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.

RSS seems unlikely to stage a takeover anytime soon, according to panelists at a MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit on email marketing held earlier this year.

Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net and author of the seminal e-book on RSS, "Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS had this to say:

Given the relative maturity of email marketing compared to RSS, you would be hard pressed to find the same level of marketing functionality, targeting, personalization, and metrics capabilities that "come standard" with most email marketing packages in RSS.

"RSS technology is progressing rapidly, but email technology is not standing still either," said Neil Squillante, president of Landing Page Interactive. "Much is being done to eliminate the spam problem. Mainstream media continues to report that the amount of spam being sent is increasing, but what they are failing to report is the amount getting through is decreasing. What the recipient is experiencing matters, and a lot of recipients are experiencing less spam than they used to."

Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk added that in the end, it is all about user choice. "Just as we have seen with email, some consumers simply won’t want to embrace RSS. But as Yahoo! rolls out RSS and MSN makes it available, consumers will have more exposure to RSS, and marketers will be looking for an additional tool to distribute the marketing messages they couldn’t maneuver past spam filters."

I agree with all these guys on this. Email marketing isn't on its way out, not by a long shot. I'm not unhappy about that either, since my company (Netconcepts) owns the email marketing service provider GravityMail. With that said, however, I think it would be foolish to ignore RSS as a marketing channel. It's about to enter a huge adoption phase.

NOTE: Don't miss Rok's webinar on marketing through RSS, this Thursday at 12pm Eastern, on MarketingProfs.com. Sign up HERE.

My 2-part article summarizing the recent Thought Leaders Summit on Email Marketing has now been published on MarketingProfs.com (part 1 and part 2).

It is for MarketingProfs premium subscribers only unfortunately, so if you have been thinking about subscribing , now is the time to do it.

MarketingProfs has kindly allowed me to make available the audio recording of the Summit, which is available here. It's over an hour and a half long; lots of meaty stuff in there.

The Summit panelists included renowned author Jim Sterne, Forrester Research analyst Shar VanBoskirk, and RSS guru Rok Hrastnik, among others.

We covered a lot of ground during the summit, including:

• whether email marketing as we know it is doomed
• the role of RSS - to replace or to augment email
• reliability of email tracking
• navigating past spam filters
• CAN-SPAM legislation
• extraordinary versus ordinary email campaigns
• top most effective email marketing tactics
• objectively selecting an email marketing vendor, and
• what the future has to hold.

This was the third Thought Leaders Summit that I’ve had the pleasure of conducting for MarketingProfs, the first two being on search engine optimization and business blogging. Another on Buzz Marketing is due out soon, so watch this space for details!

Listen to the audio recording of the Email Marketing Summit

(File size is 26 M (Show length 1 hour 46 minutes)

Here’s a startling bit of research, done by EmailLabs and written up in MarketingSherpa, for all of you folks responsible for crafting email campaigns and newsletters:

This [past] fall tens of millions of emails from permission mailers were tested for a brand new metric: actual read time.
Turns out 15-20 seconds was the average. Consider the last email campaign or newsletter you sent. Could a typical reader skim the entire thing, digest the graphics, and decide to click on the best item for them in just 15-20 seconds?

Yes, people. You read that right. The read time of your precious prose is, on average, a lousy 15 seconds... 20 seconds, tops!

You labor so hard over that e-newsletter: spending countless hours writing it, then perfecting it, then testing it, then further refining it... and to what end? The bloody inconsiderate recipient spends a mere 15 seconds absorbing it! How rude!

So, what to do? Email marketers must become masters of the 15-second soundbite. The conventional wisdom in email marketing of short sentences, short paragraphs, placing the call-to-action so it appears above-the-fold in the preview pane, etc. etc. — just won't come close to cutting it any more.

Based on this study, I've been totally rethinking how we're doing our regular "communiques" to our clients & partners. Perhaps we should ditch our current approach of a roughly-monthly, short-and-sharp 400-word e-newsletter? I think we'll test another approach: where I strive to deliver a single idea or tip that offers real value to the recipient and coaxes that person into engaging in a dialogue with me — within a mere 80 words! (This paragraph, including this parenthetical note, is 80 words.)

Bite-sized chunks of relevant advice, personalized to that individual client's situation, sent on more regular intervals than our current "communique"... Sound like a plan? (Actually it sounds like an extranet blog, but done less frequently and delivered via email instead of RSS.)

Yesterday I conducted another Thought Leaders Summit for MarketingProfs. This one was on email marketing. I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation between some leading minds in the email marketing space, including Jim Sterne, author of several excellent books on email marketing and a founder of the Web Analytics Association; Shar VanBoskirk, consulting analyst with Forester Research; Eric Kirby, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Email Solutions at DoubleClick; Chris Baggett, founding partner of ExactTarget; Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net and author of Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS; Chris Price, managing director of Permission NZ Ltd; and Neil Squillante, president of LandingPage Interactive.

We covered a lot of ground during the summit, including:

• whether email marketing as we know it is doomed
• the role of RSS - to replace or to augment email
• reliability of email tracking
• navigating past spam filters
• CAN-SPAM legislation
• extraordinary versus ordinary email campaigns
• top most effective email marketing tactics
• objectively selecting an email marketing vendor
• what the future has to hold

This was the third Thought Leaders Summit that I've had the pleasure of conducting for MarketingProfs, the first two being on search engine optimization and business blogging. I look forward to the time when we have a library of Thought Leaders Summits available for marketers covering all the key areas in marketing, particularly online marketing.

Our next summit will be on buzz marketing. The line-up for that one includes: Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz; Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists; Harvard professor David Godes; Jonathan Carson, CEO of BuzzMetrics; Dave Balter, founder of BzzAgent; Luanne Calvert of Mixed Marketing; and analysts Jim Nail and Gary Stein.

The audio recording, transcript, and summary of yesterday's Email Marketing Summit will be available in about a month's time. I'll let you all know when they're ready.