Getting smart about email marketing doesn't mean knowing all the answers. It means knowing what makes email marketing work and what type of resources you need to build something effective. A rule known as the chunking principle states that the mind can retain no more than seven items of information without memory loss. Because we want you to retain most of what you read, we have decided to condense what you need to know about email marketing into seven key truths. These are facts you should post on a wall somewhere. As you delve into email marketing, you will be challenged to remember these truths. So please, use today's hour wisely and keep this section handy.

On this second day, we are going to continue having fun by getting all our tools and resources together. Whether this is your first time creating an email marketing plan or you are a veteran, you have our guarantee that you will take away something useful from this section.

A sound email strategy presents new opportunities for overall business improvement by putting into place tools and processes that can solve current performance problems and open new avenues to bolster sales and customer satisfaction.

Before selecting or even evaluating new technology solutions, an organization should start by determining the overall objective and scope of their email program, then identifying current problems and obstacles to meeting this objective, and finally creating an inventory of current resources. Once a company has a clear understanding of what it wants to achieve, what's keeping it from getting there, and what is already in place, then it can develop an evaluation and selection plan to find the solution and define the processes to fulfill its email strategy. You can use our handy quiz to help determine what your areas of focus should be.

Drafting an email marketing budget can be a daunting task. It seems oddly simple in the beginning, but it quickly becomes riddled with complexities and challenges.

To begin with, you should make a list of every type of expense you think you may need. (Yes, if you haven't noticed already, planning for email marketing requires lots of lists.) There is a lot of research out there that will help you justify the budget you're proposing for email, including the recent survey results from Datran Media, as illustrated in Figure 6.1.

Once you've demonstrated to management the benefits of email marketing, what you need to focus on is making sure you have the money to account for all the email costs. In Chapter 4, we listed all the types of costs you should consider, including the following:

Figure 6.1. Datran 2008 annual marketing and media survey results

To take these costs one step further, we recommend building a cohesive email marketing plan that also takes these factors into consideration:

Budget Timing and Assessment

Once you have your line items listed and associated costs of doing business identified, the next step to take today is to build an ROI calculator. Using this tool, you can calculate the expected response rate for each email sent and how many emails need to be sent in order to drive the return on investment. Some people choose to build these to determine what type of response rates they need to justify the cost. Others build them to determine how much they can spend based on the projected ROI. Either case is fine. Just make sure you build one. It should look something like the example shown in Figure 6.2. (The data were created for presentation purposes only and do not reflect any company's actual budget or business plan.) It should be a living document that you update and manipulate weekly at a minimum.

Note

You can download a copy of the SampleROI.xls calculator from this book's web page at www.sybex.com/go/emailmarketinghouraday.

Figure 6.2. An ROI calculator implemented in Excel

You are now locked and loaded with knowledge about the email marketing space. You have a list of the types of services and technologies you can leverage and will need a budget (including an ROI forecasting document) in place as well as. What's next?

Remember the third truth from Monday's focus: Anything you do in the world of marketing has an email component. Regardless of whether you work for a large or small company, and whether your job is focused only on email or includes broader efforts, email will impact almost everything your company does. Today, your job is to review every aspect of marketing or advertising that your company may be doing and to see where and how email could or should be making an impact.

This is probably one of email marketing's most fun activities because it is very visual. By creating an email "look book," you will be able to effectively determine whether you need to make any changes to your budget to support other programs, design additional creative, or develop tests to supplement what you have noted.

You will also be surprised by your findings. Recent studies have shown that branding in email creative is consistent across all communications for only about 5 percent of companies. This is natural for large companies that work with multiple agencies. It is also expected for very small companies that implement efforts over time, as their services grow, often leaving older branding elements in play because of lack of resources or a volume demand to change it. So, where should you start?

The first place to look is at your print advertising. If your company is doing a print campaign, your creative may look something like the Sephora ad shown in Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.3. A print ad for an email opt-in

This print campaign is built specifically to ask people to opt in to an email effort. If your advertising group is doing something like this, good for them! But, do you know what type of email is being sent once someone opts in? Or even what is happening to the name once it is in your database? If not, you should definitely find out. Also note that addresses coming in from a print experience deserve an email welcome message that references the source.

