Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

SPAM TODAY:
AOL’s postmaster Charles Stiles on spam trends
ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO
E-Mail Marketing
STRATEGY:
Compelling reasons to centralize your e-mail, by Tricia Robinson Pridemore
LEGAL ISSUES:
Keep your e-mail safe from legal challenges, by Zafar Khan
ANALYTICS: Benchmarking e-mail response metrics,by Liz Bross
CREATIVE: When e-mail design goes bad, by Julian Scott
PLUS: Insights on e-mail authentifcation, monetizing marketing programs, and
achieving higher conversions using an A/B split.
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Editor’s Note
As savvy marketers know, reaching a consumer’s inbox is a privilege, not a right.
Effectively targeting consumers through e-mail has become at once easier due to
better targeting through technology, and harder due to deliverability issues such as spam,
increasing reputation standards and overall inbox competition. Around every corner is a
new issue the industry must grapple with — currently we are
hearing about “bacn,” meaning the e-mail we have chosen to
receive, but typically don’t read immediately, if at all. This is
only a step away from spam, according to many marketers, yet
even the definition of the latter is constantly evolving.
Effective e-mail campaigns are those that harness the power
of the advancements in the medium as well as tapping into
consumer insights, while maintaining the age-old tenets of
effective direct marketing through any channel. Going the
Eleanor Trickett
extra step and ensuring that e-mail efforts are integrated with
all other marketing output across multiple channels is a sure way to really make an
impact, and this subject, among many others, is addressed here.
In the following pages of this 2007 edition of the Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing,
you will see a broad range of advice from industry experts, from such fundamental subjects
as how to best organize your company’s e-mail output and getting the most from
e-mail service providers, to putting the cherry on the cake through use of rich media.
—Eleanor Trickett, Editor in Chief
Table of Contents
Features
4 Q&A with AOL Postmaster Charles Stiles
10 Victory lap: A personalized campaign takes
e-mail marketing for a ride in the fast lane
Fundamentals
12 The relevance factor, by Ashley Johnston
14 Five compelling reasons to centralize your
e-mail, by Tricia Robinson Pridemore
14 Getting to “Yes! Yes!”: Double opt-in as a
power practice, by Outi Tuomaala
16 Open up and say “Aaaah”, by Dave Dabbah
18 So you want to reach the inbox?, by Jared
Reitzin
18 Build your house list the right way, by Jere
Doyle
20 Why and how to switch e-mail service
providers, by Elie Ashery
20 Getting to the guts of great e-mail, by
George Le Pera
22 How to monetize e-mail marketing
programs, by Lana McGilvray
DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Infrastructure
24 It starts with reputation, by J.F. Sullivan
24 Thinking beyond deliverability, by Ellen
Siegel
26 CAN-SPAM, four years on, by Jeremy
Saibil
28 E-mail authentication: It’s time, by Al
Iverson
28 How marketers can prevent spam
complaints, by Ben Chestnut
30 Keep your e-mail safe from legal challenges,
by Zafar Khan
30 Questions and answers about e-mail
sending reputation, by George Bilbrey
32 Spam finally has a definition, by Jordan
Cohen
32 Controlling messaging costs, by Barry Abel
Analytics
34 There’s more to e-mail than e-mail, by
Bob Hale
34 Send. Analyze. Target. Resend, by Dan
Robbins
36 Benchmarketing e-mail response metrics,
by Liz Bross
EDITORIAL:
Editor in Chief Eleanor Trickett Managing Editor Cara Wood
Editorial Director Julia Hood
ART AND PRODUCTION:
Design Director Irasema Rivera Graphic Designer Robert
Falcone Production Manager Michelle Chizmadia
ADVERTISING:
District Managers Jodie Solomon, Sammy Patel
Classified & Source Directory Account Manager Ralph Claudio
Circulation Director Ronald S. Moyer
Group Sales Director Steven Sottile
HAYMARKET MEDIA:
President/Publishing Director Lisa Kirk
Chairman/CEO William Pecover
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37 Measuring e-mail results: Using the wrong
end of the Stick?, by Michael DesRochers
38 Understand and respond to your customers
through analytics, by Jack Felsheim
E-mail Campaigns
39 The elements of relevance, by John Rizzi
40 When e-mail design goes bad, by Julian
Scott
40 Keys to trigger-based e-mail marketing, by
Michael Thompson
41 The how and why of integrating e-mail
across channels, by Michael Gorman
42 Mona Lisa’s eyes, by Anne Alden
42 Earn higher conversions using an A/B Split,
by Michael Stebbin
43 Viral marketing — optimize your marketing
mix, by Josh Perlstein
44 Design for your eight e-mail audiences, by
Stefan Pollard
45 E-mail marketing fuels social media, by
Janine Popick
45 Beat outbound telemarketers to the
punch, by Tim Daly and Clay Gillespie
46 Integrating e-mail with traditional
marketing methods, by Doug Marshall

04 FEATURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Q&A
A conversation with AOL’s Charles Stiles
BY DIANNA DILWORTH
Spam is a never-ending problem. Overall spam levels in
August 2007 increased to an average of 69% of total email,
according to the September issue of Symantec’s
monthly spam report. It seems that no sooner does a
spam-blocking firm or ISP identify and stop a spam phenomenon
than a new one pops up. DM News spoke with AOL postmaster
Charles Stiles about the state of spam today, the lingering
challenges and what this means to legitimate e-mail marketers.
DM News: What are the biggest spam problems you’ve seen in
recent months and what are you doing to track them?
Charles Stiles: As of late, we are seeing a lot more criminal-type
behavior. The flavor of the day right now is people taking advantage
of individuals’ home computers. They are using botnets, which take
over home computers to send out spam. There is that type of activity,
and then there is registering fraudulent accounts, and that’s really
what it comes down to. It’s no longer legitimate marketers using bad
practices. It’s really about criminal activity now.
DM News: How do you deal with this huge problem of botnets,
especially when sometimes one can fall onto a computer and only
be active for an hour before erasing itself?
CS: One of the things that we do is we try and figure out how
these machines are connecting to us. Typically they are coming
through and sending stuff out on Port 25, that’s the standard mail
port. So AOL doesn’t use the same standard mail port. Instead we
require people to authenticate. You can’t just send e-mail off of our
mail servers when you are connected. You have to actually provide
a user name and password. Now with our clients, it’s done in the
background, you don’t see it, and with Outlook or other thirdparty
clients, you can configure it. But we do require user name
“
Charles Stiles, Postmaster, AOL
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
and password so that not just anybody can connect.
We also track how much mail each account is sending, whether
you are using our client or whether you are using a third-party
mail client. This is not so much to make sure that you don’t send
too much mail, but we look at your pattern of sending. If you
only sent five or 10 messages a day on average and suddenly you
just sent out 500, that’s certainly outside of your normal pattern —
very similar to what a credit card issuer might do — in which
case we would challenge you. And we wouldn’t necessarily just
block you, but we would offer you a challenge to say, “Is this a
real human behind this? Is she sending us a message and this is
just outside of her norm?”
We would also use what you call a capture test or the image challenge
test. So long as you passed it, you are fine to go ahead and
continue sending. If you don’t, then we will probably scramble your
password and say OK, we’re just not going to allow you to connect
to the servers anymore. Then there’s an online process whereby you
can get it unscrambled, but you again have to pass that capture test,
just to make sure that it is a human that is behind the keyboard.
DM News: So how are spammers getting more sophisticated, and
what is going on with image spam?
CS: Spammers have started using images as opposed to just text on
a lot of these messages, because they have found that the text is easily
deciphered by most of our filters and engines. So instead they’ll
put together a picture that contains all the text that they would
need for their spam message. But because sending the same picture
over and over would be easily detected, they change it and put
static in it or additional elements so that it is very difficult to track.
DM News: And what are some of the things that you are doing to
track image spam? Is it also part of the authentication and login
process?
Even if a marketer did have express written consent from the consumer, if they
had copies of his driver’s license, knew his address, his telephone number,
blood type, if at the end of the day, the consumer says,‘I don’t want it,’ then we
want the mailer to stop mailing it to them.”

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06 FEATURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Case Study:
Taxbrain
Following the law does not outlaw acquisition
potential.
Online financial services firm TaxBrain
reports to having increased its new customer
acquisitions by 500 percent, and at the same
time keeping good with the laws required of
financial services companies privacy regulations
and CAN-SPAM, by using e-mail.
TaxBrain had been faced with a quandary:
How to acquire customers through often affiliate
marketing but not violate CAN-SPAM while
doing so.
“As a company that is trying really hard to
build a brand and gain consumer trust, it is critical
that we maintain a spotless reputation,” says
Craig Petz, vice president of marketing and
sales at Petz Enterprises Inc., creator of
TaxBrain.com. “On the other hand, in order to
build my brand and increase my clientele, I have
to look for ways to acquire new customers.”
TaxBrain was initially hesitant to participate
in affiliate marketing via e-mail despite the
potential that e-mail has as an acquisition tool.
“With passage of the Graham-Leach-Bliley
Act, the definition of a financial institution
CS: We’re going to have the authentication and the login process,
that’s a big part of it. We’re also going to, like I said, limit the number
of ports that can be used. But when those messages are coming
in from the Internet, then we have to look at other characteristics
of the message. Primarily, what we are looking at right now is
the source of the message, which allows us to determine whether
this is somebody we would normally be doing business with. Is
this somebody that would normally be sending a million messages
like this? If not, then we try to put them on a slow track and identify
what’s coming in. Is this a legitimate message or not, and if
not, then we just simply issue a block. And we advise the sender
that we have blocked their message. And if they feel that it’s an
error, they need to contact us.
DM News: A few years ago, the industry recommended not using
images in e-mail, being mindful of the subject line, things like that.
Is this obsolete now that we have more sophisticated technologies
that allow you to look at the authentication process and better
understand where mail is coming from? Do these things still matter?
Are subject lines still filtered?
CS: Actually, we don’t do a whole lot of filtering on the subject line.
The most effective filtering goes on right at the consumer inbox, and
typically that does come from the subject line and the “from”
address. Consumers play a huge role in determining what is and
what is not spam on the AOL system. But also for their own inbox,
anything that is delivered, certainly they have that opportunity to say,
was greatly broadened to include not only
banks, broker-dealers, and insurance companies,
but also the real estate industry, financial
advisors, tax businesses and more,” Petz
says. “Many marketers in this sector have
simply dropped, or greatly limited, their use
of e-mail marketing.”
However, the firm was still looking to
increase its business and compete with other
online tax services firms such as H&R Block
and Turbo Tax. These concerns drove
TaxBrain to seek a third party compliance
platform to help guide through the complexities
of compliance, and still participate in
affiliate marketing. Due to restrictions from
the IRS, TaxBrain could not share suppression
lists in plain-text.
TaxBrain began using Datran Media’s
UnsubCentral platform, which manages this
IRS requirement by using a suppression list
distribution software that eliminates plaintext
sharing and is fully scaleable to meet the
tax firm’s largely seasonal business, especially
each mid-April. Before a mailing is sent out
with new names from affiliates, UnsubCentral
scrubs the lists for any unsubscribes.
“The good news is that there are now technologies
in place that enable highly effective
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
e-mail campaigns without compromising
security,” Petz adds.
To do it right, TaxBrain refrained from affiliate
marketing until it integrated compliance
across its online business and partnerships.
Since the integration, the firm has seen
record growth in revenue.
“As online, do-it-yourself income tax
preparation has become the preferred
method of paying taxes for more than half of
the 132,000,000 US taxpayers, acquisition
marketing is critical and has become a core
component of TaxBrain’s revenue model,”
Petz comments. ■ —by Dianna Dilworth
“You know what, I think that this is spam, I am not going to trust it.”
Or they are going to trust it, and that’s why we always err on the
side of caution to make sure that the message does get delivered.
DM News: If a consumer receives a message that he doesn’t want,
but it is something that he’s opted in for, is it bordering on spam?
How can marketers and consumers bridge this gap?
CS: I think that that’s a very dangerous area for us to play in, in
determining what is or is not spam. Whether that example is criminally
spam, I would say no, it is not. However, what our consumers
tell us is spam — whether they have opt-ed in for it or not
— that’s what we’ve got to filter. Because our consumers are essentially
asking us, “Please don’t deliver this message to me.” Even if a
marketer did have express written consent from the consumer saying
he wanted the message, if they had copies of his driver’s
license, knew his address, his telephone number, blood type, if at
the end of the day, the consumer says, “I don’t want it,” then we
want the mailer to stop mailing it to them.
DM News: So what should a marketer do? How does a company
find out that a consumer doesn’t want a message if he’s already
opted in?
CS: One of the ways we do that is with our “report spam” button.
And we provide those reports back to the mailer to let them
know that, for whatever reason, this consumer doesn’t want it.

