URL shorteners are a service, paid or free, where you enter in the full URL in a text box and it will shorten it. The shortened URL will point to the same site as the original URL, but the URL will be a lot shorter. Social networking sites that have a character limit can benefit from URL shorteners. The problem with that is many spammers also use this service to point to a malicious web site that may install a virus, malware, and/or steal information from you. Spammers are also creating their own URL shorteners and using them when their current shortener gets blacklisted. The issue is the end user that clicks the URL shortener link will not know where the link takes them until the page and full URL has loaded.

For email marketers, getting your emails delivered is of utmost importance. Testing your content and URLs should be a part of your email marketing plan. Remember to use full URLs when you can and avoid URL shorteners. Until next time, stay relevant, stay engaged, and get delivered!

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The newsletter remains popular because of its efficient use of resources. Content templates make it easy to write; a regular schedule makes allocating resources to it predictable; and its broad distribution means that the same message may be read by your entire list. Of course, it is probably not read by your whole list, as most email open rates hover well under the 100% mark. If the hallmark of the newsletter is efficiency, then lifting its open rates – enabling it to be read by even more of your audience – increases its efficiency further still.

Here are 4 ways to lift open rates to your newsletter, drawing in a wider audience and letting the newsletter work even harder for you:

1. Telegraph the content that appeals to the marginally engaged.
Calling your newsletter “Newsletter February 2012″ will attract your highly engaged subscribers who are looking forward to hearing from you each month, but does not give the marginally engaged a reason to get off the fence and snoop around. Use your subject line to telegraph your content, focusing on a single item within your newsletter, such as “Newsletter February 2012: Our favorite photos from the January Meeting”. No matter what you call out, you’ll still have the people who would have opened it if it was untitled, and selecting the story within the newsletter that some of your audience finds irresistible can only improve your opens. “Irresistible” is the operative word here – it is better to choose a story that some of your audience will absolutely find intriguing, than to focus on something less pointed that may have a vague appeal to more people. For this tactic to work well, you want to arrest at least a part of your audience with the promise of content they can’t refuse.

2. Be more interesting on Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook are not informational networks, or educational networks, or promotional networks. They’re social networks. Like other social functions, the most popular people in the room are not the loudest or even the smartest ones, but the most interesting. So find the segment of interesting that fits your brand best, and turn up the volume on Twitter and Facebook. Interesting in social networks is a combination of unique and relevant content, and how that content is delivered. The more interesting a brand is in social spheres, the better it is at engaging its social audience. What does that have to do with email? Interesting transcends. The more interesting people find a person or a brand, the more likely they are to respond to that same person or brand in another channel. This is why celebrities are used in advertising, and Southwest flight attendants write their own material for the safety instructions. Tactics like these make the brand more interesting, which causes people to respond better to it when they come across it in the wild. Much of your social audience also receives your newsletter, so the more interesting you are in social networks – where people go expressly to find what is interesting – the more likely your audience is to open the newsletter and look for more of the same. (So don’t disappoint them – see #3.)

3. Surprise and delight with content.
Look, I know newsletters are popular because they are somewhat formulaic. But that doesn’t mean they have to be boring. Let me give you an example. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters published by local beer and wine stores. Don’t ask me why – let’s just say it’s for industry research. One of them publishes a newsletter each week that is 90% the same. It’s about the free tastings in the store the upcoming weekend, with the same template, intro and footer. Only the bullet points of the brands on offer changes. It is interesting if and only if my schedule allows for a free tasting (which is a pre-requisite for opening it) AND one of the brands listed appeals to me (which is what might drive me to action). The newsletter succeeds in building anticipation, but ultimately fails at further engaging me with each message. Another shop, a new one which opened a couple blocks from our office in the past year, writes a truly remarkable weekly newsletter. A recent subject line was “Capital Beer & Wine Line #36 – Why barrels?” and the newsletter opened by explaining what cooperage is and why some wines use oak barrels for aging while others use stainless steel and concrete tanks. The email then follows with its promotional component, highlighting wines aged in different barrel types and explaining how the cooperage affects flavor. Even if I’m not in the market for wine this week, this brand has built deeper engagement with some highly relevant, sophisticated, and frankly unexpected content designed to make me a better consumer of wine. More importantly for our purposes, this brand’s commitment to strong content has given me – and many other customers and prospects who read this week’s – a reason to open the next email, which will certainly help lift open rates over time.