The second element to check is your customer service center. Once someone is live on the phone, is your representative asking for email address permission? Is there a workflow built to drive these customers to receive the right follow-up email or send them the most appropriate branding information? In Figure 6.4, American Express integrates the right brand with dynamic messaging, which is passed along to the email team to continue the messaging appropriately.

Figure 6.4. An American Express dynamic email

If advertising and customer service have matters under control, move along to examine your corporate site. These sites often post research, press releases, and news coverage, which a visitor can share with a friend or colleague. That is fantastic news, as long as it is consistent with your efforts. Many companies fall short in this area because their pages ask to capture email addresses but then do nothing with them.

Figure 6.5 is an example from Nestle that shows the investor relations opt-in box. It does a good job of capturing profile information, but is it linked to other types of emails, or even using space inside the emails to promote the benefits of opt-in with other Nestle products? It is not.

Finally, the last large area you will want to review is your online media planning efforts. If you are a business-to-business company, your focus is on driving leads. Here is a great example of a banner that offers a free trial:

Once again, it is your job to determine what happens to the email address once someone provides it for the download.

Figure 6.5. Nestle corporate opt-in

The impact of other marketing efforts on email grows constantly. Your job as an email marketer is twofold: to create the best email programs you can and to optimize them as you go. But it's also to ensure that any email marketing opportunities that arise thanks to your company's efforts are managed and effectively utilized in a way that creates the most positive brand experience around.

For each of these areas, ask yourself these questions:

These questions will help you build a valuable resource for collecting new and highly active email addresses when you are looking for ways to increase your database size.

It's D-day. You have spent the week researching what you need to know about email and what technologies and services you think will be of the most help to you. You've estimated the costs associated with your intended efforts, and you have identified areas of your website that will add value to your current programs. The meeting with the boss is set, and all you need to do is get the check signed.

Whether you are asking for $50 or $5,000 or $500,000, asking your boss for money to support your email marketing programs is going to require some discussion about the value of the email program to the company overall. We hope that by now you have picked up a few of the key highlights from earlier chapters in this book. These include the following:

To help support these facts and enable C-level executives to understand the value of supporting email marketing, the Email Experience Council created a report outlining the value of email addresses to a company, shown in Figure 6.6. Use these elements to help develop your plan of attack when you speak with your boss.

Your goal in this communication is to demonstrate the holistic power of email in the areas listed earlier. We urge you to stay away from tactical elements such as open rates and even click-through rates.

Figure 6.6. Calculating the value to a company of an email address

We have a friend who works at the Heinz factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her job is to schedule the delivery of Heinz products to grocery stores in the Midwest. It is a really challenging job because it has to take into consideration all of the following factors:

How is she able to organize and manage all these elements dynamically and ensure there is no excess or lack of product? Somehow she is able to effectively create a process and workflow that allows her to forecast and manage to change.

When you think about it, we have the same need in our profession. Somehow, you need to effectively forecast the amount of interaction and turnover the names in your email databases will generate so that you can budget and plan for list growth initiatives at the right times and achieve optimal results. You have to do this without going over budget or losing valuable ground.

In 2006, Silverpop conducted a list growth survey of 321 marketers. As reported by Direct magazine, it found that when asked to name their list growth tactics, almost two-thirds of the email marketers surveyed cited offline advertising and direct marketing. More than half mentioned trade shows or online marketing and web searches. Viral marketing was third. The study also revealed a gap between planned list-building tactics and those seen as successful. For example, 24 percent intend to use viral marketing, but only 10 percent see it as successful.

These are interesting insights, but before you can get into worrying about how to grow you list, you need to evaluate how effective your list is.

These three elements will get you well on your way to answering some critical questions not only about how large your list is but also about its effectiveness. Once you have this information, you will be in a good position to compare the size and response to your budget numbers, discussed in the previous section. This exercise will give you a clear indicator of how much you need to grow and what the starting points should be.

Staying on track with list growth is an important factor to focus on. Many times, we have seen people put the best plans into place and then have them fall through as soon as THEY LOSE THEIR FOCUS. Without your list, you will not be able to market. Don't lose sight of that.

