Best-selling author Tim Ferriss is one of my heroes. His book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was an inspiration to me. In my podcast interview of him, he dispensed some life-changing advice.

So when I saw that Tim had laid out a plan on his blog for outsourcing one's inbox and never checking email again, I was psyched. I spend waaay too many hours each week on email and I'm desperate to free up some of that time.

I was hopeful that India-based virtual assistant firm Get Friday (one of the firms Tim recommended in the interview and on his blog) would be up to the task. Unfortunately, no such luck.

I was assigned "Nitin" as my VA. His English fluent not so much.

To illustrate, one of Nitin's emails I nearly deleted by mistake, thinking it was spam:

Subject: Results can be even worthier than you pay!

Methinks Nitin must also serve as virtual assistant to some offshore spammers!

Here's the rest of the email...

Dear Stephan,

Very Good Evening!

I am really exicted about our newly build relationship.I will be even happier if you will be assign me some tasks to assist you,to save your time and give value for your money.You have not assigned me any task till now,kindly take some time off and please assign me some tasks as still you have 37hrs left in your account for this month of April.

I am sending you a weekly report for the time period of 14th April to 19th April as an attachement,please have a look over it.

Your feedbacks are the keys to give you best possible service so kindly give your feedback on my work and please let me know that how can I assist you in best possible way.

Waiting for your reply!

Regards,

I shudder to think of this guy acting on my behalf, replying to my business-critical emails in Borat-speak. So I fired him, and his firm.

I realize now I could have avoided this whole debacle. Hindsight's 20/20, as they say. Rather than blindly trusting in GetFriday and their VA assignment process, I could have instead followed Tim's procedure for selecting a virtual assistant:

• Make enough inquiries to receive 20-30 proposals.
• Look to hire multiple virtual assistants; never hire a single individual -- you don't want your project to fail because someone got sick, took a vacation, or quit on you.
• Immediately delete any boilerplate form responses.
• Then assign an easy 20-30 minute task to the top 3-5 candidates to test for reliability. This will eliminate around 50% of them.
• Then, if your project takes 20-30 hours, assign the task to all three and ask them to stop after three hours and send you what they have done -- and you will know who performs best.

I found another VA, this one based out of Canada. She's a lot more money, but you get what you pay for. And no, I'm not going to tell you who it is -- she's mine, I tell you, all mine!!

I'm so sick of hearing from PR "professionals" who don't have a clue about how to pitch bloggers. It's obvious they don't even read my blog. This is spam, pure and simple. It's just the next evolution of spam - the progeny of the "reciprocal link request." I used to get those every day before I started blocking unknown senders (i.e. those not in my extensive "white list") using SpamArrest challenge-response. Frustratingly, SpamArrest doesn't keep the PR flaks away, because they respond to the SpamArrest challenge-response test, thus proving they are warm bodies.

Blogger-spamming PR flaks need to understand that bloggers will not respond positively to getting spammed with press releases. Indeed, bloggers love to out them on their blogs. (Any PR is good PR? I don't think so!) So, in that same vein, for your reading pleasure, I include a real example that just arrived in my inbox today (congratulations, Stella Parkes, if that's your real name).

The moral of the story, for those not in the PR industry: Don't ever hire a PR firm that does "blogger relations" like this. Or if you already have a firm doing this on your behalf, fire them.

Dear Stephan
Ive been reading your site and as you write about email marketing I wanted to get in touch to see whether you are interested in receiving relevant news from Epsilon International, the UK arm of the US-based email marketing business?

We aim to send only newsworthy stories for consideration and hope that getting a heads up on research findings or changes to our business will be interesting. If at any time you want us to stop then send me an email and I will remove you from our press list.

Below is a news release about a new senior hire  Jon Maddison  who has joined Epsilon as its first client services director. If this is not relevant then please let me know. In the near future we have some research findings, which may be of interest.

Thanks for your time, I look forward to hearing from you.

Stella Parkes

For Epsilon International

EPSILON INTERNATIONAL STRENGTHENS SERVICE OFFERING WITH APPOINTMENT OF FIRST CLIENT SERVICES DIRECTOR
Jon Maddison hired from Loyalty Management Group to boost senior team
www. epsilon. com/international

Epsilon International, the global arm of the worlds largest email marketing services business, has hired Jon Maddison as its first UK client services director.

[...rest of verbose and pointless press release omitted...]