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08 FEATURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
We don’t require the mailer to remove that person from the list,
and we don’t say that you are guilty of spamming because a
consumer clicked “report spam.” But instead, we tell the marketer
that consumers are telling us they don’t want your message,
they consider it to be spam, so please act accordingly. And
I can tell you that in almost every single circumstance, a legitimate
mailer will say, “Absolutely, if they don’t want my mailing,
I’ll take them off the list.” Because it doesn’t do them any good
if somebody is not even going to pay attention and, in fact, has
a bad taste in his mouth as a result.
DM News: So how does the spam issue in general affect legitimate
marketers? Does it affect them?
CS: I believe it does. I think that the more we have spam out
there, the more it makes e-mail an illegitimate means of communicating,
or it certainly affects the ability of a legitimate marketer
to deliver its message in the intended way. Because at the
end of the day, the goal is to have marketers send messages that
consumers want. At the end of the day, it really becomes a lot
less about permission, and more about what consumers are asking
for. And if all marketers did that, then we wouldn’t be in
this situation.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
DM News: So what are your expectations for the spam situation?
Will marketers that don’t authenticate still get delivered?
CS: I think that authentication is going to have a really big role in
delivery in the very near future. I don’t see us as immediately having
a hard fail or a hard pass for authentication, because it’s merely
a means of saying, “This is my ID, this is who I am.” It doesn’t
say anything about your reputation, and that is a completely different
ball of wax. But it will allow us to attribute that reputation
according to the mailer’s actual mailing history and how it sends
mail and what consumers think of it.
I think that as authentication is more widely adopted and
becomes more integrated with reputation systems, legitimate marketers
are going to find that they are able to take advantage of that
good reputation that they’ve worked so hard on, and that they are
going to continue to see very good delivery rates — perhaps even
better delivery rates — than they have in the past.
But at the same time, I think that spammers that take advantage
of consumers and take advantage of all the little loopholes and
tricks and tactics and criminal activity that they use to get the messages
delivered, they are going to find themselves hard pressed to
get anything through, because they are going to be held accountable
for their reputation. ■

10 FEATURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Victory lap
A personalized campaign takes e-mail
marketing for a ride in the fast lane
BY MELANIE SHORTMAN TUAZON
For 75 million NASCAR fans, the race for
information doesn’t wait for a green flag.
Days before the race, the loyal hordes can be
found at Nascar.com (operated by
TimeWarner’s Turner division) searching for qualifying
times, news, insights and promotions. But there
is great variation within those searches — NASCAR
fans aren’t all interested in the same thing. “They’re
on the site because they’re NASCAR fans, but
they’re bigger fans of the individual drivers,” says
Norman Miglietta, director of advertising and marketing
at Turner Sports Marketing and New Media.
This was the crucial insight informing the rollout of
a new online audio product, Trackpass Scanner, during
the 2006 Talladega weekend. The NASCAR.com
marketing team, which already knows the best way
to communicate with fans is through e-mail, split their
audience up based on those driver preferences.
The Trackpass Scanner allows fans to listen in on
radio communication between the drivers, their pit
bosses and other crew members, supplementing the
TV coverage and deepening the brand experience. “If
you’re watching [NASCAR driver] Dale Earnhardt Jr.
on TV and suddenly he comes in for a pit, you might
wonder what’s going on,” says Miglietta. “With the
Scanner product, you’d be in the know.”
It’s an easy sell for the fans who will get tattoos of
their favorite driver’s car number. But the
NASCAR.com team decided to tailor e-mail communications
to a consumer’s favorite drivers’ performance
in hopes of resonating with a wider audience.
When fans register on the site — as about one-third
of the site’s 4 million monthly unique visitors do —
they are asked to select the name of their favorite
driver. So, the creative team developed different content
for each competitor with the same message: Sit
in the driver’s seat with your favorite driver. The
team also hoped this would resonate with newer fans
hoping to learn more about the sport. “We recognize
that if a fan is new to the sport, they don’t know
what is going on in the racetrack. They may have
seen a driver or heard about them, and this helps
them get into the sport even more,” Miglietta says.
Prior to the Talladega race in October, the in-
“
They’re on the site
because they’re
NASCAR fans, but
they’re bigger fans of
the individual drivers.”
Norman Miglietta
Turner Sports
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
house team at Turner created different e-mails promoting
a free trial of Trackpass Scanner for fans of
each of the competing drivers. Depending on the
driver that the user selected, he or she would get a
different message rooting for that driver and teasing
what an audio clip might sound like. “If Jeff Gordon
came off a win,” says Miglietta, “the creative would
say something like ‘Continue to watch Jeff Gordon
dominate this year.’ And if Dale Jr. had an accident
in the last race, we’d make mention of ‘Listen to
Dale Jr. bounce back from defeat’ in the creative.”
The team used Datran Media’s StormPost software
to distribute the creative to members of the
NASCAR.com database.The software not only
selected the right content and creative clip to send to
a fan, but then followed up after the race. “They’re
using Storm Post to the full potential, and that
means using the system to build value into the relationships
that they have with subscribers,” says Lana
McGilvray, VP of marketing at Datran Media.
Datran also monitored delivery, from bouncebacks
to click-throughs, and communicated with
ISPs. “It does not matter how strong your brand is,”
says McGilvray. “Making sure that brands are
white-listed with various ISPs and authenticated and
managing relationships with those ISPs are critical
to the success of everyone.“
The campaign and follow-up resulted in tens of
thousands of free trial acceptances and a 72%
increase in Trackpass Scanner subscriptions. The
team continues to use this technique to promote
new products and communicate with fans. “With
this campaign, we’ve maintained a tremendous positive
ROI of every measure to date. We’re maximizing
our subscription rates and database so much so
that we don’t have to solicit or go off-site to communicate
to NASCAR customers,” says Miglietta.
“A lot of companies struggle because they have a
brand that people have an affinity for and don’t do
everything that they can to communicate with them,”
says Rachel Bergman, SVP of client services at e-mail
service provider Cheetahmail. “They’re almost doing
people a disservice if you’re really not calling that out
and making them feel special. If you segment smartly,
it’s pretty hard to go wrong.” ■

12 FUNDAMENTALS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
FUNDAMENTALS
Page 12
The relevance factor, by
Ashley Johnston, CheetahMail
Page 14
Five compelling reasons to centralize
your e-mail, by Tricia
Robinson Pridemore, StrongMail
Getting to “Yes! Yes!”: Double optin
as a power practice,
by Outi Tuomaala, L-Soft
Page 16
Open up and say “Aaaah”, by Dave
Dabbah, Lyris Technologies
Page 18
So you want to reach the inbox?,
by Jared Reitzin, MobileStorm
Build your house list the right way,
by Jere Doyle, Prospectiv
Page 20
Why and how to switch e-mail
service providers, by Elie Ashery,
Gold Lasso
Getting to the guts of great e-mail,
by George Le Pera, Scuderia 02
Page 22
How to monetize e-mail marketing
programs, by Lana McGilvray,
Datran Media
Fundamentals
E-mail marketing tools have evolved from blasts to targeted
e-mails. Marketers who are new to e-mail plans need building
blocks. Fundamentals include relevance, strategy, double
opt-in, testing and monitoring, deliverability, list building, e-mail
service providers, design and monetizing e-mail programs.
The relevance factor
BY ASHLEY JOHNSTON
Today’s customers are more knowledgeable
and discerning than ever. They are highly
connected, well-informed of their options, and
willing to receive offers through a variety of
media, whether its e-mail, television, radio, print,
catalog or mobile. For marketers, that willingness
presents an opportunity to build lasting,
meaningful and valuable relationships with their
customers. The key is simple: Be relevant.
Fortunately, there are many tools available
today that allow marketers to create highly personalized
and relevant messages. In the realm of
e-mail marketing, this means going beyond the
traditional boundary of incorporating basic
demographic data in marketing campaigns, and
instead pursuing deeper customer connections
via psychographic, transactional and preference
center data.
One example of marketers putting this process
into action is Borders, a CheetahMail client and
retailer of books, music and movies. Borders
drives relevance through the use of dynamic
content capabilities, sending regular e-mails customized
by the customers themselves. Visitors to
Borders’ Web site can choose from 32 different
book preference categories that make up over 4
billion possible permutations of one e-mail message.
Customers then receive personalized e-mail
messages based on their choices.
Likewise, Bass Pro Shops works to drive relevance
though the use of a method known as
ReMarketing messages. By combining Web analytics
data with its current e-mail marketing program,
Bass Pro is able to encourage customers
to return to its site and complete online purchases
that went unfulfilled. For example, if a customer
abandons his shopping cart on
BassPro.com, he receives an e-mail a week later
reminding him of the items he left behind. Bass
Pro has seen that ReMarketing messages consistently
outperform standard promotional mailings,
with higher open rates, click-through rates
and, most important, revenue per message.
While such marketers have a wealth of data at
their fingertips, others are still working toward
obtaining this level of information. Luckily, there
are simple tactics for acquiring customer data.
For instance, it is possible to collect more information
about a customer, such as gender, location
or birthday, when
he registers on your
Web site. Online customer
preference centers
can also be
created, which let individuals
tell you exactly
what they want, such
as sale notifications or
new-to-market alerts.
Ashley Johnston
CheetahMail
In other cases, marketers
have the data
they need to be rele-
vant, such as transactional or demographic data,
but are not acting on it. An easy yet valuable
way to make this data work for your company is
to perform tests early and often. VistaPrint, an
online printing company, analyzed its transactional
records to segment its customers into
appropriate value groups, then performed A/B
tests to send its best US customers “big ticket”
product offers while others received multiple
low-end offers. The various testing scenarios
gave VistaPrint a winning strategy for maximizing
ROI from its e-mail campaigns.
One additional bit of good news is that customers
today don’t casually abandon their e-mail
addresses the way they used to. Nowadays, individuals
are often tied to these points of contact as
much as they are to their phone numbers. So
when a customer provides his e-mail address,
manage the relationship with care. Send messages
as individualized as your customers, and your
messages will drive results for years to come.
Ashley Johnston is the senior director of marketing at
CheetahMail. Reach her at ashley@cheetahmail.com.

WKICorpAd07DMNSup 9/18/07 12:15 PM Page 1
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14 FUNDAMENTALS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Five compelling reasons to
centralize your e-mail
BY TRICIA ROBINSON PRIDEMORE
An effective e-mail marketing strategy should take a holistic
approach that includes all e-mails sent to the customer,
whether marketing, customer service or transactional. However,
this can be a daunting undertaking for companies that aren’t structured
that way.
Only with a centralized approach can an organization have the
visibility and control needed to deploy and enforce an e-mail
strategy across all departments and channels. Sending a marketing
e-mail to a customer without
taking into account a recent purchase
or an outstanding customer
service request can
undermine the relationship
you’ve worked so hard to create.
Use these five reasons to start
the discussion in your firm:
Improve customer relationships.
A centralized e-mail platform can
provide you with centralization
tools to limit the amount and fre-
Tricia Robinson Pridemore
quency of e-mail each customer
StrongMail
receives, which can stave off customer
burnout, complaints and unsubscribes. Being able to temporarily
suspend marketing messages while a customer is
resolving a problem with customer service can go long way.
Increase sales. Centralization gives you valuable insight into customer
behavior across all departments, which can be leveraged to
send relevant and timely marketing offers. It also makes it easier
for marketers to fully leverage transactional data to insert marketing
messages into product confirmation e-mails or to customize
marketing e-mails based on past purchases.
Reduce customer service costs. Each call into customer service
reduces the profitability of the customer relationship.
Centralization helps reduce those calls by enabling you to identify
problems in real-time. For example, if shipping is delayed for a
product, let the customer know before he expects to receive it.
Maintain a consistent brand. Building a brand requires tight controls
over how the company is portrayed in all external communications.
Without a centralized approach, there is no way to ensure
that customer service is using, say, your new logo and tagline.
Centralization allows marketing to maintain and carefully manage
one approved repository of message templates and content blocks.
Maximize e-mail deliverability. The best way to get your legitimate
e-mail past the filters put in place by the ISPs is to engage in
best practices and maintain a positive sender reputation. If you’re
unaware of the e-mail sent by other departments or unable to control
it, you are putting your reputation at jeopardy.
Centralizing your e-mail on one platform empowers the savvy
marketer to leverage all customer data across all departments to
deliver appropriate and relevant communications.
Tricia Robinson Pridemore is vice president of market and product strategy at
StrongMail. You can reach her at trobinson@strongmail.com.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Getting to “Yes! Yes!”: Double
opt-in as a power practice
BY OUTI TUOMAALA
As e-mail marketing matures, and quality triumphs over quantity,
it is time to refocus on the permission and double opt-in
processes. Most legitimate e-mail marketers place permission
among the top best practices. Double opt-in, or double-confirmed
opt-in, is the gold standard. When these processes are implemented,
everyone wins.
Double opt-in does require some work and effort, but the challenges
are easily overcome when it is included from the very
beginning. Some primary benefits include:
■ Fewer bogus subscribers, bad addresses, bounces, complaints
and spam reports, resulting in a clean e-mail list with verifiable
permission from every subscriber.
■ More efficient e-mail list management and better deliverability.
■ Better compliance with the best practices, in addition to exceeding
the permission requirements of anti-spam legislation.
■ Increased subscriber response and engagement.
To implement a successful double opt-in practice, follow these
simple rules:
Plan and test your double opt-in process thoroughly. The same
great e-mail industry advice that applies to e-mail marketing campaigns
applies to your opt-in confirmation and welcome messages
as well. It’s best to focus on deliverability, readability and attractiveness
to entice subscribers, use an automated signup process to
send the confirmation message
immediately and customize any
default messages, including the
subject line, so your recipient can
recognize your brand before
opening the message. These are
easy to test and adjust. With a bit
of creativity, it can be fun and
help you avoid the mechanical
tone of automated messages.
Create synergy between your
signup page and the subscribers’
Outi Tuomaala
e-mail. To make this transition
L-Soft
smooth, use the signup confirmation
page to inform your subscribers that a confirmation message
will arrive in their inbox shortly. Remind them of the added security
benefits.
Make a good first impression. The welcome message completes
the successful subscription. Remember, this message gives you the
perfect opportunity to thank them for subscribing. In addition,
you could provide a specific message showing the benefits of your
e-mail list.
Develop a lasting relationship. The double opt-in process makes
your subscribers feel safe and secure when interacting with your
brand. It’s a double “Yes!” for any long-term business relationship.
Outi Tuomaala is an executive vice president at L-Soft. She can be reached at
outi@lsoft.com.

