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With rumors about the declining health of Apple CEO Steve Jobs making news, we were inspired to re-run this post from November 2009, discussing the obviously bogus appearance of Mr. Jobs' email address on several of our clients' mailing lists, and how confirming your opt-ins can prevent such fraudulent subscriptions.

In September 2010, as if to prove the point of this post, Jobs famously replied to a college journalism student who wrote to him for help connecting to Apple's PR department: "Please leave us alone." The student took offense at the curt message, but it was more polite and personal than the Spamcop complaint you can expect if Jobs' address ends up on your marketing email list.

I'm hoping for a miraculous recovery for Steve Jobs, who will always be, in my mind, the thriving, driven young man portrayed by Noah Wyle in this 1999 TV movie. I'd email Steve my well-wishes, except, well, um...yeah, never mind.  This blog post will have to do.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

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Photo by Erik Pitti

One of the routine tasks performed by our Support team is the investigation of Spamcop complaints. With our Terms of Service allowing only the use of opt-in mailing lists, these complaints should be (and are) infrequent, and not all of them have merit. However, each of them must be investigated.

A recent complaint drew some extra attention because of where it came from: sjobs@apple.com. I'm willing to bet that Steve Jobs doesn't personally check that mailbox! However, it's apparently a valid address, and whoever monitors it objected to receiving a mailing sent by one of our clients.

We responded by removing the address from all the mailing lists on which it appeared. But Mr. Jobs is not the only celebrity to ever appear among our clients' subscribers. For example, we've seen quite a few occurrences of "president@whitehouse.gov" and "vice_president@whitehouse.gov", and various forms of addresses for Bill Gates. How did these luminaries come to be enrolled in these mailing lists? Let's dispense with some of the more obvious answers:

• They actually signed up to receive those mailings. As a famous philosopher once said, "you cannot be serious!" If Steve Jobs has time to personally read marketing emails, then the shareholders of Apple should march on 1 Infinite Loop with torches and pitchforks.

• The mailing list was harvested from address found online. They'd better not be harvesting addresses!! To paraphrase another well-known philosopher, I pity the fool that brings a tainted list like that into our system.

No, the more likely explanation is that people subscribed with false addresses on purpose. Perhaps they did it as a prank--that happened to me once, when an eBay seller mistook me for someone she held a grudge against; I spent days unsubscribing from all sorts of lists. Whatever their reasons, confirming opt-ins would largely prevent the problem of bogus addresses being subscribed. Confirmed Opt-In, or COI, is the process of sending new subscribers a message, to the address they provided at signup, containing a link they must click on to confirm that they really do want to hear from you. Some people refer to this practice as "double opt-in" or "closed loop opt-in." By any name, COI is the surest way to demonstrate, in response to spam complaints, that your mailing list consists only of people who have requested to be part of it.

Other than pranksters, why would anyone want to give you a fake email address? Maybe they don't really want to receive email from you, and are only providing an address because you require it in order to sign up for some other service or offer. Or perhaps they just don't understand how you plan to use their email address, so they fear giving you a real one. Either way, there's a weakness in your opt-in process that can be addressed, whether you switch to COI or not. Make sure your opt-in process is clear about why you are collecting their address, and how you plan to use it. And make sure that the user feels comfortable that they can give you their valid email address for transactional purposes, without also opting in to unwanted marketing messages.

I don't care how insanely great your products or services are, I promise you Steve Jobs didn't sign up for your newsletter, if for no other reason than that he's got people to do that for him. So if I he shows up on your list, take a good, hard look at your opt-in practices.

Scenario: A businessman, eager to promote his services, collects the addresses of members of a network he belongs to.   He sends them an electronic message inviting them to check out a new product.  Some recipients take exception to the intrusion, leading to a vigorous debate about the businessman's ethics.

If you follow the email industry in 2011, you may recognize this scenario as the one that played out last month involving a businessman (Douglas Karr, CEO of DK New Media) and an offended recipient (Al Iverson, deliverability expert and anti-spam advocate).   The argument that followed, which began on Twitter and continued in a Magill Report article, was about whether DK New Media's email to Iverson's address--which Karr obtained through their mutual LinkedIn connection--constituted spam.

