Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

We just completed a case study with ReturnPath on Reaching the Inbox and Rendering Solutions and how to design so as not to encounter these issue pre-campaign.

eROI uses this data primarily to educate, consult and design. We like to help the troubled mailers become good ones and enjoy the increased response that comes from improved deliverability. Of course, if education fails, they can segregate their IPs so top-notch marketers don’t suffer because of other mailers misdeeds. (Which is why eROI has so many IPs and spend so much time monitoring, balancing and segmenting mailers on volume, reputation, list hygiene, vertical industry (say banking), and even by brand.)

eROI also uses Sender Score Campaign Preview to help their clients with content assessments. Content is another area where many ESPs typically have little control, so having a mechanism to help clients pinpoint where they need to make changes is crucial. But eROI is a hybrid ESP with full service and self service clients, agencies and other partners; due to this they can head off or test for issues prior to a campaign drop that they are creating, or test on behalf of a self serve client that requests it. Read more about how eROI uses the Sender Score suite to help its clients.

If you are struggling with deliverability issues, talk to eROI about how they address these problems. They help you assess your content? They segregate high reputation mailers from low reputation ones to protect their deliverability. You can’t expect your ESP to solve the problems that you are causing in your program, but you can expect eROI to help you diagnose and solve your problems so that you can increase your email success. Why else would we have so many great long term clients and even more each month selecting us as a partner.

http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-q207-reaching-the-inbox.html

So, after a multi-million dollar media blitz, I signed up for MyCokeRewards, which I wasn’t quite sure how I would benefit from (aside from a free coke here and there).

After sometime, I received an email telling me I had 50 free points, and to login and add a confirmation code. I did this, and the process was easy and quick. Good stuff.

Then…it went downhill. A week later I got a similar 50 free points email, which rendered horribly in Gmail, possibly the easiest email client from a rendering standpoint.

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The I get to the site and I am told this….

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You figure one of the biggest brands in the world would make sure this type of thing wouldn’t have happened. You need to make sure you aren’t sending people to a page with a code that has already been used or won’t work.

Testing your creative in all of the free consumer accounts is a must. We use Return Path.

I bought a Diet Pepsi yesterday for no reason. Coincidence?

Another newsletter focused on a b-to-b audience, SellingPower.com. This newsletter is focused at the large community of slackers…I mean salespeople. Most all salespeople I know use Outlook and will migrate when their company tells them to.

You will start to see a running theme of issues related to Outlook 2007.

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After examining the HTML, here’s why Outlook 2007 rendered the email like this:

- No set width for email content
- All css styles are referenced in the of document
- Positioning of elements (div) – Menu doesn’t display correctly b/c it uses an unsupported style: position

This gets back to the new Outlook 2007 motto – Old School Table Layouts.

Keep an eye out for this new weekly feature – Outlook 07 Offenders.

This article below was in one of my Google alerts. It’s real. Seriously. I am not sure what she is even talking about at sometimes. I posted this so you can remember that we are always fighting crazy spammers like this.

This may be my favorite quote….sounds like a mix of George W. Bush or maybe the evil Cobra Kai teacher from Karate Kid.

“Be aware that some subscribers may email them back wondering why they are on their list. People forget that they signed up for their list. People might call them bad names, but don’t worry about it. Just delete those emails and move on. They can’t be afraid to upset their list. If they are scared or upset easily then they need to get out of the email marketing game. Yes, it is a game and they have to be a tough, confident competitor.”

Here is the full article.

If You Want To Make Money You on the Internet Need to Send Out Emails Constantly

Suwanee, GA — Send out emails constantly. Internet marketers need to have constant traffic to their website. If they are not sending out emails then they are not maximizing their profits. If they want to make money then send out emails. Let me repeat – if
they want to make money then send out emails!

Set up an email schedule. Send emails every week. Why? If they are emailing every single week then they know that they are making money on a consistent basis. Ask them each week about what they want to sell that week. It doesn’t matter how many people they have on their list. They may have heard of ‘ABC – Always be closing.- Instead think of ‘ABE – Always be emailing.- Don’t be afraid of emailing and promoting your products.

Of course they want to not just send sales type emails, but also emails that provide content. But don’t be afraid to promote and sell. If they want to make money then they have to promote and sell constantly!

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I am working on rewriting our customer lifecycle document (get the current one here). What is the customer lifecycle?

The customer lifecycle is based on customer loyalty, however, many clients that I speak to mistake revenue for loyalty. Now, I agree that revenue is an important component, but loyalty is also made up of brand awareness and brand interaction. The customer lifecycle should be based on the loyalty of a customer and their interaction with your brand. Your lifecycle program needs to be a flexible and dynamic experience.

In Part 2 I will talk about the steps to building loyalty and part 3 will focus on what does it mean when it comes to developing an email program to grow customer loyalty for the customer lifecycle.

Today starts my weekly series of “Outlook 2007 Offenders”, to show you the effects of the new Outlook 2007 HTML rendering engine (MS Word). We will then examine the HTM and show you why the email is having problems.

Who better to start with than B-to-B, since Outlook is predominantly used by the business world (around 85%). Aside from the email getting flagged as spam, which it does frequently, the email is a mess in Outlook 2007.

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After examining the HTML, here’s why Outlook 2007 rendered the email like this:

1. Styles are referenced in header (Outlook 2007 doesn’t recognize styles defined in the head tag.)

This causes:
- Font to lose formatting
- Margin of email doesn’t show – there should be 10 pixels of padding between the content & edges of the email
- Background doesn’t fill consistently, there is a div tag that is referencing a style tag in the head of the document.

2. No Defined Table Width

This causes:
- Inconsistent view depending on the size of your email window.
- The email shell to stretches to the width of email client window no matter how wide or narrow.
- The “Forward to a Friend” graphic is within a table that has a width defined so it is in a set position while the rest of the email width is undefined.

Keep an eye out for this new weekly feature – Outlook 07 Offenders.

In the coming wave of eROI studies to be released over the forthcoming weeks here is one we just completed hot off the presses for you.

Over the last quarter, we took a look at how marketers are designing, coding and testing email. Email deliverability and rendering has been a hot topic for a long time, but how important is it to marketers. There is a vast difference between what they say and what they do.

In addition, we took a look at open and click statistics of those that fun all their email campaigns in house vs. those that use the services of an agency. The basics: eMarketing agencies drive nearly 50% more traffic to your site and increases brand awareness. This 8-page Q2

Well this site moved in at the speed of light and brought us into a new tech platform from KickApps in NYC. These guys let us use the back end of their system to build out a custom User Generated Content/Social Video site for Widmer Brewing. The video and design from Sasquatch Advertising who is their agency of record. (We just got to chop it up, style the design elements and mess with endless code that we had never seen) It was a fun project to work on and a good learning curve for a new project which rolled in last Thursday from HBO/Cinemax for a new series show that starts June 1st. (Yeah that gives about 3 weeks to knock it out of the park) Can’t tell you much more than that now, but it is going to be saucy and use social video and user generated content. (And has to do with Las Vegas, beautiful people and steamy plotlines.)

I would love for you to take a look at the LemonYourWidmer site as the videos we loaded it with to start it off sure are a lot of fun. AND believe it or not 100% legitimate. After you see the golf chip shot (which took only 10 takes) you will know what I am talking about. If you have an idea of how to Lemon your Widmer, shoot it and load it up.

And of course it uses emailROI to power the front page Send to a Friend functions with a custom HMTL email template.

If you think of eROI as just an email ESP, you are missing the other 40% of our business: campaign sites, blogs, DM PIN campaigns, corporate sites, Web 2.0 application builds and advergames.