Stella Parkes
Account manager
Renegade Media Ltd

PR for media and creative businesses

Office: +44 (0)1452 760 147
Mobile: +44 (0)7740 432 112
Email: stella@renegademedia.net

I find email to be inherently flawed as a communication channel because of the lack of emotional cues that help us to interpret the mood of the sender and to sense any undercurrents. According to the scholarly paper "Carrying Too Heavy a Load? The Communication and Miscommunication of Emotion by Email" coming out in next month's issue of The Academy of Management Review, people misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. According to the NY Times article E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread), this happens because the sender internally "hears" emotional overtones, though none of these cues will be sensed by the recipient. Think about that the next time you do a marathon email session, cranking out dozens of emails to valued business partners, clients, prospects, coworkers and friends. Constructive criticism done via email discourse can quickly escalate and spiral downwards. If it's at all touchy, hold off on the email and pick up the phone.

The confirmation/thank you that you get when you first sign up for an email newsletter, a webinar, a special offer, or what have you, is a really important first impression. If you send a confirmation email, that email sets the tone for your email relationship and, if it is personality-free and dry and offers no value, not only is it a wasted opportunity it really starts things off on the wrong foot.

I have blogged before about how to write Thank You emails. Now MarketingSherpa has covered the related topic, of Thank You web pages...

According to MarketingSherpa: "When a prospect signs up for a webinar -- or a white paper or newsletter for that matter -- be sure to include more hotlinks or offers on the 'Thank you' page they see right after submitting their registration. Prospects are in the perfect mood right then to learn more about you, so they may click on links for white papers or other offers. Why not deepen the relationship right then?"

In fact, their research pointed to 39% of viewers accepting offers on 'thank you' pages.

It is amazing the proliferation of "thank you for (ordering/signing up/inquiring)" pages that contain ... well, nothing else. No offer. No suggestions like "if you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy reading this ...white paper, article, news release." As MarketingSherpa says "they are wasting valuable real estate."

A fundraising/nonprofit consultant I know says that the 'thank you' is the beginning of the next 'ask'. There's a lesson here for us for-profit folks too: don't let an opportunity go by where you could be cross-selling and up-selling.

Earlier this year I spoke at the Professional Association of Innkeepers International conference. Here are two of the sessions I did, both of which on email marketing:

Email Marketing Fundamentals: PowerPoint (1.4 M & Audio (66 minutes, 32 M

Advanced Email Marketing: PowerPoint (4 M & Audio (62 minutes, 30 M

These presentations were targeted to small business owners (owners of Bed & Breakfasts) with a low to moderate level of sophistication in Internet Marketing. Nonetheless, hopefully you will glean some useful tidbits regardless!

Enjoy!

If you're seeing a decline in your email response rates, it wouldn't be surprising; it's a trend seen industry-wide over the the last 2 years. With open rates for B2C (business-to-consumer) at around 30% and clickthroughs at 6-7%, and for B2B (business-to-business) open rates at about 40% and clickthroughs at 10%, email marketing has become a tougher game than it was in the early days. Luckily, there are some actions you can take to stem this loss, and indeed counteract it, at least to some degree.

I should preface this by saying that some popular email clients (e.g. Outlook 2003) and webmail services (e.g. Gmail) don't support images by default. This doesn't mean that your email was not read, just that the email was not reported as read due to images not loading.

Nonetheless, fewer people are reading emails than before, and it's becoming increasingly harder to peak your recipient's interest and spur them to action. Here are a few tips to help you on your way to higher response rates in your email campaigns:

• Clean up the email format to make it more 'scannable'. Cut down on the gratuitous branding at the top of the email and put the key messages / content teasers there instead. Remember, email messages are not web pages and should not be designed to look like such.
• Consider smaller, more targeted campaigns, tied to broader campaign strategies. e.g. your lists could also be segmented to target geographic groups or by gender. Indications are, from industry data, that smaller lists produce better response rates.
• Get more specific in your Subject line. A/B split tests show that Subject lines with specific calls-to-action increase open rates.
• Practice spam filter avoidance. This includes revisions to body copy, message headers, and HTML. I could write a whole article about that. Oh, wait a minute... I have! ;-)
• Experiment with send times. Friday has been shown to be the most 'opened' day, but this is a moving target. As soon as marketers all jump on the Friday-send bandwagon, response rates on Friday will drop because recipients will be overwhelmed by all the volume. At this point, Thursday night send seems like an appropriate send time for B2C emails.

Hope you can make it for my MarketingProfs webinar, Email Marketing Success: 10 Campaigns Examined for Better and for Worse, today at 12pm Eastern. It's free for MarketingProfs Premium Plus subscribers, and $99 for others. I'll be doing another MarketingProfs webinar next month (Sept 14) too, Getting Google to Love Your Website... Again. So you might as well subscribe to their Premium Plus package and then catch both of my webinars!

There are a couple of slots still open in my list of campaigns to critique in my upcoming MarketingProfs webinar on email marketing. If you are DEFINITELY going to attend my webinar, Email Marketing Success: 10 Campaigns Examined for Better and for Worse, next Thursday at 12pm Eastern (note that it's not free, you have to either be a MarketingProfs Premium Plus member or pay a $99 fee), then there's still time to send me an example of an email campaign or newsletter for me to critique live during the webinar.

