by Morgan Witt

1.  Ensure you have received permission

For all email acquisitions it is essential that you receive online verifiable consent of opt-in.  This is easily accomplished through using a closed-loop or double opt-in process.  This will drastically reduce the level of spam complaints against your email marketing campaigns.  Spam complaint levels are the top metric that the ISP’s look at when making the business decision as to where your mail should be delivered (inbox vs. spam folder).

2.  Allow subscribers to easily update their profile information

More than ever, people are managing multiple inboxes.  Subscribers are jumping from email client to email client based on ease of use, features, and functionality.  Its highly unlikely that subscribers will take the time to provide you their updated email address when they make a switch if the process to do so is a hassle.  Make it easy for subscribers to provide updated profile information and customize their subscriptions by providing an email preference center.  Link to this preference center in the footer of every email you send.

3.  Optimize bounce handling

Whenever an email address bounces a very specific bounce error code is passed back from the domain or ISP it belongs to.  This bounce code states the reason for the bounce (ie. spam block, discontinued address, connection issue, etc.) as well as an email address, phone number, or link to a web form that provides additional information.  Make sure that your email service provider is processing bounces appropriately based on the error codes that are passed back to them.  For example, an address that bounces with an error code that states it is a dead or discontinued account should be flagged as invalid on the first bounce.  Sending to a high percentage of dead email addresses can lead to deliverability issues as the ISP’s view this as lack of proper list management. 

4.  Friendly “from” address and subject lines

The “from” address and subject line of your email campaign are the first things that the subscriber looks at when they are scanning through their inbox.  With ever increasing volume of email that your subscribers recieve on a daily basis its essential that the “from” address be consistent and recognizable to mitigate the risk that the email is passed over, deleted, or even worse, marked as spam.  The same mentality should be applied to your subject lines.  You want to ensure that your brand is referenced along with an attractive offer that will empower your subscribers to open and click through.

5.  Get in the address book

A large number of email clients are defaulting images to “off” when an email gets to the inbox.  So when your subscriber looks at the email in the preview plane it may have a number of empty boxes in where the images should be.  In order to ensure images are turned on when the mail gets to the inbox, it is essential to get your subscribers to add your “from” email address to their address book or “safe senders” list.  This will also improve the probability that future emails are delivered directly to the inbox.

Ex. To ensure delivery of future emails please add newsletters@xyz.com to your email address book.

6.  Authentication

The “phishing” problem that has plagued the financial services industry spawned authentication technologies to fight online fruad.  These technologies are now being leveraged as anti-spam tools.  There are two flavors of email authentication: Microsoft’s Sender ID and Yahoo’s Domain Keys.  Authentication will allow you to differentiate your email from that of spammers.  Email authentication tells the domains that you are sending to that “I am who I say I am” and “I give (enter ESP here) permission to mail on my behalf.”  In addition to Microsoft and Yahoo, a handful of the other major ISP’s will be leveraging authentication in the next year including AOL, Gmail, and Comcast.

-Alliance brings marketing intelligence platform to Asia-Pacific corporations-

San Diego - Thursday, March 13, 2008 - Juice Media Worldwide, a pioneer in on-demand marketing intelligence software and solutions, announced today its strategic partnership with Citrus, one of Australia's leading digital agencies.

The alliance offers Asia-Pacific corporations access to JuiceMetrIQs™, Juice Media's web-based marketing application designed to optimize campaign execution and measurement. JuiceMetrIQs™ facilitates the development, delivery, and performance analysis of highly-personalized marketing campaigns by connecting customer, marketing channel, and sales data within a single application.

"Executing an effective promotion campaign requires a wealth of relatable intelligence," said Peter Noble, CEO of Citrus. "JuiceMetrIQs™ provides information-rich data that enables marketers to improve their campaigns without retooling their entire department or increasing their demand on IT support."

JuiceMetrIQs™ provides marketing intelligence by combining sales and customer information with marketing communication interaction data. This empowers companies to create customized offline, online, and cross-promotion campaigns that target their intended audiences with pinpoint accuracy. As a result, marketers are able to raise levels of customer satisfaction, improve client retention, and lift conversion rates.

"In today's economy, businesses around the globe must focus even more on the relevancy of their promotion campaigns," said Rick Enrico, President and CEO of Juice Media.  "JuiceMetrIQs™ solves this distributed data dilemma by offering an easy-to-implement automated marketing platform for businesses that need improved cross-channel marketing reporting, efficiency and results. We’re proud of our ability to service Citrus’ customers in this regard."