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16 FUNDAMENTALS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Open up and say “Aaaah”
BY DAVE DABBAH
When it comes to your health, they say prevention is the best
cure. What about your e-mail marketing program? Is it getting
enough exercise? Following are some guidelines to help keep
your program in top condition.
Examine the opt-in process. Test the process from the user’s
point of view. Make sure each link sends users to the right place.
Count the clicks. The fewer clicks required (ideally fewer than
four), the more likely the user will complete the process.
Monitor your mailboxes. While it’s great to automate as much as
possible in any e-mail marketing program, good customer service
requires human interaction. Make sure you monitor all incoming
mailboxes. Despite your best efforts to direct customers elsewhere,
many will still hit reply, sending opt-outs, complaints and comments
to unmanaged mailboxes.
Run the right tests. To ensure your e-mail messages are viewed
as intended, test messages across multiple platforms and e-mail
clients — from Macs to BlackBerries and Outlook to Gmail. Thirdparty
e-mail service providers may even offer automatic testing.
Nurture the new; respect the old. New subscribers’ interest tends
to fade after the first two weeks, so it’s important to find ways to
keep them clicking. It’s just as important to treat those who unsubscribe
with the same respect. Confirm the action in a follow-up
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
e-mail or on the landing page. Include a link to a short exit survey
and directions on how to re-subscribe.
CAN-SPAM, the US law regulating commercial e-mail, requires a
working Web-based unsubscribe mechanism in every message. Make
sure yours works. Failure to operate could lead to serious fines.
Beware of blocked images and preview panes. Blocked images
and preview panes became a concern for e-mail marketers last
year when key e-mail providers added the latter to their service,
allowing readers to view a portion of the message before deciding
whether to open or delete it. That
means your template has to catch
them in a whole new way.
Designs should maximize the top
two-to-four inches. Use HTML
fonts and colors to your advantage,
and don’t rely on images
that may ultimately be blocked.
Review message frequency. Do
more messages increase your ROI
or just alienate your subscribers?
Dave Dabbah
Lyris Technologies
The best way to determine if your
e-mail schedule is working for you
is by testing it. Turn a monthly
schedule into a bi-weekly one for a few months and watch for positive
indicators — opens, clicks, conversions, sales — as well as negative

18 FUNDAMENTALS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
ones, including unsubscribes and spam complaints.
Check your mailing list for a pulse. Chances are, half your mailing
list is inactive. Determine how many addresses have not responded
for a set amount of time, say six months. Send a message to those
addresses, inviting them to opt in again, update their preferences or
take advantage of a special offer. Those who don’t respond can be
safely deleted.
Dave Dabbah is vice president of marketing at Lyris Technologies. He can be
reached at ddabbah@lyris.com.
So you want to reach
the inbox?
BY JARED REITZIN
In the constantly changing world of e-mail marketing, reaching
the inbox has become a lot more complicated than just pressing
“send.” For most marketers, sending successful e-mail campaigns
has become a tedious process with numerous hoops to jump
through. The continuing prevalence of spam has led to more and
more “false positives,” or legitimate e-mail messages that get incorrectly
labeled as spam and therefore never reach their intended
audience. According to Return Path, an e-mail performance solutions
company, more than 20 percent of permission-based e-mails
go undelivered. This accounts for
billions of dollars in lost revenue.
The rules keep changing and
marketers need to adapt, or it’s
going to hurt their pocket books.
There have been big changes in
how ISPs identify spam. In the
past, spam filters would determine
whether a message was
legitimate based on its content.
The more suspicious the content,
the higher the potential for a
Jared Reitzin
spam score. However, the ISPs
MobileStorm
soon realized that technique was
insufficient, so they now take a more comprehensive approach,
analyzing the sending IP address and the sender itself. This has
given rise to the concept of sender reputation.
So what exactly is sender reputation? It goes beyond a mere
message check or spam filtering to investigate your overall status
as a sender. Below are the four most important things you need to
take care of if you want to be a reputable e-mail marketer:
Complaints Complaints logged against your campaigns are a key
component to your sender reputation. Sending e-mails too often,
or sending messages with irrelevant content and adding people
without their knowledge, are a few ways to get in trouble. Avoid
complaints by practicing permission, setting expectations and
understanding your audience.
List Cleansing It is important to have a list that has been built
naturally and with the subscribers’ permission. It needs to be
maintained and scrubbed for invalid e-mail addresses, dead e-mail
addresses and, most important, unsubscribe requests and complaints.
Consistent List/Brand Matching A common mistake by e-mail
marketers is to assume that because you have captured an e-mail
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
address for one brand, you have permission to e-mail them about
another. You earn your reputation by keeping every brand separate
and distinct from each other. Include this policy in your privacy
agreements.
Relevant Messages The days of “batch and blast” are long gone.
Nowadays, it is all about making sure your intended recipients
find the campaign relevant. If you are a pet supply store, don’t
send dog food offers to parakeet owners. A solid e-mail marketing
platform that allows you to create targets will go a long way for
your reputation.
Inbox delivery is a complex and organic process, so you must be
vigilant about ensuring you know the rules and follow them both
today and as they continue to evolve.
Jared Reitzin is CEO and founder of mobileStorm. He can be reached at
jared@mobilestorm.com.
Build your house list the
right way
BY JERE DOYLE
It’s no secret that the key to building a successful brand is to
build solid relationships with your customers. Building and corresponding
with your in-house list can be one of the most effective
marketing tactics there is.
What is surprising, however, is that many brand marketers are
using (sometimes unknowingly) poor practices in building their inhouse
e-mail list via online customer acquisition. These bad practices
often include the selling or sharing of consumer data to third
parties, irresponsible use of e-mail (such as bombarding consumers
with too many messages) and forced registration.
Initially, some companies may see a quick surge in profits by following
these irresponsible practices, but they will ultimately feel
negative effects on profits as lead quality suffers. Poor lead quality
results in poor ROI and will ultimately harm a brand’s reputation
as consumer trust is lost. The practices mentioned above also
reflect poorly on the lead generation industry as a whole, which is
why leaders in this industry need to be more vocal when breaches
occur.
Not only are unethical e-mail practices harmful for brands, they
are a direct violation of consumer
privacy and trust. Once a consumer’s
online experience has
been tainted, he is more likely to
think twice about shopping, participating
in communities or sharing
his personal information on
the Web. Consumers are savvy,
and if they feel violated they will
turn to a new source for the
information they need. It then
becomes very difficult, and often
Jere Doyle
impossible, to regain their trust.
Prospectiv
This is why it’s imperative to
follow best practices that build trust among your customers and
promote high standards within the industry:
■ Allow consumers to opt in for each offer. Let them choose what
information and promotions they would like to receive one at a

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20 FUNDAMENTALS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
time, instead of a one-time opt-in for multiple offers.
■ Never allow third-party permission or sharing of consumer
data. This goes not only for online lead generation providers and
e-mail marketers, but their partners and advertisers as well.
Remember, permission is not transferable.
■ Don’t bombard your customers with e-mail. Respect their wishes
to receive messages from you at a rate they are comfortable with.
■ Be sure the e-mail promotions you send are clear and easy-tounderstand.
Never hide special promotional requirements in the
small print or in a separate “Terms and Conditions” agreement.
■ Use language that consumers can easily understand.
■ Be clear and understandable through the entire process.
■ Let consumers know exactly what to expect when signing up
for a promotion or offer.
■ Clearly outline the intention of your promotion. If a purchase
is required to qualify for a promotion, tell them up front.
By following responsible online marketing best practices, marketers
create a win-win situation for both the consumer and the
brand. The result is more profitable companies that enjoy trusting,
long-term relations with customers, and consumers who
receive offers for products and services they want.
Jere Doyle is president and CEO of Prospectiv. He can be reached at
jdoyle@prospectiv.com.
Why and how to switch
e-mail service providers
BY ELIE ASHERY
In a perfect world, your e-mail service provider is flexible,
responsive to your needs, knowledgeable of new technology and
cost effective. It is not a perfect world, and working with an e-mail
vendor can be frustrating as you negotiate contracts and customize
service plans. Abandoning the
vendor and moving to another
bigger, faster, cheaper or closer
provider is not always the best
answer. There are more than 100
e-mail service providers (ESPs)
selling their services in the market
today, and all of them are on the
hunt for new customers.
Taking the time to evaluate
your options will prevent getting
locked into an annual contract
Elie Ashery
with a vendor that doesn’t fit
Gold Lasso
your needs. Following are “decision
points,” factors that make it worth your while to consider
finding a new ESP.
■ You are made to share an IP address with any of your ESP’s
other clients. If so, there is no distinction between the two companies.
Organizations don’t get blacklisted, the IP associated with the
organization does.
■ Your ESP cannot handle the volume of e-mail you send.
■ The ESP does not provide high-level features to create one-toone
campaigns, or makes you pay a premium for them.
■ You cannot integrate with a third-party system.
■ Your ESP’s customer service is lacking.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
■ You pay a premium to send HTML-formatted e-mail.
■ You are locked into a service contract.
■ You are required to send a minimum amount of e-mail per
month.
■ You paid a set-up fee just for turning on your account.
■ You pay upfront to send e-mail without getting a discount.
■ Your current ESP charges high fees for inadequate training.
On the other hand, if you have low delivery rates or your campaigns
are not garnering the response you hoped or planned for,
don’t assume it is the vendor’s fault. For as many reasons as there
are to look for a new provider, there are also key reasons to stay.
■ Have you updated your lists? If you don’t take steps to maintain
and update your list, your campaigns may not succeed.
■ Are you just trying to save money? Because cheaper isn’t
always better.
How to Make the Switch
If the reasons to find a new vendor are compelling enough to
warrant a search, use the following guidelines.
■ Gather data on your current
e-marketing efforts and discuss what was lacking with your previous
vendor. Consider what type of service you need, how flexible
your budget is and what kind of partnership you want.
■ Plan out your search. Ask your colleagues and friends. Request
references from professional associations and listservs.
■ Export invalid (bounced)
e-mail address and opt outs from old ESP and import to new
ESP.
■ Export and set up templates to keep consistency and implement
a seamless transition for customers or members.
■ Make sure you are looking for an ESP that offers DNS configuration
— DNS configuration allows e-mail to be sent from your
domain instead of your ESP’s. Reverse DNS legitimizes this
process allowing mail servers to identify this domain and who it
belongs to increasing deliverability and preventing “spoofing.”
Elie Ashery is president and CEO of Gold Lasso. You can reach him at
eashery@goldlasso.com.
Getting to the guts of
great e-mail
BY GEORGE LE PERA
Have you ever done an autopsy on an e-mail? Taken a digital
solicitation and spread it out on a table, cut it open and
looked at what lay inside?
I did just such a thing not long ago. A client wanted to know
why some of her solicitations were thriving, while others flopped.
So I printed a bunch of her e-mails and put them side by side.
After looking at more than 20, and their corresponding response
rates, a consistent pattern started to emerge: It seemed that the
best performing e-mails didn’t look or read very much like
e-mails at all.
While the losing e-mails seemed to be piled high with gizmos
and gimmicks, flash and animation or elaborate designs and
clipped, nearly unintelligible copy, the winners looked and read
like good old-fashioned direct mail.
My first instinct was to scream heresy, to recite the conventional

