-based ThinData.  You can find his LinkedIn profile here, and view the official announcement here. Good luck and congratulations Scott!

Industry’s First Bounce Code Directory Now Available

Believed to be the industry’s first public directory of bounce codes in one location, The Email Experience Council’s Deliverability Roundtable has hosted this very useful resource on Get Satisfaction’s website. Bounce codes are the most frequent and direct method of communication between an ISP and a sender, and currently there is no one universal standard for these.  The next best thing is a list of the most common set of codes to refer to, and the EEC has done a great job in compiling the most important ones. Considering the list of names involved with the Bounce String Code Directory, this is definitely bookmark worthy but hopefully not a resource you will have to engage too often.

Get Ready for the Holidays with a Survey to Your Customers

If I could have Christmas jingles playing with this blog post … then I still would not. There will be plenty of time for that later in the year but right now is the time to pay attention to your subscriber list’s hoilday wish list. The Marketing Blog from Vertical Response is kindly letting us know that this holiday season is bound to be different that previous years so understanding that difference now is going to be the key to success in Decemeber. Janine Popick provides the questions we should be asking for B2B and B2C such as “What will your customers be looking to spend this holiday season?” and “When will they start planning their holiday functions?” and of course answers those questions with some strong strategy. Merry August everyone.

To me, this is the sign of a solid company. I would not hesitate to consider Campaign Monitor as my email service provider especially in light of their response to these attacks. The best measurement for the character of a company during a time like this is the reaction of their customers … and you can see the customer feedback under the original post here.

We’ll keep an eye on the situation and wish the Campaign Monitor team and clients all the best during this difficult time.

Campaign Monitor

Marketing Sherpa has picked up on a common concern amongst email marketers and has responded with some solid advice by providing solid if unspectacular strategic talking points to engage the most common internal threats to your email list. This article is re-assuring for all of us in the industry that we are not alone in being assailed by panicked co-workers and short-sited managers who would be all too willing to slash-and-burn the house email list for short term gain. Marketing Sherpa provides the common sense response that may even result in more resources and support for the company email marketer.  You can find the article here.

Week-End Trends: No references to Christmas in August yet

From The Retail Email Blog by Chad White comes the latest status Retail Email Index, a measuring of weekly email campaigns and strategy by the top 100 retailers. This week, Chad observes the current lull in Christmas marketing in the late summer contrasted with other holiday and event based metrics. My sense is that is not too late to engage in your Christmas primer campaign, but don’t forget about Labor Day and of course Back-to-School.  Do you think there has been an increase or decrease in promotional email volume since the same time last year? You might be suprised at the difference, but considering the emphasis on email marketing during these tough economic times I was not too surprised. You can find the blog posting here.

Big CSS guide update including mobile email clients

From the Campaign Monitor Blog by David Greiner comes something very, very useful when designing an email layout – a really, really good CSS guide. What’s too old? What’s too new? What about mobile clients? Does Eudora matter anymore? CSS is truly where the email marketer labors in the trenches and this free and downloadable guide is your best bet for making it through another campaign. Downloading it is exactly what I am going to do after linking up to it in this article. Thanks David & the team at Campaign Monitor Blog! You can find the Big CSS Guide here.

1. Email Marketing Analyst at Tribune (Chicago, IL): Full/Part Time Full Location IL-Chicago http://bit.ly/3GUIId
2. Email Marketing Specialist at Education Management (Pittsburgh, PA) http://bit.ly/zA3hu
3. Email Marketing Designer (Grants Pass, OR): * 1-3 years of Web Design and/or email design experience * Skilled with HTML  http://bit.ly/14CikP
4. Email Marketing Manager, Customer Contact Strategy at Yahoo! (Sunnyvale, CA): http://bit.ly/140qux
5. Email Marketing Specialist – TransUnion –  Chicago, IL: overall email communications roadmap http://bit.ly/8c9RN

Success by Email

To understand the small and dynamic integration shop Successbyemail.com, it is important to look back at their history.  Originally named “Save-A-Stamp”, BrunoPalozzi has been developing their email and SMS deployment platform for almost ten years as a department within their parent company “Systems Interactive”.

The Swiss Army Knife of Email Systems

Now as a distinct service and brand, Successbyemail.com is a hidden gem – a robust and specialized Email Marketing Service Provider and Deployment Platform with a specialization in integrating systems. Unlimited templates, dynamically insertable data fields and allowing databases to be portable and exportable are already enough to turn my head, but Success by Email also provides an API for the client’s other systems to be able to speak with their email platform.  Bruno provided two examples of how they specialize in allowing diverse systems to speak to each other to create a sophisticated value proposition for email marketing.  Currently, they are working with a client on a kiosk that sends electronic postcards from visitors, but also provides an opt-in that grows and defines their subscriber list.  The other example is a prescription reminder alert via SMS, that they provide for two pharmaceutical companies – a system they envisioned and implemented in the last year.

With no set-up fees, no data set-up and campaigns as large as you want Success by Email pride themselves on being very flexible and responsive.

Emails that say SkuYou!!