1970 Monty Python sketch about SPAM, the meat product

But theirs was not a new debate.  The question of "what constitutes spam" is older even than the use of the word "spam" to describe unsolicited commercial email, almost as old as the Internet itself.

In 1978, the word "internet" had not yet been made into a proper noun.  It was an adjective, used in technical papers as shorthand for "internetworking."  However, there was such a thing as email, on a network called ARPANET, which was the predecessor to the Internet-with-a-capital-I that we know today.  ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.  It connected ARPA-sponsored researchers at universities and private corporations.

One corporation connected to ARPANET was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).  In 1978, a new model of DEC computer was available, and a DEC marketing executive thought ARPANET users would find it particularly interesting.  All ARPANET-connected persons were listed in a printed(!) directory, so a DEC employee looked up all the West Coast addresses, typed them in, and sent them this message:
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM
AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 <PDP-10> COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T
AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.
THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040
AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.

WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY
AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS
MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:

TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 - 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA

THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 - 2 PM
DUNFEY'S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)

A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND,
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.
In this retrospective by Brad Templeton, one can see several parallels between the 1978 DEC mailing and the 2011 DK mailing:

• The senders didn't think they were doing anything wrong. The DEC executive thought the ARPANET users would welcome hearing about a product designed with their needs in mind.  Karr believed his LinkedIn network would welcome hearing about goings-on at his company, or else they wouldn't be connected to him.
• The network operators were not amused. A DoD administrator called DEC's message "A FLAGRANT VIOLATION."  One university's system was taken down when the DEC mailing filled up the server's disk (at a time when disk space was much, much more scarce and expensive than today).  Then, as in 2011, system administrators viewed unsolicited commercial email as a serious problem.
• Recipients' reactions were mixed, but tended towards angry. In his Twitter defense of his actions, Karr cited his mailing's high engagement metrics as evidence that not everyone took offense.  And the DEC rep's actions were defended by at least one recipient as being more relevant than some of the birth announcements and other mail sent on ARPANET.  But generally, unsolicited commercial email then, as now, was poorly received.

This last point illustrates a common cause of confusion for marketers: there is not a universally-accepted definition of spam.  Attempts by governments to define spam for legal purposes have fallen short of the practical definitions used every day by ISPs in filtering incoming mail, and by recipients when deciding whether or not to click that "Report Spam" button.

Was Karr's message spam?  Legally, under the CAN-SPAM act, perhaps not.  But whatever you call it, it was a bad idea.  If you have to argue about whether you have permission to send to someone, then for practical purposes, you should assume you don't have permission.

Marketers who only send mail to explicitly opted-in addresses tend not to get drawn into Twitter fights over their practices.  And if your sending practices resemble those of DEC in 1978, then it's worth noting that their DECSYSTEM-20 mailing is widely regarded today as having been "the first spam."  Don't let your mailing be the next spam.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

By now, you've probably seen this video clip from 1994 making the rounds on Internet.  If not, take two minutes and watch it now.  Then scroll down for a question:

It's easy enough to laugh smugly at this now, in 2011, when Internet email is part of our national consciousness, and Bryant Gumbel isn't.

But where were you when you first encountered email? Probably not on camera like Gumbel and Katie Couric, I'm guessing.

In terms of familiarity with email, I had an advantage over the Today Show anchors, because in 1994 I was a college student.  I had discovered Internet email two years earlier, when I learned that my account on the university's VAX/VMS mainframe could be used not only for sending messages on campus, but could also communicate with my high school classmates attending schools in far-flung places like Muncie, IN; Bowling Green, KY; and Knoxville, TN.  And when we found out that my parents' Prodigy online service included email, it became a cheaper alternative for keeping in touch with them than long-distance calling.

HTML email was still unheard of, as the main application for HTML, the World Wide Web, was still a curiosity, even on campus, where Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, had only been recently introduced to the PCs in the Computer Science department lab.  Obviously, then, we weren't using a Web-based email client, or any client at all; instead, we used terminal emulation programs, or actual dumb terminals, to connect to the server and read plain text emails there.

