Email Marketing Blog

I’ve been working closely with a luxury goods maker who is a new full service client for us.  Right off the bat we saw poor delivery rates to Hotmail/MSN addresses.  We checked Microsoft’s SNDS and immediately saw problems with hits to spam traps that were no doubt the result of some really old addresses on the list that Hotmail converted to traps.  We decided to take the bold move and suppress any Hotmail/MSN account that hadn’t opened a previous campaign.  While we had been seeing 0% inbox delivery we found directly after suppressing inactive accounts we were back into the inbox.

These insights and others can be found within our Email Marketing Resources area at listrak.com.

Regards,

Ross

JupiterResearch released their 2008 ESP Buyers Guide yesterday.  Listrak gained a favorable review which I feel is due to the hard work of our product development team. 

Here’s what they had to say about us:

Clients include Motorola, RBS, L’Oreal, PR Newswire, and Wolfgang Puck. Listrak improved the navigation and ease of use of its application, enhancing the usability of features such as the content library, which allows users to reuse, store, and organize blocks of HTML and plain-text messages when creating dynamic content.  Additionally, its dynamic content scripting and support generation tools were vastly improved, and the addition of the ability to deploy in a variety of languages makes it appropriate for large-enterprise marketers looking to centralize their mailing operations across disparate geographies. Although it is still highly valuable, its suitability was partly reduced because of its relatively smaller mailing sizes.

Looks like Live Writer is working well.

I wanted to take a minute to promote our 2008 Email Marketing Days Conference here on my blog.  The Listrak marketing team has been doing a great job putting this together.  Please check it out and we hope to see you in September.

Ok I’m back.  I’m not sure if I’m telling myself a lie or not but it seems like their could be some correlation between the pain involved in logging into my Wordpress account and the amount of blog posts I make.  To that end I’ve installed Windows Live Writer to speed my posts.  Let’s see what happens when I hit the publish button.

-Ross

This month we’re looking ahead to the deliverability landscape for 2008.  We’ve assembled a terrific deliverability guide, entitled Outlook for 2008: Essential Email Marketing Deliverability Guide.  This whitepaper is a compendium of deliverability knowledge that every email marketer needs to not only know about but also implement within their own email marketing programs.  The guide covers everything from measuring and assessing your reputation to implementing authentication methods to evaluating which accreditation service might be best for you.

For those looking for more deliverability content we’ll be hosting a free deliverability webinar as an adjunct to this whitepaper at 1PM EST on December 18th.

From all of us here at Listrak, have a safe and enjoyable Holiday Season!

Regards,

Ross Kramer
CEO

We’re publishing some exciting research today – our first case study on our all new Dynamic Content feature.  We worked with DiscountBeautyCenter.com, on a preference-based dynamic content email campaign that included two distinct dynamic content containers that displayed variable data based on past purchase history.  The results of using the preference-based dynamic content version versus the non-preference based version were compelling:

• 15% increase in open rates
• 27% increase in read rates (opened for 5 seconds or more)
• 41% increase in click through rates

The case study is available for free download here.

If you think dynamic content might be for you you’ll be interested in reading Brent Shroyer’s blog post, “Using Dynamic Content for Email Campaign A/B Split Testing.”  It offers a practical approach to using our dynamic content system for email testing.

Here are a few additional Dynamic Content Resources:

• Dynamic Content Strategy Guide
• Best Practices: Creating Relevant Email Campaigns with Dynamic Content

If you’re looking for ways to boost your response rates for your upcoming Holiday Season campaigns it’s not too late to consider using dynamic content.

This morning at 10AM we launched the public preview of Listrak 4.0.  Our marketing team as well as our Product Manager has done a great job at explaining all the features and benefits of our new email marketing platform.  Primarily the new update paves the way for future product growth as our sending engine has been completely re-written.  The big news of this release is the new Dynamic Content email marketing module.  Some people call this variable data others call it dynamic message assembly – we call it Dynamic Content.  It’s more than just replacing variables ala mail merge, rather our Dynamic Content allows conditional blocks of HTML code (or plain text) to be substituted using Boolean expressions.