Now that you know how much you need to grow and have some indication of where you may need to start, it is time to put together the plan for growing your acquisition efforts. You will have a number of choices to make. Based on your budget and your time, and results of tests, your plan can be expected to change and develop over time. We strongly encourage you to launch your acquisition plans slowly over time. Test not only for the effectiveness of meeting name-capturing goals but also for the results these new names have for your company. Do they perform in the first 30 days? Are they still effective 90 days after adding them to the list? Are there high spam or complaint rates? All these elements are factors in determining what type of list growth efforts and acquisition plans will work best for you.

An Intelliseek survey by Forrester Research on U.S. consumers' trust or distrust by type of advertising found that roughly two-thirds of respondents said they trusted emails they signed up for. This confirms what many industry experts have known all along. Email marketing is a powerful relationship-building tool. So, how does an organization implement a successful email loyalty program?

According to a study on worldwide email messaging by the market research firm IDC, daily email traffic is now estimated at message sent after 60 billion. Without question, the easiest way to find relevant email addresses is to ask every consumer who visits your website for theirs. It's simple enough, but most sites do not generate enough online traffic to drive a high volume of opt-ins. And without a sufficient volume of site traffic to capture elusive opt-in addresses to drive strong relationships between buyer and seller; business owners will lose valuable market share faster than it takes the deliverability status on an unsolicited email to bounce. So, what can you do to generate site traffic?

The answer: channel surf. Start by using as many channels as possible to drive online interests and grow a company database. A marketer's push and pull tactics can range from one, many, or all of the following channels to help create a steady flow of site traffic:

The data in Figure 6.7 illustrate different inbound channels available to online marketers and how effective each channel is at generating opt-ins.

List acquisition doesn't need to be expensive. It can work very effectively given the right focus. However, we do recommend you never put more than 15 percent of your list growth strategy into one effort. This could cause serious issues and repercussions should something go wrong.

Figure 6.7. Ways to drive opt-ins

Assuming your strategy of "reaching out" to use as many channels as possible to generate a steady flow of site traffic is successful, what next? The next step, and probably the most important in your effort, is to generate responsive and long-term opt-in permission approval.

This requires a focus on the best practices of today (remember, we said you need to watch these all of the time) to develop the best customer experience.

To make it easy on you, we asked Cliff Seltzer of PureSend to craft the following list of the current best practices in opt-in and preference centers; Cliff also provided the phenomenal creative examples. Use this as a "tear me out" checklist to keep next to the email marketing truths, and you will always have something you will find useful in design and strategy meetings:

Opt-in Examples

Figures 6.8 and 6.9 illustrate opt-in interfaces from Olympus and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Figure 6.8. Olympus email opt-in page

Figure 6.9. Saks Fifth Avenue email opt-in page

Another example is from Continental Airlines, which has always followed best practices in its opt-in strategy. Here are Continental's most important advantages:

• It has preference centers. Early on, Continental established best practices in preference centers. Figure 6.10 shows an example.

• It takes chances. Continental was an early adopter of RSS and mobile messaging. We had the chance to work with Continental a few years ago and were impressed by its willingness to look toward the future.

• Its welcome messages speak to the consumer. Many of Continental's frequent flyers have been impressed with the way the airline creates messaging that will help make flight planning and execution easier. Continental was among the first airlines to use email to alert customers to check in online and provide service updates via email mobile messaging. These transactional messages aren't viewed as interruptive at all. They're appreciated.

Figure 6.10. The Continental Airlines preference center

Setting up a plan for email acquisition, although it's essential, is only as effective as the opt-in methodology that is used. Once someone opts in, both best practices and CAN-SPAM say you must provide a simple, clear, one-click way to opt out. In reviewing your company's opt-out process, the first question you want to ask yourself is, "How well are we currently handling opt-outs?" As with the exercise to determine which elements of your advertising marketing program/website currently support an email conversation, this is also a good place to start gauging the effectiveness of your opt-out process.

In 2008, eROI, an integrated marketing service company, conducted an analysis of how companies are enabling people to opt in and opt out. Their findings contain insights you need to know when beginning to design your opt-out strategy.

A summary of their findings indicates that less than half of marketers used a confirmation process to validate opt-in requests. The difference between getting an opt-in approval and getting a confirmed opt-in can create significant differences in response rates for future emails.