But outside the university, email wasn't fully mainstream.  When I took my first job out of college in 1996, working tech support for Software Artistry, Inc., our clients included Fortune 500 companies, most of which still didn't issue Internet email accounts to their employees.  When problems occurred, it was not uncommon for customers to fax us a 50-page printed log file that today would just be attached to an email.

That's my "when I met email" story—what's yours?  Were you flummoxed like the Today Show talent?  Was your first email account through school, or work, or your home AOL dial-up service?  Or are you're of the generation that has never known a world without email?  Post your story in the comments section below.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

In the ongoing "Is email dead?" debate, we've already taken the position that email, as a marketing channel, is alive and well.

This is where a skeptic would say, "Of course you're going to argue that email is relevant, because that's the service you're selling.  Saying that email is alive and well is nothing more than shilling for your product."  I'm cynical enough, myself, to understand and appreciate that point of view. But in this particular debate, I have a unique perspective.  As a technology manager for an email service provider, I have access to data showing the extent of how much our email business is thriving.

In fact, in Delivra's eleven-year history, we've never sent more email than we're sending right now, during the holiday shopping season of 2010.  Check out our top ten sending days (by number of messages sent), all-time.  Note that Cyber Monday 2010 and the two days following represent the busiest 3-day period ever for our outbound mail servers:

1. Wednesday, November 17, 2010
2. Monday, November 29, 2010
   
3. Tuesday, November 30, 2010
4. Wednesday, December 01, 2010
5. Thursday, October 21, 2010
6. Thursday, June 17, 2010
7. Thursday, October 28, 2010
8. Tuesday, November 23, 2010
9. Friday, November 19, 2010
10. Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Much of the "is email dead" debate centers on the ascendancy of social media, and there's no doubt that Delivra's clients are investing in social media and other channels.  But the numbers suggest that they're not doing so at the expense of email.   Rather, we see more clients than ever sending more email than ever.  With six of our top ten all-time sending days occurring since November 17, and all ten of them occurring this year, it's hard to take seriously the idea that email is in decline.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Our choice, thanks to Facebook

Last month, I traveled with my family to Walt Disney World, and I needed some advice.  We were at Disney's Hollywood Studios on a Thursday night and had an opportunity to either take in the Fantasmic! fireworks and water show, or keep our dinner reservations at a restaurant where Disney characters mingle with diners.  Having not experienced either option personally, I wondered—which would our kids enjoy more? So I pulled out my iPhone and posed the question to my social network.

Quickly, I received opinions from four people:

• One of my college roommates
• A former co-worker from four companies ago
• A high school classmate who now lives in Texas
• Another college classmate

Besides being members of my Facebook network, what did all four of these people have in common?  I haven't seen them in years.   The former co-worker and I haven't been with the same company since 2002.  The others, let's just say it's been over a decade, and leave it at that, because I'm sure *they* wouldn't like me giving away *their* ages, you know?

Facebook, as you well know, refers to members of one's network as "friends."  In real life, it might be a stretch, calling someone "friend" whom you haven't seen or even talked on the phone with in years.  "Acquaintance" might be a better label, or "person I used to be friends with."  But within the context of the social network, it feels like we are friends despite the distance and years between us.  It made sense for me to seek their advice, and they were happy to give it.

I mention this just to illustrate the reach of our digital media in 2010--making people feel much more connected than they actually, presently, are.  Your audience's experience with electronic media is increasingly about fostering connectedness.

Therefore ask yourself, "does my digital marketing make people feel more personally connected to my brand?" What if your emails did more than convey information? What if your recipients felt you were communicating value to them as individuals, instead of just forwarding an electronic version of an ad such as you might once upon a time have placed in the newspaper?

Low email open, click-through, and conversion rates can all be symptoms of your messages not having an impact on recipients.  If you're not satisfied with the results, it's time to try something different (and I don't mean buying a list).  Examples of the power of digital media to make connections are all around us, so if your emails aren't connecting, don't blame the medium.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

One of my favorite TV sitcom characters of all time was a master of trivia.  Postal carrier Cliff Clavin used to sit around Cheers and show off his knowledge of trivia.  In fact, once, he almost cashed in on his trivia obsession.  He would interject his "knowledge" into conversation wherever possible, often introducing his out-of-left-field comments with, "It's a little known fact that..."