Send your single email marketing sample to emailcritique@netconcepts.com along with the answers to the following questions:

1. What was the product or service you were promoting?
2. Who was the target audience for this campaign?
3. How many recipients did you send to?
4. When was the email campaign sent? (month, year)
5. What was your objective with this email?
6. What were the results? (open rate, clicks, sales)
7. Anything else you want to share?

If you're not brave enough to have your campaign/newsletter critiqued in front of an audience of marketers, that's fine. You can still attend and learn a lot!

An effective way to recapture the potential customer who has abandoned their shopping cart is to send them a reminder email. Don't do it right away. JupiterResearch recommends waiting at least 24 hours. I'd wait a few days. In the email show a photo of each item along with the product name, price, etc. just like you (hopefully) do on your View Cart page. Sweeten the deal, particularly if the person appears to be new-to-file, by offering a discount or incentive to complete their purchase. If you're too predictable about it, customers may figure out what you're doing and purposefully abandon their cart in anticipation of a discount. The last thing you want is this listed as a discount on coupon codes sites like dealnews.com. You may wish to send several more reminder emails spaced out over time after the initial one, continuing to up the ante with more irresistable offers with each successive email until you finally give up on them. PETCO's reminder emails, sent 3 days after the cart is abandoned, included the abandoned product as the main feature along with cross-sells to three other high-margin items; these program-centric emails achieved a 852% increase in clickthrough rate and 171% increase in conversion rate over the company's previous campaign-centric emails (as reported by MediaPost).

Of course it's hard to send a reminder email if you don't have the shopper's email address. If the shopper is not a previous customer or is unidentified, have them identify himself/herself as early on in the ordering process as possible. In other words, have them provide their contact details / create an account / login (as an existing account holder) as one of the first steps of the checkout. Note that user accounts are an important feature for ease of repeat ordering and checking on order status. Through the use of cookies you should be able to also identify many of your returning shoppers without them logging in first.

This kinda goes without saying... If you're going to provide a means for a shopper to be reminded of their cart contents, you'll need to allow shoppers to add items to their "shopping cart" then leave that cart for extended periods of time and still have it remain intact. I'd keep their cart alive for 90 days or more. Sometimes shoppers will purposefully want to save their cart and return later to it. Consider having a "save my cart for later" option and/or "move items to wishlist" type feature to better cater to these people's needs.

Received any shopping cart reminder emails recently? If so, were they any good? Is there a merchant you'd like to highlight who does this "recapturing" exceptionally well? Post a comment and let me know.

Having been in the List business for over a decade, Larry Chase is one of the real experts on the topic. He's come up with a handy guide to keeping a clean list and other pointers.

In summary, Larry advises:

• Keep it Clean
  
  The cleaner your email list is, the more emails get through. Email servers shut you down if you throw too many dead email addresses at them.
• Audience Segmentation
  
  Some segments will respond to some offers, while others won't. Try to give each of these segments a name and a face so you can clearly visualize them and cater to them.
• List Representation
  
  It's best to use a list management firm that already represents lists similar to yours — and yes, your competitors.
• What's the Glue?
  
  There should be an affinity that keeps your list glued together, be it well-made sportswear or Internet marketing. If you stray too far away from that affinity, you could lose cohesion.
• Use Power Words in Email Subject Headers
  
  Make sure your email gets opened and read by loading your subject header with words that your readers are looking for.
• Source of New List Members
  
  Figure out how to draw people to your site and subscribe. Also set up co-registration partnerships with like-minded newsletters.
• Beware of Buying New Members
  
  Some lists do this, and it can be perfectly legitimate. Take great care to examine where these addresses are coming from. Junky addresses get junky response rates.
• Protect Your Good Name and Domain
  
  Set up your SPF records and look into the possibility of using a bonded-sender type service.
• Pass-Along is Your Life's Blood
  
  Subscriptions to Larry's Web Digest For Marketers are always highest on those days when his newsletter goes out. Why? Because subscribers pass it along and those recipients sign up.
• Keep It Fresh
  
  Don't change something because you're bored with it, because you see your newsletter way more than your list does. But yet don't let things get stale. Test things before pulling the trigger.
• Pick an Email Service Provider Wisely
  
  It's imperative that you select a competent service with an impeccable reputation and good tech support.
• Get Help
  
  The list business is a living, breathing organism. Make sure you have someone nearby who's done it before to help you avoid pitfalls and mistakes you don't want to make in public. It will also save you money in the long run.

Great advice, Larry. On the last point, I can't resist but plug my email marketing service, GravityMail. Not only is it smart technology for sending and tracking email campaigns, it's also got a crackerjack team of email marketers behind it.