To entice subscribers, 88 percent of companies reported offering a newsletter subscription, and 29 percent reported offering access to preferred content. Rewards came in second, with 24 percent offering discounts and coupons and 22 percent presenting a contest of some sort. When you are designing your opt-in strategy, these statistics and numbers can assist you in knowing what the rest of the market is offering. Although people are looking for an exchange of value in order to provide their email address, they do not always need to be given gifts or larger rewards in exchange.

An additional set of findings from this same report indicated that most marketers provide a "thank you" page as the landing page. Yet most marketers don't take advantage of it, because only 29 percent of email marketers reiterate the benefits of subscribing. Data management was another area where companies were not up to speed. According to eROI, 65 percent of email marketers don't pass content on to another system. Although this could be acceptable for some companies, it could be an issue with CAN-SPAM compliance for others. So please, take note of the way your data flows moving forward.

Another insight is that after opting out, 90 percent of email marketers do not follow up with subscribers, leaving a huge opportunity for additional channel communication. Just because they don't want to receive email does not necessarily mean they don't want to hear from you in the future through a different channel. Of those that do follow up, 5 percent use direct mail, and 4 percent follow up via telephone.

This week has been pretty intense. You've looked at some crucial topics: driving traffic to your site, driving opt-ins to your database, securing preferences, and even managing opt-outs. There is only one item missing for the week, and that is the need to review every landing page on your website.

Landing pages are tricky, because there may be policies or guidelines that generate restrictions. Some companies have policies that require only one version of a landing page to be used regardless of the media entry point. Other companies do not allow certain types of cookies to be put in place, so content users' clickstreams cannot be tracked. In same cases, this makes it difficult to validate the impact that the landing page content or design has on conversion. In any case, there is one consistent truth: If you send an email with a link in it, the respondent who clicks, it has to land somewhere. Even if you are not responsible for the website strategy, you are responsible for making sure the email marketing experience remains on-brand and consistent and that it creates a positive outcome.

The Recipe for Successful Landing Pages

Just as you would with any other recipe, the first step in creating a successful landing page experience is to take a look around the kitchen (your company) and determine the resources you have available. Cooking up a successful landing page strategy will require you to have the following:

• Your landing page policy. Is it one-size-fits-all, or can it be customized by media type?

• Your landing page template. It should include an email address capture even if the visitor is coming here from an email.

• Your landing page rollout time frame. Does it take three days or three weeks to move a landing page from design to production?

• Your landing page analytics capabilities. Suppose you've driven 5,000 people to the page. How will you know what happened to them after that?

Event Challenge: Cisco and the Wordy Event Effort vs. AAAA and the Visual Invite

Cisco sent out an email to promote a webinar. It also presented online banners and other media. All efforts drove to the same landing page (which required lots of explanation since banner ads can't contain it all). This was a pretty poor experience for the readers. Those who made it through the text of the email were presented with the same information on the landing page. It was tough to find a link to register.

AAAA was promoting an event at the same time. It, too, had a one-stop-landing-page rule. The difference with its email was that AAAA knew it. Instead of making the email do all the hard work, AAAA chose a more visual and high-level style of messaging that drove people to a fact-filled destination where they could continue learning and searching.

The path was integrated for the AAAA respondents. This is a key element to consider when creating any email campaign.

The next step is to build your landing page strategy. Define what needs to happen when someone clicks your email. This is important, because it will enable you to make sure the copy and layout of your email are appropriate based on the destination.

If your landing page is a one-stop shop, then your email should focus on getting people to click through to read more. Conversely, if the point of the landing page is data capture, your email marketing message has to work harder.

The third and fourth steps in your landing page strategy should be to drive the visitor to the appropriate destination and do some type of data capture. This doesn't mean you need to make it mandatory to provide an email address or other information in order to access landing page content. It does mean landing pages are no longer hidden from view, and many people will access these pages without ever having received your email. Giving someone the opportunity to engage with you is critical.

Why Data Capture on Any Landing Page Makes Sense

People who come to your landing page from an email may not be ready to do what you want. Or they might not be the right person. For example, if you are selling football tickets to your reader and they click through to check out the deal but they are hockey fans, they won't convert. However, if someone else in the house is a football fan, that email or landing page link will most likely be shared with someone not on your list. Having a section of your landing page that enables people to opt in can help grow your list and improve response rates.

Now that you know what the tools are, what the destination experience should be, and how to manage THE USER FLOW, you absolutely need to include one step to wrap up this week of learning: analysis.