About Citrus, Inc.:

Citrus is a leading Melbourne-based digital agency providing a full suite of interactive services including digital strategy, creative web design & development, user experience, branded eCommerce, relationship marketing, and analytics & optimisation.

Citrus works as a consultative business partner to some of Australia's leading brands including Sussan, Sportsgirl, Borders, STA Travel, Victoria Racing Club (VRC), and Babcock & Brown Communities. A deep dive strategic approach allows Citrus to work intimately with clients' resulting in digital marketing initiatives that go back to the business a whole, and bring brands closer to their consumers.

For more information, please visit www.citrus.com.au

About Juice Media:

Based in San Diego California, Juice Media Worldwide develops JuiceMetrIQs™, a SaaS on-demand Marketing Intelligence platform.   The JuiceMetrIQs application automatically unifies distributed consumer data from multiple IT systems in real-time to enable marketers to deliver highly personalized one-to-one communications based on purchasing patterns and previous marketing interactions.  JuiceMetrIQs™ empowers marketers to deliver marketing messages to customers through the right channel, with the right content, at the right time.

For more information please visit http://www.juicemetriqs.com

By Rick Enrico
President and CEO
Juice Media Worldwide

Marketers who look for ways to work better with their IT counterparts will find ample references and suggestions from any search engine; the cyber world is littered with "how-to" papers and thought pieces.  With all this information readily available, one would think the businesses units could easily find common ground.

Think again.

Reality shows us that the opposite is true, and for understandable reasons.  While Marketing relies heavily on corporate and Internet networks to conduct one-to-one lead generation, branding campaign and customer service initiatives, IT departments are usually knee-deep with other mission-critical support requirements, particularly in operations and finance.  These disparate pain-points invariably lead to conflict in priorities that, in today's world of shrinking budgets and staff, will not resolve itself simply by instituting a "Can't we all just get along" executive order.

Instead, successful organizations are deploying third-party Web-based systems to enable marketers to search disassociated customer databases to build customer profiles and update segments in real-time; all without creating IT work requests in the process.  These platforms streamline the marketing process by allowing companies to store customer interaction data - such as sales transactions, demographics, Web site data and email addresses - and segment that information to build relevant targeted marketing campaigns. Customer data is housed in a single warehouse that is tied to a concise central reporting dashboard. 

This real-time information empowers marketers to plan and execute stand-alone or comprehensive cross channel marketing programs that can include email, direct mail, online video, voicemail, surveys, live chat and lead management. The results include higher conversion rates as well as increased customer satisfaction and client retention.

Here's an example.  A Midwest-based retailer wanted to create an e-mail campaign targeted to past purchasers in order to acquire repeat business.  Doing this effectively meant knowing what they had previously purchased, and thus required integration between their Loyalty and POS databases with an e-mail marketing system. The company leveraged an on-demand, marketing intelligence platform to facilitate the channel integrations and segment past purchasers who were opted in to receive commercial e-mail messages without tying up the IT department's resources in the process.  The retailer then executed a targeted campaign with pinpoint accuracy.  The result - the company witnessed a 150-percent uplift in e-mail marketing ROI from that one campaign.

What's more, the marketing department was able to quickly combine POS and Web data on their own within the technology platform to better understand customer behavior and deliver only the most relevant promotion campaigns to subscribers. Subsequently, the retailer's Website traffic increased by 40 percent within 60 days.

When evaluating Web-based intelligence platforms, marketers need to ask the following questions:

• Can the system hyper-segment data from various sources based on customer behaviors and preferences?
• Can the system "Mash Up" this data into a central dashboard for up-to-date reports and analyses?
• Does the system integrate with e-mail marketing platforms, thereby allowing companies to plan, execute and analyze such campaigns in one click?
• Does the system automatically push updates and new versions without interrupting operations or requiring in-house IT support?

Today, marketers are in greater need for data-driven business intelligence, hyper segmentation and behavioral targeting that they can leverage to create dynamic and relevant promotion campaigns.  The introduction of Web-based systems helps defines the aggregation, analytics and automation of customer interaction data to drive campaign optimization while still keeping marketing and IT departments out of each other's hair.

by David L. Smith

One of the major issues for Web media continues to be data. In the end, data is the thing that sets us apart. Because of interactivity, we have more information than any other medium. In fact, we have so much data, we’re drowning in it. Bob Ivins, now with comScore, first stated that trying to parse web data was “like taking a drink out of a firehose.” This was back when he was vice president, marketing, of I/PRO in the mid ‘90s. It was true then, and remains true today.