In other news, I’ll be speaking at the DMA’s Annual Conference & Exhibition in Chicago this fall.  I’ll be sharing a session with respected wine marketing expert Bryan St. Amant.  Bryan has been a long time Listrak customer and consistently generates results that beat industry averages.  His secret?  Relevancy based on preference is the backbone of the email marketing programs that he deploys for his customers.

If you’re planning to attending the DMA show please drop me a line.

I live in the heart of the Amish paradise.  While we don’t have some of the elegant niceties of the big city we do have outlet malls.  I was shopping at the Nike Outlet a few weeks ago and picked up a postcard at point-of-purchase promoting their clearance sale.  Essentially all you had to do to get 20% off your purchase over $75 was to bring the card back with some personal information filled out on the back.  I was thrilled to see that they were asking for an email address.  This is a fabulous example of a great acquisition campaign in action.  Good stuff, Nike!

FRONT OF POSTCARD

BACK OF POSTCARD, NOTE EMAIL ADDRESS CAPTURE FIELD

Last Friday, following our announcement that we had created a seamless integration between Listrak and Google Analytics, Brett Crosby, Senior Product Manager at Google Analytics posted this blog entry about our email marketing integration.

As the founder and head cheerleader of Listrak for the past six years it’s great to see our latest achievement being recognized by one of the world’s largest Internet companies.  We have been keeping an eye on the Google Analytics product since about 2001.  At that time the product was called Urchin and the parent company was Quantified Systems.  I had originally met the Urchin guys at ISPCON in Baltimore, MD.  We were instantly impressed with the speed and power of Urchin and we’ve run the installed version of the Urchin product on our shared hosting boxes at Vertex Internet since that time.  Their on-demand hosted ASP version of Urchin (now Google Analytics) was what Google was really interested in when they purchased Urchin.  That product totally blew away the installed version.  It’s no wonder why so many companies have adopted Google Analytics.  It suits the needs of mid-market customers well with lots of power and features; and you can’t beat the cost, either – free!

Our Product Manager, Brent Shroyer, put this tutorial together to help our customers get up and running quickly.  We have also authored a comprehensive whitepaper that explains the benefits of integrating your email marketing campaigns with Google Analytics.

My second post from Marketing Sherpa’s Email Summit ’07….  One of the major themes here at the summit has been list cleansing.  MarketingSherapa Research Director, Stefan Tornquist, started one of his “2007 To-Do Item” slides with a bullet that said “Slash Your List.”  Since then the show has been a buzz with marketers wondering what the best approach for “list slashing” should be.  Essentially what Stefan is talking about is identifying the people on your list who are disengaged and removing them.  There hasn’t been much content around the topic of list cleansing so I offer the following concept: 

The primary reason for list cleansing is to understand how much disengaged users are costing you in the following terms

• Cost to mail to disengaged users (ESP fees, bandwidth, etc.)
• Deliverability cost (how much blockage are disengaged users causing)

You obviously know how much you’re paying your ISP for bandwidth or ESP for mailing costs, however, what you don’t know is if your deliverability if suffering from your disengaged users.  If you read my last post then you know that the only way to know what you don’t know is to test – so here’s how to test if you need to “slash your list.”

The first step of this process is defining your measure of disengagement.  I recommend looking at behavioral data such as clicks or purchases.  Once defined you want to then segment your list based on this measure – for example, segment all people who have never clicked.  You will want to then mail to your list with this segment suppressed.  Obviously your performance metric rates will immediately improve since you just chopped all your dead wood, however, where you need to be extremely sensitive is analyzing your gross conversion volume.  Did the gross conversion volume increase?  If so then you’ve got a deliverability problem hiding within your disengaged users.

The next question is – what to do with the emails that were suppressed.  This is the baby/bath water paradigm where you still have an asset that holds some intrinsic value – the question is where and how much.  I would recommend among other things doing a recency select on this list segment and perhaps mail to sub segments of that list to better understand where exactly your disengagement is happening.  Other ideas would be to change the content mix or format of the messaging.  They key is to not throw the baby out with the bath water.

I’m off to the airport…

Ross