Privacy and public policy are in the trades again. Every few years the topic of online privacy becomes important on Capitol Hill, so I wrote about it in my column in MediaPost this month. The debate ostensibly impacts us as email marketers, and it also may impact us as consumers. How then should we regard pending privacy legislation – as a threat to our current business practices, a chance for a more level playing field, an inevitable market correction, some relief for our own personal inboxes? All of the above, potentially. I approach email marketing from the consumer’s perspective: do right by your audience and the ROI will take care of itself. If there’s a public outcry about online privacy, I sure hope fingers are pointing at my competitors, and not me.

The Fiscal Responsibility of Business Ethics in the Privacy Debate
by Mike May
Published on 7.28.2010 in MediaPost’s Email Insider.

Public policy has become topical in the email industry again. The last time online privacy was as common as part of the vernacular on Capitol Hill was leading up to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. In 2003 legitimate email marketers were the beneficiaries of the legislation, though the impact of the current go-round on email marketers is up for debate. The current proposed legislation — in particular the bill set forth by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill) — puts forth a “universal opt-out program,” a sort of do-not-call list for email and other personally identifiable information collected online. If passed, this will change the way many law-abiding business operate, and would very likely hamstring many list rental and lead generation businesses. It could also have ramifications for trade-outs and co-promotions, as sending email to a house list on behalf of another company could fall into a grey area and raise the specter of lawsuits.

Frankly, we shouldn’t give a rat’s whisker about the legislation — CAN-SPAM, the Rush Bill, the Boucher Bill or any of the next bills to tumble down Capitol Hill. As email marketers who simply want to continue a dialogue with our customers and subscribers, shouldn’t we already be Beyond Reproach?

Think of Beyond Reproach as the kinder, more thoughtful cousin of self-regulation. If you self-regulate as a driver, for example, you might catch yourself tapping your brakes when you see a police car hiding in the weeds ahead. If you’re Beyond Reproach, you drive at the speed limit — not because you’re purposely abiding by the law, but because you genuinely believe that 55 mph is a safe and reasonable speed to travel. Staying within the law is coincidental to you. Drivers like this are the most laudable citizens of the highway.

As email professionals who devote enough energy to our craft that we read the best practices in the trades and attend the most highly regarded conferences, shouldn’t we be the most laudable citizens of the email industry? Shouldn’t we be the group that the laws aren’t meant to restrict, but whose business practices the laws seek to standardize?

Here is how Beyond Reproach would look in practice:

List Rental or Co-Promotion: A client of my company’s promotes conferences through media partners, which normally has them exchanging some exposure at the conference for email rights to the media company’s subscriber lists. But this year a proposed partner asked my client for the same rights, in order to promote an offer to the client’s subscriber base. My client refused, citing the integrity of his company’s list as the reason. But then company principals continued to reflect and realized their willingness to compromise their media partners’ list integrity reflected as poorly on them as it did on the partner. So they made a policy change to no longer send direct or sponsored emails to partners’ lists, regardless of the permissions granted by the subscribers. That’s good email citizenship.

Exceptions to Subscriber Preferences: Clients often set up preferences centers but want to reserve the right to email their subscribers independent of the lists they have selected for themselves. The most common reasons are unanticipated communication needs, the launch of new newsletters or content streams, or special announcements. Advising these clients is done with a single word: discipline. Rather than thinking of your list as an asset to leverage as you see fit, think of it instead as a media property you have some limited access to merchandise within. Once you turn preferences over to your subscribers, your role changes from list owner to content publisher. If you have a new newsletter you need to promote or an announcement you need to make, think about how you would include this content within your existing messages, instead of writing and sending separate messages that necessarily ignore (or at least stretch) subscriber preferences.