Given the size of the data cubes we have, it takes time to do everything. Simple reporting is a chore. Scheduled reporting is a good idea, but the adjustments that a media tracker or analyst must make to the data invariably necessitate exporting the waited-for report into a spreadsheet to make further refinements. The third-party ad-serving companies are lacking in dashboards and business rule capability that would help to automate reporting.

Given that this reporting takes so long, the time available to do real analysis of the data cube is sub-optimal. And, the reality is that it would take too long to crunch most of the data that folks want.
Enter the future in cloud computing. Wikipedia defines cloud computing as  “a computing paradigm shift in which computing is moved away from personal computersor an individual application server to a ‘cloud’ of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, because the underlying details of how it is achieved are hidden. This method of distributed computings done by pooling computer resources and managing them via software (rather than by a human).

The services requested of a cloud are not limited to web applications, but may also include IT management tasks, such as requesting of systems, a software stack, or a specific web appliance.”
I love it. Paradigm shift is back. All due to something that sounds a lot like peer-to-peer computing applied to the enterprise. Could it be that the experimentation that went on with programs like Napster 1.0 will change the face of enterprise computing?

A recent article in Business Week counted IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo at the forefront of cloud computing, which got me to thinking. Google buys DoubleClick (assuming the Europeans can clear their barriers on this). Microsoft buys aQuantive, which includes Atlas. All of a sudden the two top agency and advertiser third-party ad servers are associated with massive analytics crunching power like they’ve never had before. Rather than be afraid of the power that has been vested through Google and Microsoft owning so much data, let’s look at this from a positive side. We could soon have the capability to answer a lot of the questions we haven’t ever had the bandwidth to accomplish.
 
Time to think about what questions we really want to know the answers to.

 Source: DirectMag

 By Ken Magill

Yahoo! and anti-spam firm Cloudmark have signed on to begin using Return Path’s Sender Score Certification whitelisting program as one of the gauges they use to determine if incoming e-mail is spam.

Cloudmark is already checking incoming e-mail for Sender Score Certification. Yahoo! is implementing the scheme and will begin checking using it sometime in spring.

For Return Path and its clients, the development means the number of e-mail boxes in which its Sender Score Certification program plays a role in deliverability has risen from 800 million to about 1.2 billion, according to the company.

The Yahoo! deal significantly increases the role Return Path’s whitelisting e-mail deliverability program plays in getting e-mail delivered to consumer addresses.

AOL is now the only major U.S. Internet service provider not using Sender Score Certification to check incoming e-mail. AOL uses Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program where marketers pay a small fee to have their messages guaranteed to be delivered to AOL users with images and links intact.

The Cloudmark deal significantly increased Return Path’s influence over deliverability to business addresses and inboxes controlled by Earthlink, Comcast, Cox and Charter in the U.S., and Telus, THUS and Fastweb in Europe.

While being Sender Score Certified—a designation Return Path gives to non-spamming companies—is no guarantee an e-mailer’s messages will get delivered, the scheme is a significant factor in determining how incoming mail will be processed by the ISPs who use it, said Matt Blumberg, chief executive of Return Path.

“Being Sender Score Certified is not an ironclad guarantee of deliverability, or images and links [rendering] at most of the 1.2 billion mailboxes we cover,” said Blumberg. “But it is a very, very heavy influencer of all of those things. Anyone who is in the program has experienced significant lift.”

Source: Get Elastic

by Linda Bustos

Following up on previous posts about permission marketing and welcome emails for ecommerce websites, I’d like to share my personal experience registering for 87 accounts with the top online retailers and offer some tips for registration form design.

Your site may have several forms that ask for personal information - for email subscriptions, creating an account, entering billing information, requesting help, general contact, creating a wishlist or order tracking. It’s important to note that in my test I was taking initiative to sign up for an account by clicking “Register” or “My Account”. I did not reach these forms in the middle of a checkout process (required registration).

Popular Form Fields and Frequency

1. Password - 100%

Obviously this is a requirement for all sites, but 100% required users to invent their own passwords rather than sending computer-generated temporary passwords (which are terribly annoying). But Dell and Nieman Marcus failed to mention clearly that their passwords require at least one number until you fail at your first password attempt.

2. Repeat Password Field - 89%

Though it takes a small amount of extra time, this is recommended because it’s easy to make errors when you only see **** as you type. How frustrating for customers when they cannot log in because the password they *thought* they entered is wrong.