So in the spirit of Cliff Clavin, here's some email trivia: It's a little known fact that the plus sign (+) is technically a valid character to use in email addresses.

That may sound as implausible as some of Cliff bar trivia (cataloged here), but it's true.  The technical specifications that govern email, specifically RFC 5322 and RFC 3696, explicitly list "+" as a legal character for the local part of email addresses (the part before the "@" sign).

Why, though, would anyone want a plus sign in their email address?  Well, some email providers use the plus sign for a special purpose: to create aliases for an existing inbox.  This Wikipedia entry and this Lifehacker article explain it.  The idea is that if a user johndoe@gmail.com wants to sign up for email newsletters from Delivra, but is worried that  Delivra will share his address (we won't, BTW), resulting in unwanted mail, he can provide his address as johndoe+delivra@gmail.com.

Gmail ignores the tag after the plus sign when delivering messages, so the emails from Delivra will still go to johndoe@gmail.com's inbox (hopefully his Priority Inbox).  However, the full address "johndoe+delivra@gmail.com" will still show up in the To: line of the message when he reads it.  If he starts seeing email to the johndoe+delivra address from anyone but Delivra, he'll know that this address was shared without his authorization, and he can create a filter to send all messages for johndoe+delivra straight to the trash.

Not all email servers support this behavior.  Most don't, in fact, but among those that do are some of the more common public services.  Gmail and Hotmail/MSN accounts allow tags to be added to email usernames, and while free Yahoo! accounts do not, paid Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts do.

Unfortunately, many email signup forms do not recognize addresses containing plus signs as valid.  For example, I was recently trying to sign up on nikeplus.com with an address containing "+nike" and got an error message, "INVALID EMAIL, TRY AGAIN."   (For irony, you can't beat the Nike+ application not recognizing the + sign).

Why wouldn't they accept plus signs?  Does it mean that they plan on selling my email address and don't want me to find out about it?  Probably not.   It more likely just means that their programmer wasn't aware of the legal use of plus signs in email, and wrote the signup form validation to check for only the commonly used characters: letters, numbers, the dot (.), hyphen (-) and the underscore (_).

Email addresses containing plus signs aren't commonly used.  In fact, they make up less than a tenth of a percent of all addresses in our clients' subscriber lists--like I said, it's a "little-known fact."   But they are a very effective tool for tracking the sharing of email addresses.  If you sell, rent, or trade your mailing list in violation of your privacy policy, and that list contains addresses that have been tagged with a plus sign, you're likely to be busted.  That's just one more reason to keep your list private, and keep sending email only to people who want it.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Did you know that Delivra is currently hiring for positions including Forklift Operator, Barista, and Molecular Biologist?

Of course we're not.  But you wouldn't know that from looking at some of the applications for the jobs we actually ARE trying to fill: Software Developer, Application Analyst, and Integration Developer.   The job descriptions on our web site (and cross-posted to CareerBuilder.com and various social networks) have attracted many applicants, including some people who apparently don't like to read job descriptions.

Why else would someone apply for a software development job whose primary skill is driving a fork truck? Why else would someone expect their barista skills to help them land a position in systems integration?  And why on earth would a Ph.D. in molecular biology even want to interview for tech support?

I don't mean to disparage these applicants or their experiences.   Forklift operators are key to Central Indiana's thriving logistics and shipping industry.  I like my Starbucks as well as the next guy.  And while I'm not sure what molecular biologists do, exactly, I'm certain that it's important.  But we just don't have jobs for any of them.

I understand their reasoning, though.  Economic times are tough, so they feel an urgent need to advertise their services as widely as possible.  And applying for jobs is inexpensive, so they have little to lose.  Besides, we invited them to submit applications.  If we don't welcome their applications, we can always just ignore or delete them.

Is that approach going to be effective?  Surely not.  So why do so many email marketers take the same approach? Change a few words in the previous paragraph, and you've summed up the attitude of many in our industry toward their mailing lists:

"Economic times are tough, so we feel an urgent need to advertise our product as widely as possible.  And sending email is inexpensive, so we have little to lose.  Besides, they invited us to send them email [i.e., they opted in].  If they don't welcome our emails, they can always just ignore or delete them."

