A permission whitewash

By Cliff Guy

It's never a good idea to whitewash over the question of where you obtained an email recipient's contact data. And now it seems, there's been another whitewash in the Whitehouse!

Returnpath - dotMailer's deliverability partners - posted a blog recently about the implications of a hot story in the US. The Whitehouse stands accused of sending an unsolicited public information email marketing campaign that generated spam complaints.

Check out the news footage...




At dotMailer we have a feature we call our 'data watchdog' that constantly monitors the contact data our users are uploading, based on a complex algorithm.

The watchdog barks loudly if a user loads data that is potentially unpermissioned or from an unscrupulous supplier, so our system and our clients are protected from black listing issues. For this reason, we don't compel our users to include details of 'how you got on our list' in their email templates.

But barking dogs aside, email marketers themselves can take some straightforward and highly effective actions to prevent recipients perceiving their emails as being unsolicited.

1. Use a non commercial welcome email to establish or re-establish permission.

For example, having collected a new email contact, ensure the first message they receive from your organisation is a welcome email that:

• Reminds them of where they gave you their details and their permission
  



• Outlines what you're going to be sending to them
  
  


• Highlights the benefits of being on your email list and the advantages and privileges they will be able to take advantage of
  
  


• Sets out the frequency of your email messages, so they know what to expect and when

2. Ensure you stick to the frequency of messaging you have set out in your welcome email.

3. Keep permission current. Reach out to the people who don’t open or click, or to older internal lists that you haven't emailed for a while. Find out what these contacts want and collect their fresh permission to deliver it.

4. Don’t make assumptions. Just because a subscriber opted-in to receive monthly offers doesn’t mean they also want to receive your weekly newsletter or press releases.

5. If you're sending a message that falls outside the original permission grant, then let the recipient know this and include a prominent unsubscribe link.

For lots more practical advice in this area, check out our Email Revenue Booster Kit on the dotMailer website.

All fingers and thumbnails

By Cliff Guy

Interesting to read on the blog of one of our fellow email service providers yesterday, that they've just released thumbnail previews of templates.

Now, I'm proud to say that unlike a great number of other email marketing providers, dotMailer has featured live thumbnail previews for many years.

Even the 'old' version of dotMailer - replaced by our latest version in May last year - had long included this handy feature.

What's more (yes, I'm on a roll now...) dotMailer's template previews are generated instantly, so every time you save an email marketing template or microsite template, there’s a thumbnail immediately available. It's all part of the service.

That's not to say we didn't face a challenge building live thumbnail previews into dotMailer - through the sheer numbers involved.

We currently store over 1 million dotMailer campaigns and templates - which means a lot of storage space for all the related thumbnails.

Never ones to be beaten by a storage space challenge, we came up with a nifty solution that automatically deletes thumbnails from dotMailer that haven't been viewed for a while - and automatically generates and restores them if they are ever requested again.

That's a thumbs-up for dotMailer then!

Too good to share

By Eleanor Workman

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be one of the 2,000 Metro readers to win a year's Taste London membership through a competition they ran in a London free sheet.

Having seen the ad in the paper on the way to work I eagerly registered my email address on the website, to be informed that at 2pm on the Friday I needed to be at my computer, ready and waiting to submit my details to be one of the first 2,000 to enter and win.

What a great data capture and viral list building idea. BUT - here's the snag.

I really wanted a Taste London card (I know several people with them and they're ace) so I selfishly made sure that I told as few people as possible about this promo. I figured the less people I told, the less people they told and the less people I'd have to compete against at 2pm.

I had all morning on Friday to forward the email to friends, colleagues and everyone I know in London, but rather wisely I think - I chose not to. Was I the only one to think this offer was too good to share?

Maybe Taste London would have seen a much wider viral reach and collected much more data if they had turned the promo on its head - so that everyone who registered at 2.00pm got a free mini trial membership, and a random 2000 won the year's free membership.

Still, I'm sure Taste London now have a much bigger database, and have probably thousands of people trialing the card. I think they're even giving away a month's membership today in the Metro.

Using email marketing Taste London can now grow their database further, encourage contacts to send to friends and post links on Facebook and Twitter, and set about converting trialists to annual memberships.

So apologies to all my dear friends and work colleagues for my neglecting to tell you about this pretty amazing offer - I'll buy you lunch I promise (using my Taste London card of course).

Next viral campaign you do however - consider this - is it too good and too limited an offer for people to want to share?

dotMailer - by Royal Appointment

Tink Taylor

Being repeatedly caught out by the downpours of our great British summer these last weeks, prompted me to revisit the experience of my right royal day out last month.