Most email marketers look at top-level metrics: opens, clicks, and conversions. With a landing page, though, there is tremendous value in understanding what happens between the email click to the landing page and the conversion. It can often educate you about your email creative and even about the offer.

Figure 6.11 shows a landing page from IBM.

Figure 6.11. IBM Multichannel landing page

This page offers a number of places to click. You can explore content, reach a representative, navigate off the page, and more. If an email was sent to drive traffic to one of these specific areas to convert visitors and the conversion was low, it would be a huge help to be able to see where people are clicking on this page. You could then either change this page layout to make it more focused, change the destination link, or potentially even just gather clickstream data to create a very personal email follow-up. For more advanced email marketers, your landing page is a great place to try multivariate testing. We will speak about that in more detail in Chapter 7.

Knowing how your landing pages work is a key element of creating a big splash with your email marketing efforts. And as you move forward into week 3, you will need to remember all of these cornerstone elements so you can apply them appropriately to build the blueprint for success.

For our purposes, strategy is the reason you are creating your email program. There can be many reasons to send an email to people: acquisition, conversion, loyalty, retention, up-sell, cross-sell, viral, service, transactional, invites, and more. All of these fit within the larger umbrella of a program. Maybe your emails are part of a multichannel program, maybe they are the only marketing elements you use, or maybe they are meant to drive to a larger effort. In any event, your program is meant to help achieve some presumably monetary goal for your company: sell more, or get more X. And using email has become one of the most effective ways to make that happen. That ultimate company goal is 100 percent the guiding principle of your email strategy.

Although creating a strategy from company goals seems easy, it can very quickly become overwhelming and unproductive if you are not careful. Why? Because email offers so many opportunities to personalize, customize, and build individual messaging, that one simple email, intended to be targeted for different types of response or data, can turn into 100 messages. So to keep you on track, we have built the following ten-question strategy/workflow organizer for your strategy design. This is another section you may find useful to bookmark, rip out, or highlight like crazy.

Now that you have a map for your email strategy, you can build your data transfer process. Depending on the size of your company database, this can be a simple task or the most horrible experience you have ever had. For that reason, the following sections are going to be split based on complexity levels of the databases inside your company. Feel free to skip the other sections, or read them all and have pity on the people whose company has a multidepartmental CRM solution.

Small Companies, or Companies with Limited Database Ability

Believe it or not, these types of organizations have the easiest path to starting email marketing because they can leverage the power of the email provider's database. Most email marketing providers have database capabilities that store hundreds of fields about your customer. Because this information is stored inside their database,s the ability to create dynamic, rules-based messaging is simple.

If this is your scenario, the only two elements you need to worry about are the flow to get data into the database and the ability to extract it for reporting or analysis purposes when you need it. You can refer to Chapter 7 for more information about how to utilize reports and analytics to optimize your efforts.

Figure 6.12. Database assessment checklist

The focus of today's efforts is ensuring that your tracking links will work. This suggestion might seem kind of silly, especially since we spoke quite a bit about creative design elements in the previous chapter, but it is important.

These days, successful deliverability is contingent upon the perceived security of the content of an email. This means every image and link inside an email is subject to automated validation by ISPs.

There is a real threat we need to be aware of as email marketers: the misuse of links for phishing scams. Craig Spiezle, the director of security for Internet Explorer, is a leading email deliverability authority and offers these insights to share with you on the topic:

Table 6.2 shows the February 2008 percentage of messages appearing to be from legitimate domains that are actually spoofed.

And the examples in Figures 6.13 and 6.14 will show you that a spoofed email doesn't necessarily look like spam.

Figure 6.13. Spoofed email purporting to be from CitiBusiness

Figure 6.14. Spoofed email purporting to be from Hallmark

So, why should readers trust your email? We know you are not a spammer or spoofing domains, but what would be worse than spending all this time building an email campaign and having it blocked because the tracking links you have in it are highly spoofed or flagged as "non-reputable."

Now is the time to ensure that your email links are using domains and IP addresses that are appropriately registered and established and will successfully track and resolve appropriately to your database. Registering these links and IP addresses with the right monitoring and reputation system will be one of the only ways you can ensure you are not being spoofed.