Opt-Out: Read DJ Waldow’s column on this very topic from a couple of weeks ago. He outlines a scenario where an email marketer is within the law, but not Beyond Reproach. With the “Universal Opt-Out” provision in the current Rush Bill, this grey area is going to have a lot of light throw on it in the near future. And DJ’s argument is even more cogent than mine. He argues not from a position of business ethics, but simple fiscal responsibility: “making assumptions and sending customers emails they have not asked for (opt-out) tends to be a combination that can be deadly.”

I don’t mean to open up a can of flames about the current proposed legislation. I’m sure there are some aspects of it that some readers of this column object to, and there are likely provisions that could impact how my company and/or our clients conduct some parts of our business. So yes, we’ll stay current with it and follow the laws if passed. But the fact that privacy is on the Hill again should be a wake-up call that as an industry, we are not currently Beyond Reproach. Yes, your list is an asset, and you have the right to profit from that asset. But is it a more valuable asset than your company’s reputation? As competition intensifies, aren’t likability and integrity more meaningful differentiators than list size or trailing quarterly revenue?

And as a professional and an organization, is your energy best spent defending established tactics shared by yourself and all competitors in light of a rapidly evolving environment, or is it wiser to devote your resources towards innovations that differentiate you and forge newer and stronger connections with your subscribers?

I believe acting Beyond Reproach is a path toward long-term prosperity, despite the occasional near-term compromises it requires. And every time I’m pulled away from thinking about the fun possibilities in email innovation to read 55 pages of privacy legislation, I’m further convinced.

post from Mike May, Real Magnet’s Director of Insights

I talk a lot about engagement, not just because it’s going to start impacting deliverability, but also because engagement is the primary objective of most email programs. You send email because there is a connection between your organization and a subscriber, and you wish to nurture that connection. The desired end result is usually some action – registering for a conference or webinar, downloading a research report or white paper, participating in a survey, or consuming some relevant content online. But when your subscribers take these actions they are exhibiting the engagement your email strives to foster.

Alas, not all of your subscribers take each action you present to them in every one of your emails. Fortunately, there are other ways to measure how engaged they are – and how engaging your emails are – independent of the results of your message’s primary call-to-action. Here are a few metrics to employ to evaluate how engaging your email program is:

1. Open Rate. Open rate is typically used to evaluate the effectiveness of subject lines. But syntax aside, open rate also measures a very important component of engagement: anticipation. Your subscribers are more likely to open an email from you if they are expecting it and looking forward to receiving it (and any subscriber looking forward to receiving your email certainly qualifies as engaged). How do you tell which part of open rate measures the effectiveness of your subject lines, and which measures engagement? It’s impossible to pinpoint one from the other, but you can find some clues. If your open rate doesn’t move much, despite very different subject lines from message to message and even A/B testing within the same message, your score is probably more a reflection of your engagement than what’s actually in the subject line itself.

2. Click-to-Open. The number of click-throughs (or “Links” in your Real Magnet reporting) measures the number of message recipients who clicked on one or more links. Your click-through rate (or Link %) is that quantity divided by the total number of delivered messages. What this measures is the size and shape of the funnel, from your universe of recipients down to the success of the call-to-action. But while click-throughs are evidence of engagement, this metric doesn’t measure how engaging your messages actually are. A better metric is click-to-open, or the percentage of the people who opened your email who went on to click something in it. Only the people who open and read your email can judge whether or not your content is compelling.

For example, let’s say Company A sends its newsletter to 10,000 people. It gets a 50% open rate and a 5% click-through rate, for 500 links. Company B also sends to 10,000 subscribers, and gets a 20% open rate and a 2.5% click-through rate for 250 links.

Company A got double the click-through rate, but because its open rate was much higher, it had a larger universe of subscribers who saw the content in the first place and were in a position to click on it. Company A’s Click-to-Open rate is 10%. Despite Company B’s lower click-through rate, it had a Click-to-Open rate of 12.5%. Company A’s open rate could be evidence of a stronger relationship with its subscribers and greater anticipation, but Company B’s content is more compelling – pulling more of the people who read it to take action.