4. Include a recurring feature.
Some publications you subscribe to in order to devour every word – a favorite magazine or an industry newsletter that is aimed squarely at helping you improve at your job, or maybe a newsletter from a local wine shop that educates you on cooperage. But plenty of people pick up the New York Times expressly for the crossword, or go straight to the sports (or comics) section of their local paper. The challenge with newsletters is the same as their opportunity – they go to everybody. It would be fantastic if we knew everyone read our newsletters top to bottom, every time. Some do, to be sure. But many do not have time for all of it, and each time they see it in their inbox they have to make a split second decision about whether or not to allocate a precious part of their day to your brand. Recurring features help some of your subscribers make that decision. Whether it’s an industry statistic, a featured member or company profile, or a candid picture taken at a conference with someone’s iPhone, recurring features at least tell your subscribers that there is something on the other side of that subject line that they can expect to see. Choose the right recurring feature and you’ve also told them that it’s something they want to see if they only look inside. Create a recurring feature as a trojan horse to the rest of your newsletter – get them inside and then they can fan out from there.

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Chris’ role on the roundtable is not unlike what we task him with here – act as a liaison between the sending and receiving community with the aim of keeping the lines of communication open and working towards standards that make email work better for all of us. The difference is that the EEC helps amplify senders’ voices by expressing concerns with the collective weight of many organizations. Chris’ role also includes Real Magnet in standard-setting conversations from the very outset, giving us – and our clients – greater visibility into the trends shaping email, and how they will impact our day-to-day lives as email marketers.

The Roundtable doesn’t just meet and talk, however. Every year they produce a new research report or whitepaper on the issue they’ve identified as central to email deliverability and compliance. Previous reports include “How to Revive a Stale Email List,” “The Deliverability Resource Guide,” and “The State of Email Metrics.”

The Roundtable meets every third Thursday. We expect a full report, Chris.

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Now that we’ve started using and testing Social Magnet, we’re in position to be in position to learn a lot about email + social. Combining email and social in the ways Social Magnet allows is all new, and I don’t yet know what we’ll learn. In fact, we’re in the stage of learning what we’ll be able to learn – another version of being in position to be in position. Here are some of the assumptions we have going into this process, what we’re testing, and what we hope to learn:

Impact of social media on email results: One of our assumptions is that there is a lot of crossover between the email and social audiences of many companies, particularly in the B-to-B space. If that’s the case, then messaging in all channels increases frequency among the people who are attentive in all channels. So what happens when the same message is promoted across email and social? Will social messages lift email results from the added frequency? Or will the results from social cannibalize the results from email if they reach the audience first? We ran a test earlier this week promoting a webinar to see. We ran an A/B test of the email list, mailing to the first half before we promoted the same link on Facebook and Twitter, and then mailing to the other half after the social messaging. We saw a difference, but not one that was statistically relevant. Not yet anyway – if we see the same small difference over the next 4 or 5 tests, we might be onto something. Or we might have to revise our assumptions. Or our results may change as our list and audience sizes change (our email list is significantly larger than our social audience currently). As you can imagine, there are a ton of variables that can’t be isolated for a perfect testing environment. So for now, we’re not testing our results as much as testing our tests.

Impact of email on social media results: Social Magnet allows us to measure the number of clicks and (if we’re using Real Magnet’s events module for registrations) even conversions that come from all of our channels. Just as social messaging may impact email’s results, it’s equally likely that people who see something in their inbox may be more inclined to act on a message from the same brand on Facebook or Twitter. It’s plausible, at least. So we’re looking at ways to test that, and see if we can identify some situations where email messages that may not drive inbox engagement still lift results measurably in other channels. Intuitively, it makes sense. It’s only now that we’ve had a tool to put some serious thought into how to measure it.