By most estimates, spam accounts for more than 50 percent of all email communications. But just because it may look like spam and may act like spam doesn't mean it is spam. Spam filters don't really care if your message is legitimate and valued. To get some expert advice on the deliverability basics, we interviewed two top email marketing deliverability experts, Ray Everett-Church, the chief privacy officer for Habeas, and Erick Mott, the director of marketing for Habeas. Today's lesson is based on what they had to say.

Most ISPs now use spam filters to cull undesirable email to protect their subscribers and cut down on the amount of email traffic that can potentially bog down the network and slow down service. The more emails their customers get, the more it consumes expensive bandwidth.

To combat this waste of resources, ISPs, corporations, and institutions of all sizes have deployed antivirus software and other security solutions. In doing so, they have set policies about what is considered undesirable content. More often than not, the IT department is responsible for developing and enforcing policies that may not necessarily be in line with legitimate business priorities or the needs of individual users. So, sometimes valuable information is intercepted and thrown into the spam heap inadvertently.

And last, but hardly least, are the consumers who implement desktop applications that automatically delete messages that qualify as spam. Many consumers may never even see messages that might be of interest to them.

Spam filters are becoming an obstacle for legitimate e-newsletter publishers and email marketers. To get your mail into the inbox, consider implementing these four basic strategies.

Hooray! You've made it through week 3. With a strong strategy in place, a data flow process, and assurance that your messages are going to be delivered, you are down to the wire. It's time to test one more aspect of your campaign: the ability for someone to take action with it.

The first rule to keep in mind here is that the definition of "action" does not mean a click-through, because, in reality, emails never die. It's true—once an email is delivered, even if it is put in the trash folder, unread, it has a chance of being referenced at a future date.

To determine whether your email is actionable, you can use the following checklist as a starting point:

Once you feel comfortable your emails can induce or support action, either now or later, give yourself a pat on the back. You've come a long way, and now it is time to get ready to put all your hard work into motion. It is time to get ready to send!

As you were growing up, your mother may have told you, "You are what you eat." The same is true in email. Your email messages are only as good as the content inside. The trick is, how do you get people to look inside? In today's effort we will take a deep dive into the ways that the "actionability" of your email can be impacted.

Chapter 5 does a thorough job of providing you with tactics that will help you create your own From address and subject line strategy. In this chapter, we thought it would be beneficial for you to see how your subject line strategy can actually impact results and the kind of impact it will have on results.

In 2008, U.K. advertising agency Alchemy Worx produced a very compelling report on the correlation of subject lines and response rates. Its report showed that a shorter subject line will positively impact open rates. Specifically, 11–20 words drive the highest open rates for emails. (The testing looked at subject lines that ranged from 11–140 words). This is a fairly widely held belief. Shorter subject lines can be read in more email clients and can be read on handheld devices. For years, the standard has been to try to keep the total number of characters to less than 50 to ensure most email clients will render all the words in the preview pane.

Although this information is consistent with most historical recommendations, the information the report provides immediately following this is new, exciting, and a bit different from any information that has ever been shared before. The report indicated that although shorter subject lines drive the highest open rates, it is the longer subject lines that drive the highest click-to-open rates. This is new information, and when you think about it, it makes quite a bit of sense. Longer subject lines act as content filters for what is in the email. Subject lines like "Get 50% now" is great, but you need to open the email to see what you are saving money on. Longer subject lines like "Get 50% off on your new iPhone 3G" provide much more specific insight. These subject lines will drive lower but more qualified open rates and click rates.

Deciding between volume and quality has long been a heated debate among marketers. Which one you make your focus for subject lines will ultimately be a decision only you can make based on company goals. To make the most informed decision, review the elements of Chapter 5, and then test both strategies before making a final decision.

It is crucial that recipients can see everything in the emails you send. Yet this is often an area where marketers drop the ball. In the previous chapter, we covered creative design and best practices. But as you get ready to kick off your first campaign, after someone opens your message, you want them to be able to get all your content, even if images are blocked or turned off.

Some of the most up-to-date results focusing on the reality of the state of rendering come from the Email Experience Council. A report released in June 2008 examined the email design practices of 104 top online retailers and their performance in an images-off email environment. It also includes the results of a survey of 472 marketers regarding rendering issues, conducted in conjunction with SubscriberMail.