Stream Send
DM091107.indd 1 9/11/07 4:20:59 PM

22 FUNDAMENTALS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
wisdom that says e-mail and direct mail are two different media
with nothing in common but the word “mail.” But upon further
examination, winning e-mail and
winning direct mail turned out to
be a lot more similar than I
would have thought.
Here are just a few of the characteristics
they share:
A good subject line is a good OE
teaser Both need to be clear and
concise, designed to entice and
edify without being deceptive,
written to draw readers in, to get
George Le Pera
Scuderia 02
the solicitation opened and read.
A good headline is a well-written
Johnson box Both put the offer
front and center, tells readers how to respond and gives you a
sense of urgency. They let you understand in five seconds or less
what you’re getting yourself into — and if you’re into it.
A good link is a good call to action The early-and-often rule
applies in both instances. Allowing people to respond right away,
to self-select with little more than one good reason, is a key component
of great response rates and high conversion.
A good wire frame is a good layout Much to the chagrin of Web
and traditional art directors alike, simple, straightforward designs
always win out over elaborate, even beautiful, art direction. People
don’t want pretty, they want easy.
A good copy deck is a good copy deck A well-stated claim that
grabs attention, gets interest, spurs decision and drives action is all
you need. A great offer, clearly written, supported by valid proof
points is a nearly unbeatable formula for success.
While it’s true that e-mail and direct mail are different media
that require technical differences in approach — I don’t know of
any “spam filters” to combat traditional mail — some things are
consistent any time you’re sending written communication to a
customer. You need: a clear concise message, a desirable offer with
high perceived value, a design that naturally and effortlessly
guides the reader and, of course, that most elusive of all characteristics
— well written copy that begs to be read.
George Le Pera is creative director at Scuderia 02. He can be reached at
GeorgeL@scuderiaO2.com.
How to monetize e-mail
marketing programs
BY LANA MCGILVRAY
For those of us that have been buying, selling or covering email
marketing over the past decade, the conversation is only
now beginning to shift from the basics toward a more focused
conversation on how to drive the strongest ROI from our programs.
Why has the shift taken so long? For one thing, e-mail as
a marketing and media channel is relatively young, so there was a
substantial learning curve to overcome. Before marketers looking
to integrate e-mail into their multichannel media mix could realize
its revenue potential, they needed to understand it. During this
time, deliverability, e-mail optimization, compliance, e-mail feature
sets and workflow took center stage in the dialogue.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Today, the same conversations continue, which is fine for marketers
who are new to the space. These marketers need to understand
that, just because they represent a top direct, consumer or
b-to-b brand, they don’t get a free pass into consumers’ inboxes.
However, there is a substantial need for more advanced conversations
like the ones that the E-mail Experience Council (now
merged with the Direct Marketing Association), the Interactive
Advertising Bureau and other industry pundits have begun.
These conversations are focused on measuring the lifetime customer
value associated with e-mail, leveraging performance marketing
and sharing true campaign metrics.
In short, the new conversations are about the next phase of e-mail
marketing. They discuss the blurring lines between branding and
direct. They are not about how to get to the inbox or how to tweak
e-mail creatives per se, though those are talking points. They are
about how integrated e-mail marketing retention and acquisition
campaigns can be measured from a revenue perspective within a
larger multi-channel marketing investment. It is a multichannel
investment that includes search, online display and offline media
spending. They are about the value of the customer you win and
who, over time, becomes loyal — responding to you with more trust
and wallet share. They are about multi-touch campaigns that show
proven results and can be replicated, automated and tweaked for
increasing performance over time.
They are about dissatisfaction with
the status quo of pricing models
(CPM based pricing) in a convergent
e-mail, search and display
marketplace that could be cost-peracquisition
across the board. In
short, the conversations are the
high-level ones that marketers have
in the board rooms that answer the
question, “How do we turn what
Lana McGilvray
Datran Media
has been a cost center into a high
revenue channel?”
Rather than pontificating on all
the various long-term possibilities, here are immediate resources to
explore for readers interested in participating in these conversations
(in addition to DM News). Keep them handy throughout the
year and join the dialogue.
■ The Direct Marketing Associations 2007 Integration of DM &
Brand Report http://www.the-dma.org/bookstore/cgi/displaybook?product_id=009422
■ The Email Experience Council Website http://www.emailexperience.org/
■ The Interactive Advertising Bureau http://www.iab.net/
■ David Baker’s Whitenoise Blog http://whitenoiseinc.com/
■ The Outperformance Marketing Blog http://www.outperformance-marketing.com/
Lana McGilvray is vice president of marketing at Datran Media. You can
reach her at lana@datranmedia.com.

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24 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
INFRASTRUCTURE
Page 24
It starts with reputation,
by J.F. Sullivan, Habeas
Thinking beyond deliverability,
by Ellen Siegel, Constant Contact
Page 26
CAN-SPAM, four years on, by
Jeremy Saibil, Campaigner
Page 28
E-mail authentication: It’s time,
by Al Iverson, ExactTarget
How marketers can prevent spam
complaints, by Ben Chestnut,
MailChimp.com
Page 30
Keep your e-mail safe from legal
challenges, by Zafar Khan, RPost
Questions and answers about
sending reputation, by George
Bilbrey, Return Path’s Sender
Score
Page 32
Spam finally has a definition, by
Jordan Cohen, Epsilon
Controlling messaging costs, by
Barry Abel, Message Systems
Infrastructure
E-mail delivery is no longer just about whether or not you get in
the inbox, as reputation systems and feedback loops have become
commonplace. All e-mail marketers must be fluent in the issues of
reputation, monitoring, CAN-SPAM, authentication, preventing spam
complaints, auditing e-mails and ISP relations.
It starts with
reputation
BY J.F. SULLIVAN
Vendors are doing their best to get marketers
to take seriously the issues of monitoring
and maintaining online reputation. Within the
once-tiny industry of
e-mail deliverability,
there are now more
companies springing up
to give you a snap-shot
of your online reputation
than photographers
following Paris Hilton.
Why is that?
In reality, much of
what people refer to as
J.F. Sullivan
Habeas
reputation is not new. It
has existed for years,
mostly in the form of anti-spam blacklist services.
As anti-spam techniques became more complex
and mature, the concepts of whitelists sprung up
as a form of positive reputation.
In more recent years, ISPs have also been
developing their own metrics for reputation in
the form of collected user complaints. This “feedback
reputation” has been dangled over the
heads of senders for years now, like a Sword of
Damocles ready to slice and dice the mail of any
sender flagged by the ISP’s users.
A number of anti-spam content analysis vendors
have also begun repositioning themselves as
being in the business of helping senders enhance
and improve their reputation through a variety of
add-on tools.
Lest anyone wonder, we at Habeas confess that
for the last several years we have been aggregating
and maintaining a reputation data network. Our
database contains reputation information on several
million receiving systems and networks, allowing
us to build a detailed picture of how senders
are perceived by receivers around the world.
If reputation is truly a lot of old processes
wrapped in a trendy new name, why all the
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
sudden fuss?
Simply put: Senders are beginning to lean more
and more heavily on reputation data in order to
make the kinds of delivery decisions that mean
life or death for e-mail marketing campaigns.
One of the events that crystallized the issue
was Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will
begin throttling the connections of new senders,
not by whether they were on a whitelist, but solely
by the established reputation of that sender.
Microsoft’s assessment of senders’ reputations
incorporates a number of factors, including individual
and aggregated views of sending volumes,
complaint rates and a variety of technical and
infrastructure characteristics, all measured and
assessed over time.
Why should you care about how ISPs view
your e-mail reputation? It really boils down to
whether you are interested in maintaining the relationships
you enjoy today with your customers.
In this new world of e-mail reputation, all the
old rules apply with regard to message content
and construction. But whereas you might have
found blacklists, whitelists and other reputation
information to be little more than an inconvenience
or an annoyance in the past, the future is
going to be very different.
Your customer relationships are going to start
with that reputation, or your customer relationships
won’t be relationships at all.
J.F. Sullivan is vice president of marketing at Habeas.
You can reach him at jfsullivan@habeas.com.
Thinking beyond
deliverability
BY ELLEN SIEGEL
According to the December 2006 ESPC/Ipsos
E-mail Survey, most consumers decide to
delete e-mails or report them as spam based on
their “from” and “subject” lines, and nearly 80
percent do so without ever opening them. Hence
it is critical for small businesses to understand the
importance of reputation and trust if they want

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26 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
to increase their open rates.
It is especially important for small businesses to build reputation
through consistent e-mail behavior and a good permission-based
list. Negative results such as spam reports and bounce rates affect
reputation and negatively impact deliverability. Your recipients’
behavior (whether or not they report your mail as spam) is important
to your reputation with them and their ISPs. Anything out of
the ordinary may convince recipients that they have been
spammed: Even opt-in mail
becomes spam if a recipient labels
it as such. Therefore, small businesses
need to make developing
trust and recognition a priority.
The first step is to organize
your contact database. To ensure
a good reputation, you should
keep your distribution lists updated
and your e-mail relevant.
■ All e-mail lists should be opt-in
Ellen Siegel
Constant Contact
only. Let people know they can
easily unsubscribe at any time
and adhere to their requests.
■ Monitor your bounces and keep your list up to date. Mailing
repeatedly to a bounced address can hurt your reputation with an ISP.
The second step in building reputation is exhibiting consistent email
behavior — make sure your recipients understand how often
you’ll send them e-mail messages. Additional steps to increase successful
delivery include the following:
■ Be sure recipients recognize you as the sender. The name next
to your “from” address must be clearly identifiable to your subscribers,
bearing in mind that in many cases your company’s
name is more recognizable than those of your employees.
Encourage recipients to put your “from address” in their address
book, trusted sender list or approved sender list.
■ Content matters. Help ensure your recipients won’t delete or
report your mail by making the subject line clear and relevant.
Also avoid “spammy” words, excess capitalization or use of exclamation
points that may trigger ISP content filters.
■ If you use an e-mail service provider, improve your reputation
by making sure they have solid, long-standing relationships with
the major ISPs. If they look good, you look good.
Finally, follow industry best practices. Stand behind your e-mail
and protect your brand by using e-mail authentication. Honor
unsubscribe requests promptly. If you use an ESP, leverage its
expertise and infrastructure in these areas.
By taking these simple steps you will be well on your way to
developing trusted relationships with your recipients and ensuring
your e-mail communications not only make it to your intended
contacts’ inboxes, but are also actually read.
Ellen Siegel is the principal technologist at Constant Contact. She can be
reached at esiegel@constantcontact.com.
CAN-SPAM, four years on
BY JEREMY SAIBIL
In December of 2003, President Bush signed the CAN-SPAM
Act into law. The CAN-SPAM Act set rules for sending commercial
e-mail, including mandatory inclusion of an opt-out mech-
anism, adding a physical address to the message and using a legitimate
subject line.
So four years later, what is the assessment of the CAN-SPAM
Act? Government officials, Internet service providers (ISPs) and
e-mail service providers (ESPs) generally agree that the law has
had a positive effect.
Genuine marketers are not seen as major contributors to the
SPAM problem. Still, it is a criminal element that continues to be
responsible for much of the harmful SPAM being sent today, and
the US government still sees SPAM as a pressing issue and is
focusing on enforcing the law, rather than changing it.
The good, the bad and the evil Let’s start with evil: many
experts agree that an increasing portion of SPAM is related to illegal
activities. Some common examples:
■ Pump-and-dump stock scams
■ Identity theft and fraud
■ Scams (I am the widow of an African dictator…)
Unfortunately, many people are still falling for these scams and
fuelling the spammers’ fire.
The good: ESPs and ISPs have worked well together to put in
place standards and technology that prevent forged e-mail and better
allow recipients to manage what mail they want to receive. In
the past few years, the sender policy framework (SPF), sender ID
and domain keys, (authentication protocols supported by such
products as Campaigner) have been developed and are now widely
adopted. In another example, ISPs have set up feedback loops with
ESPs so that SPAM complaints
can be transmitted to senders in
real time.
Strong authentication tools are
needed to establish the reputation
of individual senders. Eventually,
like on eBay, recipients will be
able to see a sender’s reputation
before agreeing to engage in a
relationship. As a marketer, it is
important to start thinking of
Jeremy Saibil
Campaigner
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
your e-mail reputation, if you are
not already. Many ISPs are
already providing filtering tools to
their users. AOL pioneered the “report spam” button in its mail
client and others followed. Yahoo has a “this is not junk” button,
and Hotmail is working on a way to let people unsubscribe using a
tool in the Hotmail interface instead of the link in the message
itself. The trend giving more control to recipients is one that will
continue.
This brings us to the bad. Some marketers are still not following
all of the best practices put forward by the industry and rules
required by law: Get permission, provide an opt-out, and include a
physical address
Another factor affecting your reputation is the relevance of your
content. Despite having opt-in status, if you are sending offers
that are only of interest to a segment of your list, you may be
receiving complaints. So target your message to relevant segments
and spare the rest. Take a common-sense approach and your reputation
will be fine.
Jeremy Saibil is director of deliverability at Campaigner. He can be reached at
jsaibil@campaigner.com.

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28 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
E-mail authentication:
It’s time
BY AL IVERSON
ISPs like Hotmail have been pushing e-mail authentication for
years. I’ve been talking about Sender ID and Hotmail for more
than two years now and Meng Wong (now of Karmasphere) has
been educating senders and receivers on why sender policy framework
(SPF) is important since at least mid-2004.
For a long time, it seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
Common questions included,
what does e-mail authentication
do, why should one invest in a
new technology, and if mail is getting
through fine. There simply
didn’t seem to be a good enough,
or compelling enough reason for
most senders to start authenticating
their mail.
But now the industry recognizes
that there are significant delivery
benefits for senders who authenti-
Al Iverson
cate their mail.
ExactTarget
There are now three primary
authentication technologies in play: Sender ID, SPF and
DomainKeys/DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Here’s a simple
overview.
Sender ID just got very important at Hotmail. Sender ID is an
integral component of getting your e-mail to any inbox at
Hotmail. If you’re not doing Sender ID, or your Sender ID
records are set up incorrectly, you’re going to have issues soon, if
not already. Hotmail has clarified on numerous occasions and in
numerous venues that if you publish a Sender ID record, and do
it correctly, it improves your ability to deliver mail.
DomainKeys (soon to be replaced by DKIM) is the authentication
technology most important to Yahoo. What’s the benefit? If
you want to participate in Yahoo’s feedback loop, you need to sign
your mail with DomainKeys. If you don’t have DomainKeys
authentication in place, you won’t receive spam complaint data
back from Yahoo users. Senders who utilize feedback loops enjoy
better deliverability. Yahoo is a large enough receiving site that any
spam-blocking issues are sure to have a huge negative impact on
e-mail performance.
SPF matters, too. Sender ID is backwards-compatible with SPF,
so you need to be doing at least one or the other to prevent
Hotmail issues. SPF will also give you a modest delivery boost at a
few other ISPs, with the promise that more are to come. Since it’s
the easiest technology to implement, at the very least, you should
be utilizing SPF. It’s a simple text record you put in DNS, and it’s
something you should immediately task your server administrators
(or e-mail service providers) with helping you implement.
Authenticate today and the benefits won’t be limited to better
deliverability with Hotmail and participation in Yahoo’s feedback
loop. As more and more receiving sites and spam filters begin
looking for e-mail authentication, the benefits will multiply.
Al Iverson is director of privacy and deliverability at ExactTarget. You can
reach him at aiverson@exacttarget.com.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
How marketers can prevent
spam complaints
BY BEN CHESTNUT
You don’t have to be a spammer to get reported for spamming.
Even totally clean, 100 percent double opt-in lists will get one
or two abuse reports per 50,000 recipients. Sometimes it’s just a
simple mistake, but getting reported for abuse is pretty serious. If a
major ISP receives even a small handful of complaints about your
e-mails, it will start blocking all e-mail from your server.
So it’s worth looking at how legitimate e-mail marketers get
falsely accused of sending spam.
Sometimes, it’s a simple mistake. But more often than not, it’s
the marketers’ own fault, caused by one or more of these actions:
■ The marketer collected e-mails legitimately, but took too long to
make contact. People receive full-blown e-mail newsletters and
they don’t remember opting in two years ago.
■ The marketer runs an online store that yields thousands of
e-mail addresses of customers who have purchased products in the
past. Instead of asking people to join the e-mail marketing list, the
marketer just start blasting offers out.
■ The marketer is exhibiting at a trade show that has provided a
list of attendee e-mail addresses. Instead of e-mailing those people
an invitation to join its list, the marketer just assumes it has permission
and starts e-mailing
newsletters and promos.
■ Fish bowls and business cards.
To marketers, it's common sense
that this is a list-collection technique.
To prospects, it’s just a free
lunch.
■ Purchasing or renting members’
e-mail addresses from an
organization, then just adding
them to the list without getting
permission.
Ben Chestnut
MailChimp.com
Ways to Prevent Abuse Reports
■ Use the double opt-in method. This way you have proof that
each and every recipient gave permission to send them e-mails.
■ Even if they’re your customers, don’t send promotions without
permission. Set up a separate “marketing list” for customers to
join. Give them reasons (or free prizes) for signing up.
■ Don’t hide your opt-out link. Make it very prominent. Some
marketers are placing the “Unsubscribe” link at the top of their
e-mails, so they’re easy to find. We think this is a best practice.
■ Make sure your e-mail looks reputable and professional so that
people will trust your unsubscribe link.
Ben Chestnut is the co-founder and managing partner of MailChimp.com. He
can be reached at ben@mailchimp.com.