On 7th July I was lucky enough to be invited to the Queen's Garden Party, in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Another day, another guest list!

Interestingly that afternoon, I discovered that the Queen seemingly has the power to control the weather.

On a day that was reported as seeing the worst weather in the history of the Queen's garden party, I can confirm that it was indeed raining cats and corgis.

However, a royal intervention saw the torrential rain abruptly stop the moment the Queen and Prince Philip came outdoors for their traditional walkabout and meet & greet. Eerily, as soon as the Queen was undercover again, the heavens reopened – this time with hailstones, thunder and lightning.

Happily I took refuge in the refreshments tent and got stuck into the cucumber and mint sarnies!

Whilst not actually meeting the Queen or Prince Philip, I was within earshot of them both, and of a nice little faux pas that Philip let slip (ask me another time and I’ll tell you) and I did get formally introduced to His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester.

Introduced as ‘Tink Taylor of dotMailer, who do ‘Internet Marketing’’, the Duke quickly replied ‘Internet Marketing… do you mean E-bay?’ I explained I wasn’t from E-bay and that email marketing was a ‘slightly’ different thing.

However the conversation quickly turned back to online shopping and ecommerce. It seemed the Duke and his family, though he was reluctant to say so at first - had a bit of a penchant for internet shopping – particularly himself, for buying digital cameras online.

And quite rightly too – online shopping can't be beaten when it comes to offering choice, information and value for technology lines like cameras.

Now I had him on the subject, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to do some royal field research and find out what makes a Duke choose one ecommerce site over another, over and above the price.

We talked about the various influencing factors that a retailer can use on their online shopping site and I promised him that by coincidence these are all covered in our very latest ecommerce benchmark report called ‘Hitting the Checkout’ – available to download from dotCommerce, our sister ecommerce company.

We shook hands and said goodbye, and just as I returned to the refreshment tent I noticed the Queen slipping back inside the Palace and the dark storm clouds beginning to shower the grounds again. Quite a reign!

Marketing budget share goes to email

By Cliff Guy

A DMNews report in the US last week showed that spend on email marketing by direct marketers is set to expand at a rate of 18.5% per year, for the next 5 years.

US spending patterns are mirrored in the UK, where the take up by consumers of online shopping and using the internet for product research has been even more enthusiastic and prolific.

The fact is that marketers in the US and the UK alike are continuing to switch their budget spend away from traditional direct channels such as direct mail and catalogues and into email marketing.

This is good news for all those who've been advocating for so long the benefits that email can offer cash-strapped marketers, and good news in fact for all those in direct marketing in general.

Whilst above the line spending is under siege at the front line of the global recession - simply because it is so hard and costly to track and account for the ROI on the spend - direct marketing remains robust, because of it's very accountability. And no DM channel offers the level of trackability and accountability that email marketing can.

Why email marketing is your most versatile business tool

Email marketing is a powerful revenue generation tool, and an unrivalled relationship marketing channel. But that is only a part of the potential that email marketing holds for your organisation.

As well as your customers there are at least 5 other groups you can be using email marketing to communicate with: Employees; Recruitment; Referrals; Influencers; Suppliers (and don't forget Shareholders either!)

You may not have direct contact or responsibility for working with each of the markets but someone in your organisation does and email should be part of the communications strategy with those contacts in each group. Work with and help your colleagues across different functions and departments to use email to increase organisation effectiveness, efficiency and profit.

Can you help reduce costs throughout the business?

1. Within your current emails can you drive customers and prospects to online help centres and user forums?

2. Could you include links to online answers to the most frequently asked questions dealt with by your customer care teams and build an automated, triggered program of emails so your prospects and customers get this information when they need it most?

3. Triggered emails can be set up t provide offers of training, customer information and support that can radically reduce the cost of 'manually' servicing customers.

4. And what about 'reactivation emails' for B2B leads who have gone cold. Triggered emails can ensure long term leads are kept warm, and reactivated with special offers once they reach a certain age.

5. Don't forget, triggered emails can be used to up-sell and cross-sell customers too - based on their transactional behavior. In fact, triggered campaigns can be used to engage with your customers on the basis of any data you have on them, from a renewal date, to a birthday.

Finance and payments

Speak to your finance department to see how you can work with them to use email more effectively.

6. For example, can you encourage online payment or payment by direct debit through email communications (with incentives or penalties to drive action)?

Could your emails be better targeted towards those most likely to spend?