Performance of different message types by channel: Like most marketers, we promote everything in all our channels. If something goes onto the blog, it may also show up in an email newsletter, on Facebook, Twitter and in LinkedIn. Some of what we do I’d classify as informational – like this blog, for example, or Tuesday’s blog about Subject Lines, or Chris’ blog earlier this week about Deliverability Numbers. Other messages are promotional or direct response, like a webinar registration reminder or a whitepaper download for lead generation. In Social Magnet, you can categorize any message – email, Twitter, Facebook and soon LinkedIn. It works very similar to a blog, where you determine what content categories you would like to group messages within, and then simply select one when you publish your message. We currently have a number of informational message categories, including Blogs (where we measure how much lift our own blogs get from our social channels), Articles (similar to Blogs, but measuring the clicks to articles we publish or are quoted in such as MediaPost and Mobile Marketer), Images (used to measure the pickup of any kind of images we post, principally socially) and Pass-Along (where we group any social messages that pass along links to articles that have nothing to do with us, but which we find interesting or influential enough to share). We have another category for Webinars on the promotional side, and one more for Newsletters. Once we have enough data, we might have some insight about which channels are best for different message types. It could be some highly actionable learning, as marketers could then fine-tune their messaging by content, improving targeting by channel while at the same time reducing clutter by limiting messages to the channel they perform best in.

You’ll notice I haven’t once said “best practices” in this whole piece. My hypothesis does not allow for them. I don’t expect to find any universal truths about combining email and social, and fully expect that what I learn is only partly applicable to other marketers. Instead, what I hope to learn – and share – is the process by which we’re discovering what works for us. The findings may not be replicable from one company to the next, but learning what you can learn from email and social is something that we can all do.

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Here are some comparisons of actual subject lines in my inbox. Each pair is for the same type of message, but the brand narrative they tell is very different. Have a look:

The Confirmation Email:
Emails to subscribers or customers right after they have  made a purchase or filled out a form on your site reach them when they are at their most engaged and receptive, so the confirmation email is critical for setting the tone of your brand’s relationship with them.

• Backcountry.com: “Order Confirmed – Get Stoked”
• CustomInk.com: “Shipping Confirmation – Order #1857244″

Both examples do the job, but convey a very different impression of the brand. The language in the Backcountry subject line is echoed by the copy on the website, so the tone remains consistent. CustomInk.com also has a casual tone on the site, but elects to be all business with the confirmation subject line. Neither is right or wrong, but they tell different stories about the brands sending them.

The Last Chance Email
Email remains a staple in marketing communications in part because of its immediacy. Over half the response to most messages come within the first three hours, and nearly all of its impact is recognized within the first day. It’s no wonder then that “last chance” is a popular theme for email messages. But the way the “last minute” message is presented can mean the difference between inciting a shopper to frenzy, or bringing her down from one.

• Container Store: “SPECTACULAR last-minute gifts, many on SALE now!”
• CompactAppliance.com: “Last minute gift ideas with guaranteed 24 hour shipping”

Both brands offer to solve the same problem, but offer to ally themselves differently. Container Store is the coach giving the rousing halftime speech: “Let’s do this!” CompactAppliance.com on the other hand, is more tranquilo, reassuring shoppers, “Relax, you can do this.”

The Newsletter
On the one hand, we want to telegraph the scheduled consistency of our newsletters in order to build familiarity and anticipation within the inbox. But we can also use the newsletter subject line to glimpse some brand personality, if that’s appropriate.