3. Unique and Gross Clicks.

The number of “Links” reported by Real Magnet Overview Tracking Page is the number of people who clicked on one or more links within your message. You can drill down into your Links metrics to see these Unique Clicks (the total number of clicks excluding multiple clicks of the same link) and also Gross Clicks (the total number of clicks including multiple clicks of the same link).

In the example above, Company A might find that its 500 recipients who clicked through actually generated 600 Unique Clicks and 700 Gross Clicks. That means that many of its subscribers were reading the email, clicked through, and then returned to the email to either click on something else, or to click again on the same link later on. The larger the difference between the number of Links and the Unique and Gross Clicks, the better your content is working to compel action from your recipients.

4. Social Clicks.

If your message includes links to follow your organization in social channels like Facebook and Twitter, or links to Real Magnet’s SWYN (Share With Your Network) feature, the activity around these social icons can also telegraph engagement. The easiest way to get a sense of the effectiveness of these icons within your message is to use Click-View tracking, which is linked by the thumbnail of your message on the top level of Message Tracking. You’ll see how many clicks the Facebook and Twitter and other social icons attract.

Activity here is evidence of your most engaged subscribers, as they are the ones who are most likely to forge a connection with your organization in addition to the email, or pass along something you’ve sent to their friends and colleagues.

5. Recipient Level Tracking. You can run extremely informative reports with Recipient Level Tracking. One of my favorites to measure engagement is to quantify the number of subscribers who click-through emails on a regular basis. Customize a report to show how many recipients have clicked 2, 3, 4, 5 or more times in the past 10 messages, and compare these quantities to your total subscriber base. Very quickly you’ll have a sense of how large your most active and engaged population is. You can even drill down into these reports to identify who these subscribers are, to target them for other high-engagement campaigns. (There is an added cost for recipient level tracking because of the costs associated with keeping such a high volume of data available and current for immediate reporting. Contact your account manager for details.)

For various reasons, some of you have lost message content while working in Real Magnet. We realize how frustrating this is and have made changes to reduce, if not eliminate, these occurrences. Specifically, autosave and a process for recovering content upon accidental log out has been added to Real Magnet.

Autosave Feature

As the name implies, the new autosave feature automatically saves your content. It does so every two minutes. By default, autosave is off. To enable it, simply select the “on” option from the autosave pull-down menu in the upper left corner of the WYSIWYG editor. Autosave is currently enabled with our WYSIWYG blank templates and not with Active Preview, Copy/Paste or our Plug and Play templates. This setting is defined on a user basis (i.e. you can have it on and your colleague can have it off) and Real Magnet will remember your setting each time you log in.

You’ll also notice that when content is saved (either manually by clicking the Save button or via autosave), it does so in a more seamless fashion. Before, you’d see the entire edit page refresh. Now, instead, you’ll see the language in the “Save” button change to “Saving…” And perhaps more importantly, a “Last Saved” time stamp is displayed adjacent to the “Save” button showing the last point in time at which the content was saved.

Session Recovery

The second part of the upgrade is a process for protecting your content against accidental log outs. Previously, if you were logged out, you’d be thrown back to the log in page and any content that wasn’t saved was lost. With this enhancement, our system will detect that you are no longer logged in and will guide you through the process of logging back in, WITHOUT LEAVING THE EDITING PAGE! You’ll be logged in on the editing page where you can immediately save your content and go back to work.  Just follow the steps outlined in the screen shots below to restore your session.

Step 1: Session Log out/Expiration Screen

A pop up window will appear notifying you that you’ve been accidentally logged out.  Select the Click “here” link in Step 1.

Step 2: Log in Screen

Enter your log in information in the pop-up window.

Step 3: Return and Close Session Log out/Expiration Screen

You’re taken back to the Session Log out/Expiration Screen.  Close it by clicking the “x” in the upper right corner.

Step 4: Save Your Work!