3. Email Subscription Option - 66%

Of the two thirds who took advantage of the registration form to ask for opt-in email subscriptions 57% pre-checked boxes.

4. Required First / Last Name - 54%

Unless you are not asking for a mailing address at the same time (for billing and shipping information), don’t require first and last names, because customers will have to re-enter this at a later time.

5. Required Address - 33%

I really don’t want to argue that for the sake of a short form, retailers shouldn’t require an address. Because billing and shipping information is essential to ecommerce, there is reason for having this information in the form, but I recommend making it optional (see below). 7% of retailers just asked for postal code - perhaps to notify registrants if they fall outside of the shipping area, or to collect demographic information. “Birds of a feather flock together” and your postal code tells a lot about your income.

6. Confirm Email Address - 32%

This is recommended as it’s easy to mistype an email address. Incorrect email addresses create log-in problems and makes it impossible to send confirmation emails and other messages.

7. Security Question - 20%

As an alternative to sending you your login details via email for handy reference, some sites employ a security question feature — either by dropdown menu question or an open-ended “hint” field.

8. Benefits of Registration - 14%

Among the very few sites that reinforce why customers should take the time to sign up, the following benefits were listed:

* Faster check out
* Save multiple shipping locations
* Save multiple billing options
* Exclusive offers
* Order tracking
* View order history
* Faster customer service (reps can pull up customer info quickly)
* Save items to wishlist
* Save items in cart
* Check reward point balances
* Incentives for referring friends
* Birthday and holiday reminders
* Access across partner stores (GAP, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piper Lime)
* Although some retailers get really creative with their benefits pages, I prefer bullet point lists - makes it easier to scan.

9. Username - 13%

Email addresses make fine user names — they’re easy to remember and unique. Because you need to have a user email addresses anyway, save them the trouble of trying 15 times to find a username that’s available, or having to remember their preferred handle appended with a bunch of numbers. Playing the username creation game is frustrating as it forces the user to re-enter password information every attempt.

10. Non-Canadian Friendly - 13%

There are at least two ways you can prevent Canadians (or other citizens of the world) from doing business with you. You can make your postal code field only 5 digits long, or you can include a dropdown menu of just US states.

11. Required Birthday - 7%

A few reasons you might ask this:

1. To segment your list
2. To verify the registrant is at least 13 years old
3. Customer relationship building - Macy’s includes a line: “In the future, we will use this information to send you something special”

12. Terms and Conditions - 6%

I noticed this is not very common among retail websites, though very common on other types of site registration. I’m interested to know what percent actually read these statements! 3% of sites used an “I am 13 years or older” checkbox.

13. Personalization Questions - 5%

14. Captcha - 1%

Only 1-800-Contacts used a Captcha to make sure you’re human.

What’s The Ideal Registration Form Length?

Usability experts recommend keeping forms as simple as possible because the longer your form is, the lower your completion rate. Don’t ask for too much information. I see there being 4 reasons for this:

* Trust - The amount of information I give you correlates with how much I trust you to use this information responsibly, and that giving you this information somehow will benefit me. If I am signing up to create a wish list, I am not ready to enter my credit card information.
* Time - If a form looks overly complicated, I might not be that motivated to fill it all out if there is a shorter alternative (competitor I have done business with or have recently visited)
* Typos - The more fields to fill out, the more chance for error - especially with captchas and password fields, causing user frustration and abandonment
* Technical Issues - Programming errors and bad design (problems for international users, for example)
However, if address and billing information will inevitably be required to process payment and ship goods, it also makes sense to collect this information in one go. You definitely don’t want to double up on information in all your different forms. What’s the solution?

* Give users the option of filling in what they are willing to share with you
* Clearly state the benefits of providing this information now (i.e. this will make your check-out process so much faster)
* Distinguish required fields from optional fields with the conventional

Registration Form Usability Tips

* Make the email address the username
* If a password requires a number, clearly say so
* Ask user to confirm email and password
* Always distinguish required fields from optional with an asterisk
* Avoid security questions, instead send a confirmation email with login details
* Send welcome / confirmation emails within 24 hours if possible
* If you sell internationally, make sure your registration form is usable
* Don’t ask for more information than is required
* State benefits of registration using a bulleted list
* For unusual information items, explain how this helps improve customer experience
* Avoid hiding important information in graphics that look like ads or buttons that can be overlooked
* Allow customers to enter billing address and credit card information at a later date
* Don’t pre-check email opt-ins, and don’t send promotions without gaining permission