• Edgemoor Daycare Center: “Newsletter November 23, 2011″
• Neuvation Cycling: “Newsletter December 16, Spoke Sniffers Club”

The difference between these two approaches is due in part to the relationship each brand has with its subscribers. Most of Edgemoor Daycare Center’s subscribers are the parents of young children who attend the center – as captive an audience as an email marketer can hope for. Neuvation sells cycling products so its newsletters are direct response pieces designed to drive transactions. But the other difference is based on the attentiveness each brand gives to its subject line. Neuvation customizes its subject line for the content within. Yes, it is designed to drive higher open rates, but it also suggests that the brand is willing to go a little further in order to be relevant and engaging to its audience. Taking the easy way out with a subject line can imply to your subscribers that you do not value them enough to put in that extra bit of attentiveness.

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• 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
• 27.6% – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
• 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
• 112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
• 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
• 360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
• $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
• 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
• 0.39% – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).

I’m not going to go into all the numbers and trends, but some of the items caught my eye and I wanted to dig deeper into them. Symantec reports that in November 2011, spam accounted for almost 71% of email traffic (down 3.7% from October 2011). If you couple that with the article’s number of 19% of spam emails are delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters, spam can cause companies a lot of money in storage and lost productivity. Email marketers need to continue delivering relevant content to engaged subscribers to get into their subscriber’s inbox. I would also venture to take that a step further and make sure that email marketers are paying attention to their IP and domain reputation to make sure that they stay out of these email filters.

I also found it noteworthy to mention that the article stated Hotmail was the largest email service in the world with over 360 million users. Hotmail (which also includes msn.com and live.com domains) has come a long way in the past 15 years.  With the new “Sweep” feature, SkyDrive integration, and ActiveViews, I can see why Hotmail is growing. As someone in the deliverability space, I use Hotmail’s Smart Network Data Services portal (https://postmaster.live.com/snds/) on a daily basis to keep track of how my customers are performing at the Microsoft domains. The tools that Microsoft provides to the email world has made a difference in many customer conference calls concerning email deliverability.

The last point that I want to mention is the article states that there are 3.146 billion email accounts worldwide. That is an astonishing figure to me considering the first email was sent almost 40 years ago! I have seen figures where that number is expected to grow over 4 billion by 2015. As an email marketer, it is so important to remember that your list hygiene and data security practices are high priority. Continually segmenting your list and removing those inactive accounts will help with your email delivery.

Who says that email is dying?  Stay relevant, stay engaged, and get delivered!

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Social media is responsible for not one, nor two, but now three of the big shifts in email marketing, thusly:

1. Social Media as a Threat to email (2009 – 2010): A few years ago, the rapid rise of Facebook and Twitter prompted quite a few people close to social media to pronounce the imminent demise of email marketing. Very few people who actually used and relied on email joined the chorus, however. But we devoted no small amount of energy towards reassuring email marketers that all of their email skills and permission-based assets were as valuable as ever. Because they were, and they still are.

2. Email coexists with Social Media (2011): Once it was clear the sky was in no danger of falling, the email + social conversation shifted from how social would marginalize email to how email and social could c0-exist, perhaps even symbiotically. Share-With-Your-Network (SWYN) features were launched and at least one article per week in industry trades was on how to use email to improve social, and/or vice versa. The biggest distinction between this period and the fear, uncertainty and doubt that preceded it is that the prevailing sentiment here was based on sound strategy instead of Chicken Little sensationalism, and has proven to be largely true. My own personal take is that email and social are both permission-based channels, so the skills for success in them spring from the same strategy. I believe email marketers are uniquely qualified to succeed in social, so adopting a channel agnostic attitude for communications can benefit us significantly.

3. Email + Social Integration (2012): Here’s where we are today – looking for new ways for email and social not just to lift each other, but to work together in ways that produce all new insights and intelligence for marketers. If I knew what they all were already my job would be really easy – but also kind of boring. The truth is that none of us know what we’ll learn from analytics that measure the productivity of each channel within marketing communications. Will we learn that tweeting right before an email goes out lifts open rates? Or maybe that the net clicks from a campaign are actually higher if the email goes first followed by tweets? How will we optimize communications across channels for the maximum response? Is the ROI on growing our social audiences higher than growing our house list?

