In the July issue of Inc. Magazine, there is an interesting article about how one of our clients, Successories, is transforming from a catalog-based company to a web-based company.  Steve, a founding partner of Shay Digital, is quoted in the story:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080701/a-direct-mail-pioneer-fights-back.html

The FTC has approved four new rule provisions to the CAN-SPAM act, which created standards for sending commercial email in 2003.  From the FTC press release, the four issues addressed are:

1. an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
2. the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
3. a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and
4. a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

The full text (PDF, 312KB) provides a more detailed explanation of each of the new rules and some additional information including clarification on how ‘Forward To a Friend’ emails should be classified. 

For most marketers, these new provisions won’t have a practical impact on their email programs. 

The one exception might be the first item, which addresses the opt-out process.  An important best practice has been to make the unsubscribe process simple and straightforward, so I don’t except that a lot of marketers will need to change anything.  However, given the continuing importance of the CAN-SPAM act, everyone should review the new provisions to determine what, if any, effect it has on your email marketing programs.

Cyber Monday (Monday after Thanksgiving) gets all of the headlines as the most imporant online holiday of the season, but the reality is that in 2006, it was the 12th highest sales day during the holiday season.The following are the busiest online shopping days in 2006 according to ComScore:

Recently, Mailer Mailer released their 1st Half of 2007 Email Metrics Report.  While we need to continually test what works best in our particular situation and not rely solely on industry averages, the report did contain some interesting information that help serve as best practices. For example,

• Subject lines with 35 or few characters outperformed longer subject lines by about 25%.  While there are merits to longer copy on web pages or even in email messages themselves, the consensus continues to be that shorter subject lines improve results.  Given the way that virtually all email programs display messages, people generally use the ‘From’ address and the subject line to evaluate which emails to delete, read next, etc.  Using 35 characters as a limit forces us to communicate why the email is relevant in a very concise manner.
• While the vast majority of opens occur within the first 24 hours of a camping being launched, emails continue to be opened months after they were originally sent.  Beyond making sure that you don’t delete pages or images relating to older campaigns, you should also consider updating pages that have expired offers with updated specials or content that is no longer relevant with new information.

If you have gone through a web redesign in the last couple of years, you are probably familiar with user personas.  Fortunately, most interactive agencies have integrated persona development into their standard design process.  In case you haven’t worked with user personas before, they are usually written descriptions of fictional characters who represent key target audiences.  Personas bring ‘users to life’ by communicating motivations, needs, objectives, and expectations that drive their online behavior.

Personas provide extremely useful insights and work like a compass to help guide your marketing efforts.   They need to part of your marketing planning for a number of reasons:

1. The process of developing personas should reinforce that neither you nor anyone in your company is your target consumer.  Even if you are a user of your organization’s product or service, working at your company, especially if you are a marketer, creates biases that make you different.
2. Creating personas help you think of your consumers in terms of needs, wants, and motivations, instead of gender, age, and household income.  Personas create a much richer picture of your consumer than any demographic could.  To me, knowing that someone looks at the purchase of a high-end boat as a status symbol is much more useful than knowing that the average household income of yacht purchasers is $10 million (I made-up number – all I know is that I am not part of that target audience).
3. Through persona development, you segment your target audience into groups that allow you customize your marketing and tailor your offerings in a way that you couldn’t if you focused only on the notion of a single, average user.  For example, Wal-Mart has identified a group of consumers who will probably never buy clothes from its stores but who are excellent targets for electronics.  Email campaigns that focus specifically on DVD players, plasma TVs, mp3 players, etc. are going to be much more effective in attracting that group than general, ‘Sunday Circular’ types of email blasts.

Know thy consumer is one of the commandments of marketing and personas are a great tool in helping you refining your understanding of key target consumers. If you haven’t created personas, you should.  If you have created personas, make sure that you are using your personas for all of your online marketing efforts, including email campaigns, banner advertising, and search marketing. 

The following are some resources on developing personas:

• Perfecting Your Personas
• Practical Personas
• Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
• An Introduction To Personas and How To Use Them

When measuring the success of email marketing campaigns, the metrics most often tracked are open and click-thru rates. While those are noteworthy statistics, unique clicks to unique opens which I call the Engagement Rate is a very important, yet often over-looked measure of the overall success of a campaign. 

Most companies calculate click-thru rates as the number of clicks/number of emails delivered (clicks either being total or unique).  What the click-through rate doesn’t provide insight to is the percentage of overall readers who find your email useful or relevant. 

The click-thru rate doesn’t distinguish between a scenario in which you have 10 subscribers (an anemic number for a list but it makes the math a lot easier) and 1 user clicks on 10 links in an email and 9 subscribers open the email but do nothing and a situation in which all 10 subscribers each click on a single link.  In both cases, the number of clicks is 10 and the number of opens is 10; however, I would argue that in the later scenario, you have a higher level of engagement with your readership because each of your subscribers each found something in your email of relevance.

That doesn’t mean that traditional click-thru rates aren’t important, but the tracking the engagement rate will help you make sure that you are providing value to as many of your subscribers as possible.  If your engagement rate is low or declining, it may be that you campaigns are too general and you should offer multiple, more targeted emails or try segmenting your audience and include more specific content. 

In any case, the engagement rate provides another way to look at how your e-mail campaigns are performing and that additional insight will help you make them even more effective.