Once back at the editor, SAVE YOUR WORK and you’re good to go. With Autosave and Session Restore, your message and hard work is well protected.

If you have any questions about this upgrade, please contact us at support@realmagnet.com or call 301-652-5074.

– End of tutorial –

Real Magnet is gearing up to release a mobile tool kit that provides a mobile web version of your message, mobile tracking analytics and enhanced mobile email deliverability testing.  The mobile field is dynamic and innovating in many diverse areas.  In David Gammel’s piece below, he explains how your cellphone might eventually become your mobile wallet. Stay tuned to Real Insights to learn more about our upcoming mobile release!

We’ve already seen music players and cameras merging with the cellular phone over the past several years. The wallet is not too far behind.

Mobile phones in Europe and Asia are very commonly used like a check card is in the U.S.: a simple and easy way to pay for daily goods and services. Internet connected smart phones allow the devices to be plugged directly into banking or simply charge the payment to the mobile account. It’s like being able to make calls with an American Express card.

In the United States, the American Red Cross drive to raise relief money in response to the Haiti earthquake (which raised millions of dollars in just days with no advertising campaign) is a peek into the future of how organizations will raise funds and collect payments for many goods, services and causes.

A few things to consider about this coming change in the U.S. market:

Mobile communication strategies are critical for driving mobile payments. How will you drive messaging and next actions to the mobile devices of your best members or constituents?
Conferences and trade shows are likely to be key areas for driving impulse payments. Mobile payments allows immediate action even while strolling down an exhibit hall alley.
Your technology and banking infrastructure will need to be prepared for this form of payment and will need to be flexible to take advantage of rapidly evolving technology and purchasing behavior.

By C. David Gammel, CAE, president of High Context Consulting and author of the book, “Online and On Mission: Practical Web Strategy for Breakthrough Results.” You may contact David at david@highcontext.com.

For various reasons, some of you have lost message content while working in Real Magnet. We realize how frustrating this is and are adding new functionality to reduce, if not eliminate, these occurrences.  Specifically, we’re adding an autosave feature and a process for recovering content should you get logged out. These features will be coming soon.

Autosave Feature

As the name implies, the new autosave feature automatically saves your content. It does so every two minutes.  By default, autosave is off. To enable it, simply select the “on” option from the autosave pull-down menu in the upper left corner of the WYSIWYG editor. Autosave is currently enabled with our WYSIWYG blank templates and not with Active Preview, Copy/Paste or our Plug and Play templates.   This setting is defined on a user basis (i.e. you can have it on and your colleague can have it off) and Real Magnet will remember your setting each time you log-in.

You’ll also notice that when content is saved (either manually by clicking the Save button or via autosave), it does so in a more seamless fashion. Before, you’d see the entire edit page refresh. Now instead, you’ll see the language in the “Save” button change to “Saving…” And perhaps more importantly, a “Last Saved” time stamp is displayed adjacent to the “Save” button showing the last point in time the content was saved.

Session Recovery

The second part of the upgrade is a process for protecting your content against accidental log outs.  Previously if you were logged out, you’d be thrown back to the log in page and any content that wasn’t saved was lost.  With this enhancement, our system will detect that you are no longer logged in and will guide you through the process of re-logging WITHOUT LEAVING THE EDITING PAGE!  You’ll be logged in back on the editing page where you can immediately save your content and go back to work.

If you have any questions about this upgrade, please contact us at support@realmagnet.com or call 301-652-5074.

A study from Litmus has shown that the iPhone’s email client already ranks in at number 5 with a 4% market share of the total email client environment. This is indicative of a broader shift of how recipients are viewing email messages. The iPhones mail client is already within the top 10 email clients after 3 years of being on the market.  With the successful launch of Apple’s iPhone 4, it is a sure bet the iPhone’s email client will rise higher on this list as time goes on.  As phone manufactures shift their resources into this area of the cell phone market and more consumers purchase smartphones we’ll see many other mobile inboxes competing in the top 10 clients.