Like I said, I don’t know the answers to those questions, and dozens more we can now start to ask about integrated digital communications. But we aim to find the answers, which really means finding the ways each of us individually can answer them for our own organizations. One of the ways we’ll be doing that is by sharing everything we discover on the new LinkedIn Email + Social group we started. Whether your job depends on integrating digital communications or you’re just a curious lurker, I encourage you to join the group and participate as much or little as you’d like. It’s really one of those topics that can only benefit from as much brainpower we can connect to it.

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I find the report particularly interesting in the distinction it makes between social media “adoption” and “integration.” Lots of businesses already have Facebook pages (69%), corporate Twitter accounts (57%), LinkedIn pages (47%) and YouTube channels (43%). But far fewer are actively in the process of integrating social media (23%) or have already done so (14%).

The biggest obstacle cited between adoption and integration is that management sees “no clear financial benefits.” The study does point out that there is a clear correlation between organizations that are well down the social integration road and financial performance: the companies that integrate social better tend to make more money. What isn’t clear is the causality – do the companies that integrate social do better as a result of the integration, or is it that the more successful companies possess the organizational structure, culture or other attributes that make them more likely to move aggressively into social integration?

I think the answer lies in the perceived obstacle. A lot of companies – particularly in B2B – are interested in social media inasmuch as it makes the phone ring. If they can’t clearly see how Facebook generates leads, ie, they see “no clear financial benefits” to integrating social, they’re less likely channel resources away from what they know works (or at least know used to work and hope will work again one day). As we integrate Social Magnet into our internal email and social media channels, I’m particularly mindful of that perspective as it’s a question I hear pretty commonly. Why should I move money into social? What should I take it out of?

My hypothesis is that an organization that is active and successful in social media becomes more approachable, which makes prospects more likely to post a comment on Facebook, reply to a tweet, ask a question in the comments field of a blog, or even pick up the phone. I’m seeing if that hypothesis bears out in the analytics on Social Magnet. In addition to giving marketers a clear picture of their social activity, Social Magnet is unique in that its analytics compare productivity across all channels. For example, we’ll post a link to a blog post (maybe this one, in fact) on Facebook and Twitter, and also include it an an upcoming email newsletter. We’ll then be able to see which channel drove the most links, which helps paint a picture of how productive your social channels are compared to email. As a marketer, I find data like that – the kind that gives you clear conviction in your marketing decisions – pretty irresistible.

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Job Status Button

Our Job Status button will now allow you to see general metrics of where your message is in the process of being delivered (as shown in the image below).  If you’re having trouble viewing the Job Status button on the track page you should clear your cache.  Instructions on how to do so are here.

Job Status Overview

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know!  Contact us at support@realmagnet.com or at 301-652-4025.

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-User engagement is now more vital than ever.  Depending upon your business and sending methodology, identify subscribers that have been inactive for 6-9 months, and segment them out.  Removing the unengaged subscribers will help reduce complaints, improve your response rates, and help establish a stronger reputation with the ISPs.

-URL shorteners are not your friend!  Many URL shorteners are listed on major blacklists and will get your emails blocked, so always use full URLs in your campaigns.

-It is time to authenticate with SPF and DKIM.  If you do not have IP and domain authentication set up for your email program, resolve to get this done for 2012.

-Set up and monitor abuse@ and postmaster@ email addresses for your email sending domain.  This way people can get in contact with you if they have questions.  With that being said, monitor the reply email address too.  Nothing is as bad as trying to reply to a brand’s email only to find out that mailbox isn’t monitored.

-Resolve to test, test, and test your email marketing campaigns.  If you are a Real Magnet customer, we have deliverability tools for rendering, usability, and spam checking.

The key to success is to make sure you don’t just do all of the above once, but to continually look back at your email marketing program and make adjustments as needed.  I hope your New Year is prosperous and you strive to keep all of your New Year’s Resolutions!  Until 2013…

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