Increasingly, images are being blocked by default by email and webmail clients, changing the game for B2C marketers, many of whom have become accustomed to designing emails that are composed mostly of images. "The results of this study underscore the importance of proactively designing email to compensate for image suppression," said Jordan Ayan, CEO of SubscriberMail.

She continues, "Specifically, email marketers must design emails to work with and without images present and test to ensure optimal image rendering. Marketers whose design accounted for image suppression reported impressive lifts in key performance areas. Still, a significant percent of email marketers realize this issue, yet fail to take action to address it."

Here's a summary of the results of the Email Experience Council rendering study:

Based on the importance of image rendering and the need to quickly read the copy in an email, many marketers take precautionary steps. These include the actions shown in Figure 6.15.

Figure 6.15. Actions taken to address image blocking

Whitelisting

Figure 6.16 shows an example of how an email message can look when sent to someone who is very cautious about what they receive or doesn't know that their images are turned off in their email client.

Figure 6.16. Email with images blocked

To avoid having your emails look like this, you should encourage people to whitelist or safelist your messages. Figure 6.17 shows current actions taken by marketers ranked by usage frequency.

Figure 6.17. Preheader element usage in the promotional emails of 104 major online retailers

It's the middle of the last week before you send your campaign, and you are working hard to make sure everything is checked and a contingency plan is in place. Personalization is one of the tactics many marketers use to make sure emails are recognized and opened. Today's focus is making sure your data feeds and dynamic content strategies are set up correctly to avoid embarrassing personalization errors.

Of course, you should test every new campaign you set up. However, when it comes to personalization of data inside an email, you will want to employ a few additional best practices:

Figure 6.18. Personalization gone wrong

Notice the copy: "And with the 0 TrueBlue points you've earned as of June 3, 2008, you're on your way . . ." Really? With 0 points, Jeanniey won't get very far. A more appropriate personalized message would have been to send people with 0 points the same email with a statement like this replacing the one I received: "We noticed you don't have any points yet, so now is a great time to take advantage of this offer." You see, personalization does matter to the reader.

Personalization may seem simple at first, but please begin using it in smaller chunks and with great caution to ensure you get the hang of it before you go full stream ahead.

We have spoken about this concept a number of times throughout the book already. Email is unique. Unlike paper, even when you throw it away, you can still dig it out of the trash folder a week later. Unlike a phone call, when are you done with it, it is still there. Once you send an email to someone, it lives forever. This means your messages, your brand, and your offer all need to maintain the highest level of quality they can.

When we are speaking with people about email marketing, we often conduct a quiz called "What Kind of Emailer Are You?" In this quiz, we tell people to imagine they receive an email about a sale on flowers. We then ask people to imagine what they would do with the email, and it always ends up that their actions fall into one of five possibilities:

We then ask people to imagine that three weeks later their best friend calls in a panic that she forgot her mother's birthday and is desperate to send flowers and is looking for a recommendation.

At this point, regardless of which of the five types of readers we have in the room, every single person says they would remember the email received weeks ago (admitting that they might not remember the details of the content) and will go as far as digging into their trash folder to find it and send to their friend.

You can try this email life-span test with any type of content, and it is always the same reaction. Emails live forever.

This is something you need to know and understand before your first campaign goes out. Why? Because this means your branding, your offers, and your editorial content will be read and referenced not just for days or weeks but potentially for months and, in the business world, even for years.

Understanding that email lives forever can give you a leg up as you think of copy. Referencing previous emails special offers or upcoming content keeps people engaged well beyond the one-email-readership trend that many new emailers fall into.

Use this information wisely.

A funny thing happens when you are the person who actually clicks the button to send an email campaign. Even if you are 100 percent sure your email campaign is set up perfectly, when it comes time to click the Send button, your heart begins to race, and you start questioning everything you have done up to this point.

This is not something that goes away quickly. It lives for each new send you do. In the email world, we call this sender's remorse.

For that reason, on the day before you send, we recommend you take the time to review all the elements of this chapter and go through the success list one more time. We also recommend sending a final test to both yourself and someone who's not involved with the campaign at all. Having a fresh set of eyes never hurts.

Your success checklist should include the following:

We recommend you go through this chapter in detail one last time, because next week is your big chance to click that Send button and drive some revenue and results.