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30 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Keep your e-mail safe from
legal challenges
BY ZAFAR KHAN
If your company does business transactions via e-mail, you’ll
need to be sure that business-critical messages are treated, well,
critically. While most e-mail users are not concerned about the
electronic record they have created, it can serve as a critically
important defense for business transitions, if properly managed.
Businesses must consider anti-spam laws, e-discovery rulings,
storage and retention of e-mails. Proof of e-mails for business
transactions are a must have, and companies are investing billions
of dollars to protect themselves. Analysts at the Radicati Group
estimate that the e-mail archiving market will hit $6 billion in
2010.
The good news is e-mail technology is catching up with the
evolving regulatory and business landscape. A case in point is
Great Lakes List Management, an Erie, PA-based provider of data
for direct marketers, and an RPost client. Because Great Lakes’
business model involves multiple companies — including direct
customers and list brokers — it experiences a sizeable time lag
between delivering services and getting paid for them. By sending
business files with a registered e-mail service, Great Lakes receives
a detailed electronic audit trail that proves precisely what e-mail
content and attachments were sent and received, by whom and
when. Armed with this information, the company can ensure it
gets paid for services rendered without hassle, and has the necessary
backup to demonstrate compliance with regulated/required
disclosures, such as privacy notices.
For companies that operate their business using e-mail, legal protection
is even more critical.
Provisions of electronic law and
recent court decisions underscore
the fact that electronic business
systems require proper transaction
documentation, and a reliable
recordkeeping management
system.
Here are a few ways you can
ensure your business is safe from
legal challenges:
■ Send business-critical e-mails
Zafar Khan
with legal proof of delivery and
RPost
content.
■ Archive your e-mails in a solution that’s easy to retrieve.
■ Prevent e-mail manipulation on the receiving end with encryption
tools.
■ Don’t save every single e-mail, just the business-critical ones.
Many e-mail service providers aim to ensure deliverability and
legally protect their e-mail users with value-added services, such as
proof of delivery and content with registered e-mail, e-contracting
tools, encryption, meta data cleaning and e-mail archiving capabilities.
Take advantage of the technology that is out there to cost
effectively and proactively protect yourself.
Zafar Khan is CEO and founder of RPost. You can reach him at
zkhan@rpost.com.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Questions and answers
about sending reputation
BY GEORGE BILBREY
Astudy by Return Path indicates that more than 80 percent of
delivery problems are caused by reputation. But there is still
confusion as to what reputation is, where the data comes from and
how to manage your reputation for better deliverability. Below are
three common questions that
marketers ask about reputation.
1. What is a sender reputation
and how do ISPs and other e-mail
receivers monitor it? Your sending
reputation is made up of a
variety of factors, primarily complaint
rates, unknown user rates,
spam trap hits, infrastructure
issues and sending stability.
Spammers tend to do badly on
these measures. Your job is to not
George Bilbrey
look like a spammer by perform-
Return Path’s Sender Score
ing well on these measures. Every
major receiver has a slightly different way of determining and
measuring reputation. They begin with their own data — what they
see on their network. Some ISPs also use proprietary reputation
data aggregators to see how a sender behaves with other receivers.
2. How can I manage my e-mail reputation to ensure high deliverability?
It really comes down to the top five factors that are
most likely to get you blocked. These are:
■ Complaint rate: Isolating why your subscribers complain about
you is crucial to bringing this number down. We find the following
factors to be the most common: Weak or no permission; content
that isn’t valuable or relevant; too high or low frequency; and
subscribers’ inability to recognize the e-mail.
■ Unknown user rate: If you have a high unknown user rate you
need to review your bounce processing rules and make sure you
are removing “unknown user” hard bounces after two attempts.
■ Spam trap hits: You can see if you are hitting some spam traps
through Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services. Unfortunately,
while this and other publicly available tools can tell you if you have
spam traps, there isn’t any way to identify which e-mail addresses
they are. Instead, you need to isolate the parts of your list most
likely to harbor spam traps and suppress those parts of the list.
■ Infrastructure: There are specific ways that ISPs like to see a
mailing system set up in order to have some confidence that the
e-mail is legitimate. If you use a reputable e-mail service provider,
you shouldn’t have infrastructure issues. If you are sending your
own messages, you should consider reaching out to a deliverability
expert.
■ Sending stability: Once you have established a good reputation
for an IP address, don’t move to a new server.
3. How can I determine my reputation? There are a number of
public sources of reputation data. These include Microsoft’s
SNDS, DNSStuff, CipherTrust’s TrustedSource, Ironport’s
Senderbase, and Return Path’s Sender Score.
George Bilbrey is vice president and general manager of Return Path’s Sender
Score. You can reach him at george.bilbrey@returnpath.net.

C
M
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CM
MY
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CMY
K
dmnews_abandoner.pdf 10/1/07 4:31:37 PM
H
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The Abandoner
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32 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Spam finally has a definition
BY JORDAN COHEN
When industry groups first started tackling deliverability best
practices a few years ago, the struggle to define spam raised
some controversial questions. Marketers, ISPs, consumer groups
and government agencies alike wondered: Should all unsolicited
commercial e-mail be considered spam? Or just unsolicited bulk
commercial e-mail? Or perhaps it’s any e-mail sent without permission;
bulk, commercial or otherwise?
Eventually, attempts to define spam were abandoned, as no one
could agree on a meaning that would encompass all unwanted
messages while excluding legitimate e-mail. Besides, a definition
seemed irrelevant when an estimated one-in-five commercial
e-mails were getting caught in filters for failing content checks or
poor bounce management, even when specifically requested by
the consumer.
Fast forward to 2007, and we may finally have a definition for
spam. Yahoo’s top e-mail operations executive, Miles Libbey, senior
product manager at Yahoo Mail, probably put it best at the
Federal Trade Commission’s recent Spam Summit: “Operationally,
we define spam as anything users don’t want in their inbox,”
Libbey said. It’s short, sweet, highly understandable and 100 percent
consumer-centric. But it’s also a definition that may frighten
the many marketers who previously believed that acquiring affirmative
consent meant they would never be considered spammers.
As we move closer to a time when consumer spam complaints
will weigh heaviest on a marketers’ deliverability and ROI, successful
firms will increase their focus on making sure that every
e-mail they send is relevant, valuable, welcomed and wanted by its
recipients. To survive and thrive in the next phase of e-mail marketing,
keep these two core principles in mind:
■ How you give notice trumps how you get permission. Getting
consumers’ permission is meaningless unless you are clear about
what they are agreeing to when they sign up. At a recent industry
conference, AOL’s postmaster, Charles Stiles, told attendees, “I
don’t care if they triple opted-in and gave you their credit card
number.” He drew chuckles, but made his point loud and clear:
Opt-in is meaningless if consumers subsequently click the “Report
Spam” button.
■ Relevancy rules. There are no
“throw away” communications in
the e-mail world, where consumers
provide immediate and
constant feedback about what
they think of your programs to
their ISPs. Before clicking send,
always ask yourself, “Is the individual
recipient I’m sending this
to going to find it valuable?” And
while you’re at it, “Would I be
Jordan Cohen
happy to receive this message.”
Epsilon
Jordan Cohen is director of industry and government relations at Epsilon. He
can be reached at jcohen@epsilon.com.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Controlling messaging costs
BY BARRY ABEL
For every message that doesn’t make it to the intended inbox,
the bottom line takes a direct hit. The number one reason why
mail doesn’t get delivered is infrastructure. Infrastructure in the
e-mail world means MTA (Message Transfer Agent) and is the
way your company presents itself to the ISP community. But most
companies’ sending infrastructures are not conducive to handling
large volumes of outbound mail. Common sending architecture
falls into two camps. The first is composed of open source solutions
such as Sendmail, which
requires dozens of servers to meet
volume and speed requirements.
The second includes early-to-market
spam engines intended to
send high volumes of mail, but
without the control features
required to secure delivery and a
positive reputation. Neither
approach is optimal.
There are, however, several
ways companies can optimize
Barry Abel
their infrastructure to reduce
Message Systems
costs and improve deliverability.
■ Improve infrastructure performance There is a tremendous
cost to running servers, so if you can reduce the number you need
to support, you automatically reduce costs. Adopting a solution
that will allow each server to send millions of messages per hour
with ability to maintain 100k concurrent connections, results in a
10:1 hardware reduction.
■ Insist on virtual IP support By adopting an infrastructure that
supports virtual IPs — the ability to segment traffic by unlimited
IP addresses on a server — you can optimize your throughput for
each type of mail you send to each ISP.
■ Cluster servers This will allow you to configure, manage and
support all servers from a single interface.
■ Establish bounce classifications and a list hygiene process This
will decrease mailing costs, because you’ve eliminated bad addresses
by setting up an automated way to handle bounced mail.
■ Obtain workflow and policy management capability Being able
to set mail processing policies in advance saves admin time and
processing power. Setting thresholds to alert admin of deliverability
problems will help catch problems early so they can be corrected.
■ Prepare for authentication To prevent messages from being
blocked by ISPs using authentication technology, establish a policy
to mark e-mail with DKIM and Sender ID.
■ Adopt e-mail monitoring E-mail monitoring lets you know if
your message landed in the inbox, a junk folder or was blocked
by a spam catcher. Knowing this can give you a better chance of
making changes that will get you to more inboxes.
■ Insist on real-time reporting With real-time analytics, adjustments
can be made before sending subsequent campaigns.
Barry Abel is vice president of field operations at Message Systems. He can be
reached at barry.abel@messagesystems.com.

34 ANALYTICS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
ANALYTICS
Page 34
There’s more to e-mail than e-mail,
by Bob Hale, Alterian
Send. Analyze. Target. Resend,
by Dan Robbins, ClickTracks
Page 36
Benchmarketing e-mail
response metrics, by Liz Bross,
Harte-Hanks
Page 37
Measuring e-mail results: Using
the wrong end of the stick?, by
Michael DesRochers, Salestream
Software
Page 38
Understand and respond to your
customers through analytics, by
Jack Felsheim, Ovation Marketing
Analytics
Studying analytics is the best way for a marketer to see results in their
e-mail campaigns, test how a campaign is doing and keep up-to-date
information on customer behavior and profiles to help increase ROI.
Key topics include analyzing data, targeting and retargeting, setting benchmarks
to e-mail metrics and monitoring clicks and interactions.
There’s more to
e-mail than e-mail
BY BOB HALE
How does your company approach direct
mail? Do you just randomly send the same
package to everyone on your list, without regard
for past behavior or purchase models? Probably
not. So why is it that when it comes to e-mail
marketing, so many organizations apply an
entirely different — entirely lax — standard?
All too often, while marketers are busy applying
analytics to every other facet of direct marketing,
e-mail is being handled on its own,
segregated from the rest of the communications
strategy.
Sending thousands of e-mails to thousands of
addresses, even if you
have permission, isn’t
much better than spamming.
All it takes to inform
your e-mail marketing
efforts is a little knowledge
of your customers’
behavior. If you think
you don’t know
enough about them,
Bob Hale
Alterian
you’re wrong. In fact,
what you know about
their online activities can go a long way toward
rounding out your overall customer view — and
a long way toward increasing revenues across
your organization.
According to the Direct Marketing Association,
e-mail drove more than $16 billion in revenue
last year and influenced nearly $100 billion more.
Those are impressive numbers, but it’s clear that
of the 83 percent of marketers that use e-mail,
many aren’t mining it as well as they could be.
What do you need to tap into that potential?
■ Deep customer data, not just aggregated Web
data or click throughs. Interact with your customers.
Find out their preferences. And pull
together everything you know from every source.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
■ Insight into that data. Find the right software
and tools to learn about your audience using
demographic, tracking and account data. Using
disparate applications to accomplish these tasks
usually doesn’t work. It’s not practical. “Right
software and tools” means, using a single integrated
platform. Don’t worry, they’re out there.
■ Action. You’ve got the facts, now act on them.
Data-driven decisions are easy to justify and easy
to measure at the back end.
■ Measurement. If you can’t measure it, you
shouldn’t be doing it. You need to know what
works, and what individual customers and
prospects prefer.
■ The ability to fine tune and change directions.
Responding to what you learn lets you continually
tighten future campaigns.
Using e-mail as a full-fledged direct marketing
channel, and applying the same analytical standards
you’ve set for offline efforts, can help you
get a better look at your customers, build
stronger relationships and increase returns in
every possible way. That’s the value of real relationship
building and acknowledging the real
value of your customer.
Bob Hale is vice president of business development for
Alterian. You can reach him at bhale@alterian.com.
Send. Analyze.
Target. Resend.
BY DAN ROBBINS
There’s a lot more to be learned from your
e-mail campaigns than open and clickthrough
rates will tell you. By using a Web analytics
tool to analyze the behavior of respondents,
you can gain valuable insight to just how effective
your e-mail campaign is — or isn’t.
Many marketers consider conversion the holy
grail of campaign success. But a lack of conversion
doesn’t necessarily constitute a failure. By
examining two key metrics — your visitors’ average
time on site (ATOS) and your campaign exit
rate — you can understand where the conversion