7. By working with your finance department, you can undertake some basic data mining to identify who are your best customers - who's spent the most with your business, and what kind of customers these are.

After all - someone who's only spent £50 with you in the past 6 months isn't likely to buy your new £500 product, but someone who regularly spends £150 is a much hotter prospect. Once you've identified these key groups of customers, use dynamic content in your marketing emails to change the product and offers your contacts see.

Don't neglect your fellow colleagues

8. Internal newsletters are often a neglected channel of communication. but they should be instrumental in your organisation's culture, informing and educating employees on new initiatives, internal cost saving opportunities, under utilised resources recruitment referral opportunities (a sure fire way to reduce the cost of engaging recruitment agencies.

9. Your HR department can use email very effectively for running employee satisfaction surveys and distributing details of internal vacancies.

10. Would your sales team benefit from their very own email newsletter? Filled with the latest promotional offers you're sending, new product news and development, latest wins and competitor information? A better informed sales team should be a more motivated and productive sales team.

Keeping other stakeholders informed

11. Remember other key stakeholders who need to be kept in your communication loop, for the benefit of your organisation: partners, resellers, shareholders,

These suggestions are by no means a definitive list of the opportunities email marketing offers your organisation as a whole - in fact they're just the beginning- take a step back and start looking at how else email can help your business.

The dotMailer feature which will revolutionise your life

By Eleanor Workman

Most marketers occasionally find their web designers, developers, IT departments and processes a source of frustration and bottle necks. You have a tight deadline on an email marketing campaign that requires a dedicated landing page or campaign microsite, but there’s no resource available to help get your webpages designed and live. By the time you can get your page up, the time will have passed and the campaign will have gone. Sound familiar?

If only you had dotMailer…

dotMailer Enterprise has an industry-unique tool that can enables anyone to create personalised landing pages, thank you pages, microsites, competitions - any landing page you could need for your email campaign You can do it yourself, without any help or resource from designers, developers or IT. Called Site Builder, this amazing tool uses the same editor as you use to build your email campaigns. So there's nothing new to learn.
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Site Builder is easy to get to from within your dotMailer account – just click on Site Builder in the top right hand corner. We even let you have a go whilst your trial account is live.

The killer feature in our Site Builder tool is a unique feature we call ‘Site Scraper’. In just a few clicks you can create a replica of your homepage or content page from your website, and edit it so you can add content that’s personalised but looks exactly like it’s part of your site. It even directs clickers within your navigation straight onto your site.

dotMailer’s Site Builder will save you a lot of design and devlopment budget and resource, make your working life easier and help your email campaigns to deliver more. Take a trial or log into your dotMailer email marketing account and click Site Builder in the top right hand corner.

Is it the end of the world - Twitter is down

By Eleanor Workman

What do you do if Twitter is down?

Twitter is having the longest downtime since May last year. No cause has been determined but Twitter have updated their status blog. And if you're in any doubt you can always go to www.istwitterdown.com

Is the failure of this now seemingly critical network in our lives going to bring us all down into despair?

Or will we be able to get on with our lives and not stress that we no longer need to know the minutiae of our friends', colleagues', celebrities' and anyone else that we follow lives.

Maybe this is a time to think about our Twitter strategies. Do posts retain their relevancy? Does each post work towards a goal?

Life without Twitter - peaceful isn't it

On your marks, get set, go!

By Eleanor Workman

Ready Steady Email is back. After a summer break the workshop with a twist returns to London on Monday October 5th. Run by the DMA & IAB and supported by dotMailer, Ready Steady Email is a unique, seriously hands-on and highly enjoyable email marketing workshop, where attendees compete to win on the day.

Book now for October and join the ranks of satisfied participants (including yours truly) who have gained some great insights and advice - from their team members, competing teams and from the industry-expert facilitators and judges (including our own dotMailer Director - Tink Taylor).

Find out more and book your place via the DMA website.

143 days and counting

By Eleanor Workman

Yesterday Harrods opened its Christmas store. Although the first of the major department stores to open their shop the others are sure to follow suit soon.

Like all boy and girl scouts should be, its always good to be prepared. For marketers who don't have the resource to be planning Christmas campaigns 6 months in advance, the launch of Christmas stores is a timely reminder to get started with a Christmas email marketing strategy.

This year, we've also got to consider the impact of the recession. With many families watching the pennies will more people start their Christmas shopping earlier to spread costs over the next 4 months?

We can only wait and see but maybe we should start thinking about our Christmas email marketing strategy a little earlier this year?

The count down is on. 143 days and counting.