Another good example of Systems Interactive innovative technology development and integration is “SkuYou”, a 2-D barcode system that can be read by handheld devices *and* have the users information added and/or updated within the client’s email platform database immediately.

Successbyemail is Unique in Expertise and Value Proposition

With no set-up fees, no data set-up and campaigns as large as you want Success by Email pride themselves on being very flexible and responsive. If permission email marketing is the hidden gem of internet marketing, then Success By Email is truly a diamond waiting to be discovered.

You can find out more information about Success By Email in The eMail Guide’s Listings here

The images in your emails cannot be embedded in the email itself but rather are called from a location where they are already online. This is where you have to make some key decisions about the future of your images and this in turn will decide the fate of your email archives and/or newsletters as well as control of your online destiny.

For Whom Does the Inbox Chime Toll for?

Sounds like the beginning of a Space Opera? It’s actually quite simple – many email deployment services will certainly host your images for you, and there are many commercial, professional image hosting services out there as well. But what happens to your images when it’s time to move on from that service? Someone who still has your emails / newsletters will have the images disappear because your email HTML & image paths reside in someone’s inbox and not on the web.  That means you won’t be able to export your information and keep it intact, and therefore you are limited to using that one service – a service that may or may not even allow you to export your images.

The Double-Whammy!

Why rent a room when you can own the hotel?

Why not simply set up your own domain to host your email images and newsletters? You could use a sub-domain on your existing website (i.e subdomainforemailimages.yourdomain.com) but that does not avoid the dreaded “double-whammy” effect. For example, you can register yourdomainforemailing.com and even create sub-domains for different campaigns such as thiscampaign.yourdomainforemailing.com.  This should be on a completely different server ideally at a different hosting company and even a geographically distinct location help avoid traffic overload issues by being on different node altogether.  This is because when you send out a campaign with, say, 50,000 emails there will (hopefully) be thousands of visits to your website – but combined with the opened emails calling thousands of images from the same server at the same time and you’ve got the double-whammy effect and a risk of a slow loading website or even a crash due to too much traffic all at once.

The Postman Always Sends at Least Twice

A good email service will allow you to throttle your delivery rate throughout the campaign deployment. If you are sending out those 50,000 emails at the same time, what is going to happen when there are 10s of thousands of image requests for the same image from your website host server? It will probably crash your server and your email campaign has actually caused damage to your brand. By establishing a separate domain and server service specifically for email campaigns, you avoid this aspect of the double-whammy effect and your inbound sales team will also thank you for spreading the responses to a manageable level.

Yes, you could use Social Networking platforms to achieve some of the same results – Flikr or PhotoBucket – but this will result in the same obstacles when it is time to migrate / export this data. Separate image hosting on a domain you own ensures you have full control over the space where you can put all of your images, newsletters, articles, landing pages and web pages versions of your emails.

Here at The eMail Guide, Jeff and I realized that we needed to bring a better way of aggragating more email marketing job opportunities for the community. Though the quality of searching and hand-picking job opportunities is undeniable, there is simply too much out there that is far to useful to not automate the process.

The eMail Guide Job Bot on Twitter

So, without further pomp and circumstance, we are pleased and proud to present the “EMG eMail Job Bot”
http://twitter.com/emailjobs.

The Center of the Email Marketing Job Universe

With several RSS feeds configured from various job sites, our little Twitter bot seems to have a lot to say about opportunities everyday. We’ve been monitoring it pretty closely and the opportunities are legitimate (some pretty big companies out there looking for our industry expertise) and though there is the occasional repeat of a job post due to cross posting at different job sites, it is minimal.

Add Your Email Marketing Careers to the Mix

The call to action? We welcome your website’s job page feed to add to the mix, so qualified candidates can find your opening and everybody benefits. Email me at chris@theemailguide.com

Just remember us when you get that promotion and corner office ;)

So what exactly is the issue here?

There are lots of technical reasons but I will attempt to simplify the issues and the history leading up to the current debate.

The way Microsoft renders an email is different than the way the most popular, accessible and published standards tell the rest of us how to render email. This in turn has the effect that emails sent from someone with Microsoft Outlook to someone with Microsoft Outlook looks fine, but tends to look terrible if someone sending or receiving that email is using any other kind of email program than Microsoft.

Why?

Well, on one hand Microsoft is using HTML layout codes that were supposed to stop being used many years ago. On the other hand, they are using HTML layout codes that only Microsoft uses.  This means that there will virtually be no way to ensure that your email campaign will look or function correctly for your subscribers.

So how can this be fixed?

This is totally in Microsoft’s court to fix, though they essentially claim that it is an issue of their program being so good it does not work for the rest of us. (To me, this implies that we should all just stop complaining and buy Microsoft)

What they need to do is make sure Outlook renders email in the same way the vast majority of the rest of the world renders email so it works the same for everybody. They can do it – they seem to pretty handy with software programs and if they need help they can always call on the expert help of The eMail Guide’s directory members.

You can help by visiting http://fixoutlook.org/ and adding your voice to the concerned community.

Screen Shot of the Twitter-based campaign to fix Oulook