36 ANALYTICS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
process needs improvement.
Focused analysis Segmentation is the key to gaining actionable
insight on any of your marketing activities, including your e-mail
campaigns. You need to be able to focus on visitors who share
common behavior when responding to a particular campaign.
Using your Web analytics program to segment campaign respondents
will provide valuable information when formulating followup
campaigns.
Time is on your side Time on site measures your Web site’s ability
to successfully hold each visitor’s interest. It’s also a good indicator
of how well you’re meeting
visitor expectations. Using average
time on site for all visitors as
a benchmark, you can analyze
the average time on site for just
the visitors that came through
your e-mail campaign and then
compare.
If you have large groups of visitors
with high ATOS but few
conversions, examine your cam-
Dan Robbins
ClickTracks
paign offer and look for ways to
create a sense of urgency in your
follow-up campaign. Give your
lingering window shoppers a catalyst to convert.
Leaving like a jet plane? Your campaign exit rate is also an effective
way to gauge whether you met visitors’ expectations. If you’re
dealing with high exit rates, your first move should be to see how
well your landing page reflects the promise made in your campaign.
For example, if you send out an e-mail message with a free
shipping offer, your landing page should clearly restate that offer.
Final judgment It is also important to note that you shouldn’t
look at any one metric in a vacuum. Instead, you should take a
holistic look at your metrics — including ROI, conversion and visitor
volume/response rate — to ensure that you have an accurate
picture of the value of each campaign.
By combining your e-mail provider’s metrics with a few key metrics
from your Web analysis software, you can improve the experience
for customers both in their inboxes and on your site.
Dan Robbins is director of marketing at ClickTracks. You can reach him at
drobbins@clicktracks.com.
Benchmarking e-mail
response metrics
BY LIZ BROSS
In the first half of 2007, the travel and hospitality and entertainment
industries received the highest delivery, open and clickthrough
rates of the 13 industries monitored by the Harte-Hanks
Postfuture Index, a periodic e-mail benchmarking monitor.
The Postfuture Index provides comparative e-mail metrics in
aggregate, and includes business and consumer e-mail campaigns
executed using the Harte-Hanks Postfuture Enterprise Edition
from January-June 2007. Altogether, the findings represent more
than 6,800 single-send broadcast and more than 1,200 transactional
e-mail campaigns across 13 industry sectors.
Metrics reveal that marketers using dynamic personalization,
print-at-home incentives and behavior-driven delivery enjoy the
highest e-mail open and click-through rates. Among those industry
categories with at least a dozen campaigns executed during the
first half of the year, travel and hospitality fared best, recording
open rates of 28.6 percent and click-through rates of 8.8 percent.
Entertainment ranked second for open rates (26.4 percent) and
click-through rates (5.4 percent). The lowest click-through rates
were found in the government sector (0.7 percent).
Cross-industry metrics Overall delivery rates across all industry
sectors and campaign types from January through June 2007 averaged
88.6 percent. Open rates averaged 20 percent of all delivered
messages. Click-through rates across all industry sectors averaged
3.8 percent.
B-to-b and b-to-c audience comparison Business-to-business email
open rates for the year’s first half were recorded at 21.8 percent
with a 3.5 percent click-through rate. By comparison,
business-to-consumer open rates were at 16.3 percent with a 3.4
percent click-through.
Transactional, send-to-a-friend and coupon metrics Given the
cross-industry average open rate of 20 percent and click-through
rate of 3.8 percent, transactional, send-to-a-friend and online incentives
campaigns fared much better for both opens and clickthroughs.
For example, average open rates for transactional e-mail
were recorded at 50.1 percent, with an average click-through rate
of 11 percent. E-mails with
coupons averaged 59.6 percent
opens and 38.31 percent clickthroughs.
Implications for direct
marketers Marketers that accelerate
rollout of customer-centric
e-mail strategies, including personalized
product recommendations,
behavior-driven messaging
dialogues and print-at-home
incentives to deliver individual-
Liz Bross
Harte-Hanks
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
ized marketing offers are more
likely to find success in open and
click-through, and ultimately
more e-mail conversions. The best-performing e-mail campaigns
combine personalization and behavior synchronization.
Transactional cross-sell is also effective and combines account status
e-mail with dynamic product recommendations.
Likewise, momentum toward the outsourcing of transactional
and customer service e-mail delivery continues to increase as marketers
realize the value of transactional e-mail messages for crosssell
and up-sell marketing.
Liz Bross is vice president of digital interaction at Harte-Hanks. She can be
reached at liz_bross@harte-hanks.com.

Measuring e-mail results:
Using the wrong end
of the stick?
BY MICHAEL DESROCHERS
If the job of marketing is to generate interest and drive leads, then
e-mail measurement must move that process forward. Measuring
open rates and click-through at the broadcast level is rarely actionable.
It’s like measuring with the opposite end of a yardstick.
E-mail provides a built-in direct response and follow-up mechanism.
Most marketing broadcasts will initiate some interest and
action, but no one expects a reply from your newsletter@address
that reads, “Hey, thanks for your interest in this link. Here is some
more information.”
Why keep valuable data such as who opened the message,
clicked on the links, read the attachments or forwarded the e-mail
to a friend locked up in a broadcast-only e-mail system?
Actionable measurement information is available within plug-ins
and services for everyday business e-mail systems like Outlook. The
ability to pinpoint interest as it happens, and easily follow-up and
extend the interaction, provides the ability to align the marketing
and sales process, literally on an individual customer and lead basis.
Sales, marketing and service staff use e-mail to communicate with
a set of prospects and customers every day. If they knew exactly
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DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS 37
E-MAIL MARKETING GUIDE
when these individuals responded to a campaign, they could take
more immediate, personal and relevant follow-up action.
Monitoring clicks and interactions thoughout the interest, evaluation
and purchase cycle provides multiple benefits. Sales people
improve their productivity and
timing by focusing in on the individuals
expressing real interest
through click behavior. Marketers
can exert more control by providing
standardized, branded content
distributed via everyday e-mail,
and gain the ability to measure
the results of their broadcast campaigns
to a whole new level of
conversion, monitoring the
engagement of their audience
Michael Desrochers
with the company’s front-line rep-
Salestream Software
resentatives.
Yet most marketers never put this concept into action, relying
only on broadcast e-mail analytics, Web analytics or sales figures
to measure whether a message, offer or promotion is successful.
Certainly the idea of e-mail and Web analytics integration is a
step in the right direction. The idea of adding CRM integration
into this mix is usually enough to strike fear into the hearts of any
sane business or IT manager.
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38 ANALYTICS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
But there is an easier way. Tracking interactions and filling the gap
between broadcast marketing and sales activity is increasingly valuable.
Like most things in business, success relies upon execution. Yet
the e-mail interactions are already happening, right in Outlook. All
you need to do is supercharge them and capture the information,
turning your everyday inbox into a sales and marketing machine.
Michael DesRochers is CEO of Salestream Software. He can be reached at
info@politemail.com.
Understand and respond
to your customers through
analytics
BY JACK FELSHEIM
When you blast an e-mail campaign, you know the number of
visitors to your Web site will increase. But how much do
you know about the specific types of visitors you are attracting and
what triggered their clicks? Here is how you can use analytics to
understand the return frequency of your visitors and optimize your
messaging based on how they respond to your e-mails.
When you look at a typical unique visitor graph from an e-mail
blast, you will see a spike each time a message is sent. This allows
you to know with certainty that your e-mail efforts are driving
more customers to your site. But are the customers clicking
through because of the product offerings? Are they interested in
the special offers? Or are they simply responding to the e-mail as a
reminder that your site is out there?
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
To find the answer to these questions, we analyzed the click
activity for one of our b-to-c retail client’s e-mail campaigns. We
noticed that more users clicked on links directing them to the Web
site than clicked on the product links offered in the e-mail. Further
analysis confirmed that the products purchased as a result of the
campaign were not the featured products in the e-mail. We were
working hard to find the right products to feature and match them
to the particular segment of the list, but analysis of the click
reports showed that product did not matter. Most of the customers
simply used the e-mail as a trigger to visit the site.
We looked deeper into the daily Web analytics reports by return
frequency. Forty-eight percent of the traffic generated from the
e-mail was from visitors who had not been to the site in the past
30 days, while 34 percent of the traffic was generated from visitors
who had been away from 15 to 30 days.
Armed with this knowledge, we turned our focus from finding
the optimal product to feature in the e-mail to creating compelling
reasons or offers that would drive customers to the site — where
they are able to purchase many more products than can effectively
be displayed in an e-mail. We then focused subsequent creative
and marketing efforts on discovering ways to increase repeat visits,
increase order frequency, increase average orders and maximize
long-term customer value.
Watching your customers’ click and purchase behaviors will
allow you to fine-tune your e-mail messages and optimize both
your customers’ experiences and your campaign results.
Jack Felsheim is the marketing director at Ovation Marketing. He can be
reached at jackf@ovationmarketing.com.

E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS
Page 39
The elements of relevance,
by John Rizzi, e-Dialog.
Page 40
When e-mail design goes bad,
by Julian Scott, Responsys.
Keys to trigger-based e-mail
marketing, by Michael Thompson,
eServices at Click Tactics
Page 41
The how and why of integrating
e-mail across channels, by
Michael Gorman, Acxiom Digital
Page 42
Mona Lisa’s eyes, by Anne Alden,
Merkle, Inc.
Earn higher conversions using an
A/B split, by Michael Stebbin,
MarketMotive
Page 43
Viral marketing – optimize your
marketing mix, by Josh Perlstein,
Response Media
Page 44
Design for your eight e-mail
audiences, by Stefan Pollard,
EmailLabs
Page 45
E-mail marketing fuels social
media, by Janine Popick, Vertical
Response
Beat outbound telemarketers to
the punch, by Tim Daly and Clay
Gillespie, UnReal Marketing
Page 46
Integrating e-mail with traditional
marketing methods, by Doug
Marshall, Responsys
DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS 39
E-Mail Fundamentals
Campaigns
E-mail campaigns are a foundation to an online marketing
program. Included in this section are articles by industry
thought leaders about relevance, design, timing and triggered
e-mail, cross channel integration, optimizing viral marketing
and e-mail and social media.
The elements of
relevance
BY JOHN RIZZI
Could you have imagined this 10 years ago?
Today 97 percent of all marketers use e-mail
to communicate with customers. The reasons are
clear: E-mail offers ease of entry and the lowest
cost-per-contact of any marketing tool. But the
ubiquitous nature of e-mail is also the source of
its challenges.
It has never been more difficult to get messages
noticed in a customer’s inbox, let alone to get
customers to respond positively or take action.
E-mail does offer some rather dramatic technical
advantages that, when used wisely, can increase
its visibility and effectiveness. Yet few marketers
today know what those advantages are, let alone
how to use them. Instead, many are broadcasting
e-mails like needles in a haystack and hoping that
their customers will somehow find them.
What makes a relevant e-mail? Imagine your email
“needle” is the size of a basketball, tricycle
or subcompact car. Would that increase the likelihood
that customers will notice it? That’s the
idea behind e-mail relevance — applying enough
individual significance to your message that it
becomes difficult for customers to overlook.
There are several tactics you can take to
increasing e-mail relevance, all relying on marketing
ingenuity and information contained in your
customer database. These tactics can be broken
down into six key elements that characterize relevant
e-mail, and are guaranteed to increase customer
engagement and e-mail productivity.
■ Segmentation Why broadcast an e-mail campaign
if you have the ability to target specific
audiences? Use the data you have on customer
demographics, preferences, location and behavior
to segment individual groups who share the
same attributes. Your audiences will be smaller
but far more qualified and responsive.
■ Personalization You would be surprised how
many companies are not even marketing to customers
on a first-name basis. Use the customer
data you have to personalize the content based
on profile, attributes, location, status, preferences
and behavior.
■ Lifecycle management Is the customer new to
your business, a loyal shopper or no longer active?
Being able to key your messages to a person’s
place in the customer lifecycle will help you refine
your programs and optimize retention efforts.
■ Triggers Whenever possible, your e-mail marketing
should include programs that are driven
by customer status and behavior. There are
applications that enable you to automate these
programs, ensuring
consistency in the way
you handle welcoming
new customers, up-selling
certain products or
following up with those
who abandon their
shopping cart.
■ Interactivity Indulge
your customer’s curiosi-
John Rizzi
e-Dialog
ty and feed her need to
be entertained. Include
a clear call to action as
well as interactive elements that engage customers,
such as a preference center, survey or
information links. Always leave the customer
wanting more.
■ Testing and measurement Understand the
impact your e-mail program has and how to
improve it by employing valid control groups,
A/B testing and any available metrics.
Relevance isn’t easy. It requires a confluence of
customer data, targeting tactics, marketing
expertise, process, and technology. But as an email
marketing strategy, the impact relevance can
have on both customer engagement and profitability
makes it worth the effort.
John Rizzi is the president and CEO of e-Dialog in
Lexington, MA. You can reach him at jrizzi@e-dialog.com.

40 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
When e-mail design goes bad
BY JULIAN SCOTT
Time and time again I discover that one of the main obstacles
to creating effective, visually engaging, brand-propelling
and, most important, results-driven e-mails is the creative team behind
them.
There are many factors that need to be considered when designing
an e-mail: how much content there will be, whether there will
be dynamic content, how the design will organize the content,
what call to action to use and how it will be coded. Everything
needs to come together in unison
to deliver an e-mail message that
will deliver the most results.
Several critical points your creative
team must keep in mind:
Best practices are best practices
for a reason Unless it will work
in 99.9 percent of environments,
it is not a best practice and
should generally be avoided.
Print is not the same as e-mail
How the recipient will interact
Julian Scott
with and read it will be very dif-
Responsys
ferent. E-mails are rarely viewed
in their entirety. You have to be able to tell your story within consolidated
chunks that are clear, easily scanned and actionable.
E-mails are read top to bottom and left to right, so placing the
headline at the bottom of the e-mail is not going to work. You
have only a few seconds to grab their attention — don’t waste it
making them search for the primary points or call to action.
The way you would code a Web page is not the same way you
code an e-mail, and you must adjust your design to accommodate
no background images, no Flash, no forms, no java script, no
CSS, no image maps.
An e-mail is never the destination. It serves as a stepping stone to
motivate recipients to take an action. If the e-mail is not designed
with this in mind, then you’ve missed the point and wasted your
money.
Remember, if recipients cannot read your e-mail because the primary
content is below the fold or coded in a way that will not render
correctly, they are not likely to take an action.
Some simple things you can do include making sure your creative
team attends industry events and stays on top of industry
trends and news. Also, try to include them as part of your marketing
planning process. Often, just understanding “why” is critical to
effective implementation. Always be sure to share results and
encourage creative thinking that can be validated through testing.
Julian Scott is creative director at Responsys. You can reach him at
jscott@responsys.com.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Keys to trigger-based e-mail
marketing
BY MICHAEL THOMPSON
Imagine having the power to send your customers a message at the
precise moment they are most likely to act on it. Imagine never
again having to play the guessing game of throwing an offer out
there and hoping it will stick. Instead, imagine having information
regarding your customers’ life-changing events, such as the purchase
of a home or opening of a checking account, at your fingertips, and
the dexterity to send out the right
offer at precisely the right time.
Well, there’s no need to imagine.
Trigger-based marketing programs
are enabling e-mail
marketers to communicate
insightful offers in a timely fashion
to both customers and
prospects, yielding as much as a
400 percent improvement in
response rates without costing
millions of dollars.
Michael Thompson
Triggers 101 Triggers generally
eServices at Click Tactics
fall into four categories: external
(something happening in the mortgage or housing industry, for
example); customer life (marriage, retirement); behavioral (customer
purchase or dropped service) and communication (inquiry
about a product upgrade or service). Each represents a specific
moment when the customer is both interested and engaged.
Today’s most successful campaigns use triggers to automatically
initiate e-mail when customers take certain actions. This is done
by establishing a set of business rules that act on pre-assigned criteria.
Trigger-based e-mail programs enable marketers to turn existing
customer data into business rules that systematically drive a
program through execution at greatly reduced campaign cycle
times.
Two key factors: timing and relevancy Timing and relevancy are
the foundation on which successful marketing programs are built.
Missing on either front can often spell disaster for a campaign.
Much as a dancer needs both rhythm and knowledge of the right
steps to dance, marketers must hit both “right message” and “right
time” to move the customer to action. By aligning the content and
timing of e-mail messages with customer needs, you’re increasing
the relevance, response and, ultimately, revenue from your direct
marketing programs.
Assisted by new robust e-mail platforms and on-demand technologies
that enable triggered communications using dynamic content,
companies can deliver individualized, relevant
communication to each customer. What’s more, e-mails can be
used as part of a multi-touch communications strategy allowing
marketers to deliver messages over a variety of channels based on
customer preference and at varying intervals, enabling marketers
to send out thousands or just a few at the appropriate time. These
programs tell the customer, “Hey, we know you and here’s how
we can help you specifically.”
Keep it simple When implementing trigger-based programs,
keep it simple. Don’t reconfigure your current systems or dramatically
change internal processes. Your trigger-based solution should

conform to your brand and culture. And take advantage of
e-mail’s measurability. You’ll be able to learn and test on the fly, so
layer in new business rules and continue to hone messages.
For any marketing program, timing and relevancy are the keys
to driving customer interest. Creating triggered-based e-mail programs
activated by customer actions augments their relevancy,
ultimately increasing your results.
Michael Thompson is vice president of eServices at Click Tactics. He can be
reached at mthompson@clicktactics.com.
The how and why of
integrating e-mail across
channels
BY MICHAEL GORMAN
More marketers than ever are mastering the challenges of optimizing
campaigns in each online channel, from search to
Web sites to e-mail. So now they’re beginning to ask why they
can’t coordinate and optimize campaigns across multiple channels,
on and offline?
First, it’s important to understand that e-mail now occupies a
special place in the portfolio of marketing channels. It is exception-
DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS 41
Michael Gorman
Acxiom Digital
E-MAIL MARKETING GUIDE
ally measurable and highly targetable,
even at the individual
level. It is usually the most costeffective
channel, the one with
the highest ROI. However, it is
also among the channels with the
narrowest reach, as compared to
online ads, search, mail or television.
Companies still struggle to
maintain valid e-mail lists on
more than 50 percent of their customer
base, and many fall far
short of that. In short, e-mail is a
great way to communicate with
your brand’s core online audience.
But integration is a top priority for many marketers right now.
Companies must figure out how to assemble data from external
and internal sources to build that elusive single view of the customer.
Here are three flavors of e-mail integration.
Extending messages delivered in other channels to e-mail This
approach is probably the oldest of the three, usually paired with
direct mail. There has been evidence for some time to suggest that
two related messages delivered in the same time window, one in email
and one in direct mail, will drive better performance for both
messages than either would achieve alone. But marketers would

42 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
be wise to test carefully here and consider all options given the
additional effort required to coordinate messages.
Extending e-mail messaging to other channels This technique is
newer. Examples include sending an e-mail with a special offer
then following up with a mobile message referencing the offer. Or
follow up with a physical mailing, but only to those who click on
the offer and whose other characteristics make them likely responders.
Have your Web site reference an offer on the home page for
customers who opened or clicked on an e-mail. The technology to
accomplish all these message extensions is available, although
these techniques are not yet broadly adopted by marketers.
E-mail in a more complex communication stream This technique
is my favorite, and the one I expect will someday be the
dominant use of e-mail communication. You just visited the Web
site, lingering over a particular product. Should you not receive an
e-mail that in some manner builds on this behavior? “Time to
renew.” “Your warranty will soon expire.” “A new store is opening
in your area.” Connect the customer with the brand, and use email
to continue the conversation followed by an offer of some
benefit. When customers receive pertinent, timely information that
extends their relationship with a brand, their attentiveness to
future e-mail from that brand increases.
For all of the integration techniques discussed, the critical factor
making everything possible is data integration across multiple
channels. This challenge is most acute for campaigns that are continuous,
not one-off, and based on triggered behavior - which also
happen to be the type with the greatest potential to drive results.
Michael Gorman is senior vice president of search and acquisition at Acxiom
Digital. You can reach him at Michael.Gorman@acxiom.com.
Mona Lisa’s eyes
BY ANNE ALDEN
How does the Mona Lisa draw people in? Is it her eyes? That
elusive smile? Or could it be the overall effect of the entire
painting? If you only saw Mona Lisa’s eyes, would you want to
see more? These are the questions you should be asking yourself
when designing and writing an e-mail.
Granted, comparing one of the best-known masterpieces of all
time to effective e-mail design is a bit extreme, but you get the picture:
Within a few small inches,
the recipient must get a good idea
of your offer, become intrigued
and open the e-mail to view the
entire message.
Information should be conveyed
in an efficient yet effective
way that upholds your brand
tenents. And to make the situation
more challenging, you only
get 45 characters in a subject line.
Sound easy? Maybe so, but
Anne Alden
there is one invisible element that
Merkle, Inc.
is beyond any creative control —
the bottom of a preview pane or “fold” of an open e-mail.
So, how do we get your equivalent to the Mona Lisa “above the
fold”?
First, run your e-mail through a simulated send sequence to
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
check its on-screen rendering across a selection of the most commonly
used e-mail providers using tools like Pivotal Veracity
(http://www.pivotalveracity.com) and Delivery Audit from
EmailReach.com.
Second, consider other factors determined by the recipient:
■ Preview pane size. Some people like to see what they are about
to get, but others read only the subject line before hitting “delete.”
So remember that for some, even your best creative efforts aren’t
as important as the subject line.
■ Screen resolution. Most monitors and laptop screens have
advanced beyond the 800-pixel by 600-pixel ratio. The norm is
now 1024 by 768, which provides more screen space.
■ Competition with your e-mails. Your messages compete for
attention with other e-mails, instant messaging, message boards,
multiple applications, other Web sites, ringing phones, etc.
■ Image options. Turning images off is the default setting for
many Web-based e-mail services and applications.
Now, ask yourself these questions:
■ Is my subject line compelling? Is my message relevant and
focused? The job of an e-mail is to get people to click into the
client brand experience — not to give them every option and
detail.
■ What does your message look like with images turned off? Be
sure to include a “Can’t view this e-mail? Click here” option that
will take readers to a hosted HTML page.
■ What is the overall picture? An e-mail must work as a bridge
that a reader can’t refuse to walk — or click — across. Length of
copy, call to action, the blend of images and text, hyperlinks and
overall clarity play a role.
When readers choose to scroll below the fold, that means they
are engaged and want to know more. If you only saw a portion of
the Mona Lisa above the fold but could click to see the rest,
wouldn’t you?
Anne Alden is creative director at Merkle, Inc. She can be reached at
aalden@merkleinc.com.
Earn higher conversions
using an A/B split
BY MICHAEL STEBBIN
Consider this situation: You run the marketing department for
an e-commerce outdoor outfitter, and your team has decided
on a subject line and special offer for your next campaign. The
variable you’re trying to settle is whether the main graphic should
be a product photo or one of the company president announcing
the offer. This is the perfect time to employ an A/B split to find
out which works better.
Creating campaign A First create the e-mail using product shots
— in this case, one that includes an array of men’s and women’s
shoes. Then, create a landing page that reiterates the president’s
sale coupon offer, in addition to using the same product imagery.
This will be your ‘A’ campaign.
Creating campaign B In order to isolate how much impact the
imagery has on the recipient’s actions, campaign ‘B’ will be an
exact replica of ‘A,’ but in place of the shoes photo, use a photo of
your president. The landing page includes the coupon offer and
that same picture.

Michael Stebbin
MarketMotive
Randomize, send and analyze
Now it’s time to send out the
e-mail. If your e-mail service
provider offers you the option to
randomly select half of your list,
use it. If not, simply cut your list
in half alphabetically or by order
of the opt-in date, bearing in
mind that the results will be
slightly skewed because of these
variables.
After you’ve sent the mail, look
at your metrics. First, check your
e-mail stats to determine if your click-through rates are better for
either campaign. Then, use your Web analytics application to see
how visitors from campaign A behaved differently from visitors
from campaign B. And although you’ll want to concentrate on
conversion rates, you can glean knowledge from other metrics, as
well. How did the visitors’ average time on site differ? Did visitors
from one campaign view a vastly different number of pages than
visitors from the other? Contrasting and comparing how each
campaign’s visitors behaved lets you draw conclusions about what
worked and what didn’t.
Drawing conclusions In our imaginary scenario, let’s assume
that you found that campaign B (featuring the picture of the presi-
Instantly add video to your email. The Zeop
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DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS 43
dent) yielded 1.5 times better purchase conversion than campaign
A, which featured product shots. Your customers showed you that
seeing your company president made them feel more compelled to
purchase.
A/B testing may be a bit more work on the front end of an
e-mail campaign, but the information and insights you gain from it
can make a huge difference in your click-through rates, as well as
your conversion rates. So the next time your team can’t decide
between two good ideas, split the difference and let your customers
show you.
Michael Stebbin is CEO of MarketMotive. He can be reached at
mstebbins@marketmotive.com
Success with your e-mail marketing campaigns is about more than sending
e-mail using reliable technology. It’s also about reaching your recipients
with genuine, personalized messages that speak to their interests and
inspire measurable action. Campaign Enterprise is the e-mail marketing
solution chosen by the most successful online marketers in the world to
build relationships, and now marketers can send streaming video e-mails
using the Zeop Media Engine. Learn more today at www.Zeop.com
Campaign Enterprise customers include:
E-MAIL MARKETING GUIDE
Viral marketing — optimize
your marketing mix
BY JOSH PERLSTEIN
Viral marketing, if used properly, can be a highly effective and
cost-efficient tool in your marketing mix. A viral idea or content
has greater impact and more credibility when it comes from a
friend, and by transferring the work of distribution to consumers
themselves, costs are minimized, significantly improving your marketing
ROI.
Reliable technology for building
e-mail relationships.
Download a Free Evaluation Today!
Call 1-800-453-9387 or visit www.ArialSoftware.com

44 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
According to a Jupiter
Communications survey, 80 percent
of online companies say they
do some form of viral promoting.
A study from Sharpe Partners
revealed that nearly 9 of 10 adult
Internet users in the US share
content with others via e-mail.
Eighty-one percent pass viral messages
on to at least one other person;
almost half are likely to pass
Josh Perlstein
that message along to two or
Response Media
three other people.
A 2007 MarketingSherpa study points to the “experience
chasm” that gives a significant edge to experienced viral marketers.
Response Media has tested numerous viral programs for
consumer packaged goods firms, so here are some tips for delivering
value beyond simple “buzz”:
■ Use viral as a stepping stone to build relationships and grow
brand affinity Whether building prospect databases or driving
online sales, understanding which sites and which people have the
greatest probability of spreading a message is the key to getting
something to spread.
■ Viral works best when integrated into your overall marketing
mix Viral is not a standalone technique. It needs to be used strategically
as a means to an end.
■ Get real Marketers model the viral market opportunity to set
goals, performance metrics and realistic budgets. Developing
behavioral and motivational profiles is far better than banking on
a single creative approach applied across different strategies.
Analysis of behavioral models and multiple cycles of multivariate
testing will allow you to turn your viral marketing into a predictable,
measureable marketing channel.
■ Allow recipients to download the content in a useable form
These include JPG pictures, MPG videos, etc. Viral marketing
succeeds when you have a topic that motivates customers to talk
and you help them share that conversation.
Provide an interactive Web site dedicated to creating a strong
online community. Experienced companies also reach out to customers
and prospects by putting a special offer in an e-mail, which
becomes an easy-to-forward means of building buzz.
■ Measure and analyze pass-along, click-through and conversion
rates. Separate the click-through and conversion rates by original
customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances
in addition to tracking which people actually purchased something
from your business.
■ Follow hygiene, suppression and other data management best
practices. From ensuring that the code blocks multiple submissions
of the form by same session/IP address in a short time span,
to checks for obscene content, the form and function of viral campaigns
need to be thought through from the outset.
Creatively integrating the viral program into your overall marketing
mix, setting realistic goals, and testing and optimizing will
help drive rapid, positive exposure through trusted word-of-mouth
networks for minimal cost.
Josh Perlstein is president of Response Media. He can be reached at
joshp@responsemedia.com.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Design for your
eight e-mail audiences
BY STEFAN POLLARD
As a marketer, you might send one identical message per campaign
to a highly targeted list of active recipients, but it will still
be seen by eight different e-mail audiences, each of whom reads and
responds to your message in a different way. So it’s vital to find a
design that appeals to as many of those audiences as possible.
Just to complicate matters, the audiences can shift each time.
The same recipients might read your message differently from edition
to edition, depending on their mood or time constraints.
Understanding the major e-mail audiences will help you choose
the right design tactics to maximize the likelihood that everyone
will read and comprehend your message.
The eight different audiences are:
■ Identifiers Identifiers have one goal: They use the “from”
address and the subject line to whittle down their inboxes as fast
as possible, deleting everything they don’t want. Clear branding
and great subject lines have the greatest impact.
■ HTML vs. text Some e-mail clients give users a choice between
HTML or text, which is why multipart MIME format has two
parts: HTML for those who prefer e-mails with images and text
for those who don’t. Every e-mail you send should include both
versions even if your preference center doesn’t capture this choice.
■ Skimmers vs. readers Skimmers open your message, but they
want to read as fast as possible, using headlines, subheads and
CTAs as cues. When you craft your message, have all these copy
points working in unison to deliver the idea and lead to the clickthrough.
Readers want to read
the two-to-three sentences of
body copy between the headline
and CTA to “learn more” about
the specific topic the e-mail is discussing
and help them over the
click-through hurdle.
■ Mobile vs. desk Some PDAs
display HTML just fine. Others
show a text version including
lines of ugly HTML code. These
e-mail addicts will most likely
Stefan Pollard
save your message to read later
EmailLabs
on a desktop or laptop. Few
mobile readers will click through, and many will delete if something
doesn’t grab their eye fast enough. Desk readers are the ones
most marketers design their e-mails for. Rendering tools like
EmailAdvisor (http://www.lyris.com/products/emailadvisor/) check
e-mail messages with this audience in mind. They are the majority
and the most likely audience to act on your message. Anything
you do to optimize your design strategy for your other audiences
will also help you reach this audience more effectively.
■ Searchers Searchers start out as members of one of the other
audiences. They saw something they liked in your message but
couldn’t deal with it right away and saved your message for later.
The challenge: finding it again. If it doesn’t stand out, it will be
overlooked or forgotten and eventually deleted. Proper branding
in the sender address and the subject line — including brand name
and offer — have the greatest impact.

Which audience is yours?
If you keep all eight audiences in mind when you design your emails,
you multiply your chances of reaching the broadest spectrum
of readers.
Stefan Pollard is director of consulting services at EmailLabs. You can reach
him at spollard@emaillabs.com.
E-mail marketing fuels
social media
JANINE POPICK
Janine Popick
Verical Response
We do a lot of social networking
here at
VerticalResponse to reach our
desired audience, which is mostly
small businesses. The list of
resources to choose from is seemingly
never-ending: Facebook,
Myspace, Squidoo, blogs, communities
or forums — never has
there been so many alternatives
to bring you closer to your customers.
Exciting, isn’t it?
If your business is active with
any of these, then you know that
it’s not a slam-dunk to drive traffic and spark activity. That’s why
e-mail can play such an important role in alerting them to activity,
therefore potentially driving more traffic. Here’s how we’ve made
e-mail fuel our social networking activities:
Blogs A few years ago, when blogs were still sort of new, we
started one full of e-mail marketing best practices. We also wrote a
newsletter that went out to our users, which was filled mostly with
best practices and information on our product updates. At one
point, we took a step back and asked, “Who is going to create all
of this content?”
The solution: We continued writing best practices for the blog.
Two times per month we included excerpts from the blog in the
newsletter and sent it to our users to drive more traffic.
The result: These days our blog is ranked pretty high in the
search engines. We also link from the blog to our site and to other
blogs that we like. Over and over again our readers have told us
that our blog has really made a difference. We think it’s because
that’s where we are focusing our content, and that’s what we’re
using our e-mail newsletter for.
Social networks Businesses today are finding themselves taking
to the social networks. Yes, they are filled with teens wanting to
know what their best friend is doing, but you’ll also find a large
amount of businesses setting up groups for customer feedback,
event invites, etc.
If you do set up your own business’s group or network, make
sure you announce it in your e-mail newsletter. We recently set up
a group and sent an e-mail newsletter about it. In three days we
had almost 100 members. We also started discussions there and
got some great feedback about our product.
Communities and forums Businesses are noticing that communities
are a great way to listen to their customers. Our community
has taken off with people wanting best-practice advice as well as
DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS 45
E-MAIL MARKETING GUIDE
people helping people. Can a community exist without outbound
communications? I suppose, but it’s sure more active when you
drive people to it and tell them about recent topics of discussion.
I’m part of a marketing community that sends out e-mail at least
two times a week letting people know what the hot marketing topics
are. On my own, I might not have gone into that community,
but I was able to pick up a few pointers thanks to the e-mail alerting
me.
Social media isn’t just for the teenie boppers anymore. Dive in.
But don’t forget to use e-mail to drive traffic. Since e-mail is a disruptive
form of media and an attention grabber, you can leverage
your recipients’ habits of checking and reading e-mail to drive
activity on your presence among social networks.
Janine Popick is CEO of Vertical Response. She can be reached at
janine@verticalresponse.com.
Beat outbound telemarketers
to the punch
TIM DALY AND CLAY GILLESPIE
In recent years, online marketing budgets have shifted toward the
fast-growing medium of lead generation referrals. According to
the Internet Advertising Bureau, lead generation represents 8 percent
of all online media spend. Online advertisers spent $1.3 billion
in 2006 obtaining leads — a
growth rate of 74 percent from
2005.
While media spending and
advertiser demand for this medium
is growing, lead conversion
rates have struggled to improve.
Due to the heated environment in
lead aggregation, speed of
response is critical to success.
First-mover status is the focus of
many insurance and mortgage
Tim Daly
advertisers, with some triggering
UnReal Marketing
outbound call-center efforts within
15 seconds of obtaining the
lead.
So how does the old-school
direct marketer compete against
this wave of technology-enabled
outbound telemarketers? We suggest
an integrated approach using
e-mail and other direct response
vehicles to provide umbrella support
for outbound telemarketing
(OBTM) in an effort to equalize
Clay Gillespie
the speed of the “tech” call cen-
UnReal Marketing
ters and increase the likelihood of
conversion.
The following are five best practice areas to focus on to effectively
leverage e-mail in your lead-conversion efforts:
Lead quality Suppress non-actionable leads by applying ondemand
data verification to the lead generation data. This will
improve the quality of your lead, deliverability of the e-mail, and

46 E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
your cost per conversion. Considering that the non-actionable lead
rate can range anywhere from 5 percent to 20 percent, the $35/M
cost for this service is a small price to pay for the efficiencies of
securing a more qualified lead file.
E-mail deliverability Consider licensing an ASP solution instead
of in-house distribution of e-mail. ASP providers can help increase
the deliverability as well as consistency and regulatory compliance
of your e-mails.
Conversion optimization Send a custom auto-response e-mail
within seconds of lead data receipt that includes personalized
dynamic content based on triggers included in the lead form such
as geography, loan amount (e.g.; mortgage industry), etc. Make
sure the e-mail is substantive and effectively describes the next
steps in the process.
Frequency Frequent communication plays a significant role in
taking a prospect from awareness to action. We suggest formulating
a cohesive communication strategy in the form of a series of e-mails
to optimize lead conversion. Typically, a string of six e-mails over a
two-to-three week period with cohesive messaging reinforces your
desire for their business without appearing intrusive. You may also
test an “increasing” offer strategy in subsequent e-mails.
Ongoing lead cultivation Enact detailed tracking to evaluate
opens and clicks so you can use the data to improve your call center
contact strategy. The idea is to treat e-mail responders who
have not converted as a greater priority within your predictive
dialing model for more aggressive ongoing communication.
In summary, direct marketers need to apply an integrated
approach to maximize conversion from their lead-generation referrals.
When used effectively, e-mail is a medium that can deliver
the direct conversion, but also provide support to OBTM and
other conversion channels.
Don’t let your leads slip into the hands of you competitors —
beat them to the phones with an effective e-mail strategy.
Clay Gillespie is EVP of client services and Timothy Daly is SVP of
interactive services at UnReal Marketing. They can be reached at
clay.gillespie@unrealmarketing.com and timothy.daly@unrealmarketing.com.
Integrating e-mail with
traditional marketing
methods
BY DOUG MARSHALL
It is an unfortunate reality that, in many organizations, marketing
is broken down in silos, and even though a company’s message
may be consistent from one channel to another, the channels do
little to help one another.
Take e-mail, a function that is often treated as a separate channel
even though it is proven to improve the performance of other traditional
marketing methods.
With very little effort, smart marketers can use e-mail to improve
the ROI of direct mail and more accurately target print, broadcast
and online messages. On the flip side, marketers can leverage existing
customer touch points to improve e-mail marketing programs.
Supporting direct mail One example of how e-mail can be used
to support traditional marketing methods is in conjunction with
direct mail.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
If you are a company that depends primarily on offline purchases,
you can improve direct mail conversions by using e-mail before
a drop. By sending an e-mail message in advance of a direct mail
drop, you can prepare your audience in a way that will increase
their recognition of — and place a higher value on — your catalog,
coupon or brochure.
As with any e-mail, you want to make sure that the calls to
action are clear and above the
fold. It’s also important when
using e-mail to bolster other
media to show some visual representation
of that media in the
form of an icon, inset or callout.
Data-level integration
Companies can target print,
broadcast and online messages
based on any number of criteria,
but it can be difficult to collect the
data necessary to segment your
Doug Marshall
Responsys
constituents.
One way to make it easier is to
go slowly. Constituents are usual-
ly willing to offer up information in small amounts at first. If you
use this little bit of data in a trustworthy manner, they may consider
giving you more. E-mail is a great way to implement this technique
of progressive profiling.
If you have access to data modeling and Web analytics applications,
you can overlay that data to infer a great deal more about your
constituents, and even use it for cross-selling, among other purposes.
Helping out e-mail My recommendation to every company that
engages in e-mail marketing is to identify every touch point your
company has with constituents — customer service, technical support,
brick and mortar points-of-sale, package inserts, direct mail,
online shopping carts, theater ads, billboards, radio, banner ads,
sweepstakes, affiliates, co-registrations, search engines, radio, television,
etc. — and turn them into e-mail address collection channels.
By sending e-mail messages in conjunction with traditional marketing
messages, you can increase responsiveness. By collecting
e-mail addresses at every turn, your traditional marketing methods
can extend the reach of your e-mail programs. It’s a win-win
proposition. And with a little creative thought, it can be a highly
profitable one.
Doug Marshall is senior manager of service solutions and operations at
Responsys. He can be reached at dmarshall@responsys.com.

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