That's a poor way to find a new job, and a poor way to run an email marketing program.

Here at Delivra, and at many other companies our size, most jobs are still filled through some personal connection, so you'll want to find an angle that helps you stand out from the other applicants in our inbox.   Understand your brand and target the right audience with your resume.  Personalize those cover letters to fit the job.   Use social networks to learn more about who you're selling to.

Marketers, I'm still not just talking about job hunting here, know what I mean?

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Few things amaze me more than my wife's ability to find a good bargain.  In fact, she doesn't just excel at finding deals.  Sometimes she creates a deal where none previously existed.

In American society, negotiation of prices is expected in certain settings only.   For example, we understand that when buying a car, the "manufacturer's suggested retail price" is truly only a suggestion.  So we show up at the dealership ready to haggle, and the dealer expects this.   It's considered normal.

Or, when buying or selling a house, your realtor will tell you to expect there to be offers and counteroffers.  It's just how it's done.

But people are shocked when I tell them how my wife has saved our family hundreds of dollars at a time by negotiating at retail stores, big-box national chains with names that you would recognize.   She gets discounts by, well, asking for them.   For example, we recently purchased a new TV.  The same model we bought showed up in the store's national ad just a few weeks later.  The advertised sale price was less than my wife paid!

How does she pull it off?  It takes a combination of timing, chutzpah, killer instinct, and charm that most people lack.  But a better question is, why is it so surprising?  It seems almost scandalous.  In fact, while it's going on, I usually find it embarrassing that she's asking for special treatment.  She'll get no complaints from me about the cash we save, but in the moment it seems so...nervy.

However, being a consumer hasn't always been like that, as Time Magazine pointed out, in it's 1999 Person of the Year tribute to Internet retailer Jeff Bezos:

The idea of fixed prices is only about 100 years old. Before then nearly everything was negotiable. The last great retail revolution was mail order, led by Sears, Roebuck in the 1890s, and it solidified the idea of fixed prices, since buyer and seller were often separated by hundreds of miles of rail track.

Over time, customers preferred the fixed price model.  Sears prospered, and other retailers followed suit, to the extent that American society  has come to accept--even expect--the idea that prices are fixed.  It's not a mandate of law, it's just become "the way things are."  This is why my wife's example is so startling, because she defies the norm.

That revolution took a century, but in the Internet age, norms change much faster.   One revolutionary idea playing out before our eyes is an expectation that individuals--and not some distant publisher or broadcaster--can determine what messages and media they want, and when they want them.

For example, I can remember when late-night viewing choices consisted of Johnny Carson, reruns on one of the other two (!) networks, or a test pattern.  Now, the options are too many to list--hundreds of cable channels, podcasts, DVR recordings, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix streaming, etc.  And those are just the video options, to say nothing of websites, blogs, social networks, satellite radio...but you get the point.

For a marketer, what are the implications of a society where people expect to view only what they want, and nothing they don't want?  For one, it simply doesn't make sense to send a generic, one-size-fits-all email "blast."  Your recipients have segmented their media consumption to include only what suits them personally.  If you're not tuning your communications to suit their needs, you risk losing their attention and becoming unwelcome in their inboxes.

This is the main reason we talk so much about segmentation (dividing your list into subgroups for targeting), dynamic content (creating different version of email for different subscribers), and collecting profile information.   It's because recipients now expect you to interest them, personally.  But don't look for them to tell you so.  It is--particularly for the younger generation--simply "the way things are."

Fail to target subscribers with relevant and dynamic content, and you'll appear out of line with the norm, just like my wife.  But unlike her, you won't save money, and you could lose some by alienating your subscribers.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Early last year, around the time of Delivra's ten-year anniversary, we went shopping for a new mail transfer agent (MTA) technology partner to help sustain our growth for the next ten years.  We knew that our email sending volume was only going to increase over time, but we were still surprised, in December of 2009, to see how suddenly growth could occur.  That month, with the addition of new clients plus seasonal increases in emailing by our existing customers, our mailing volume jumped by 60% over previous highs!

That dramatic increase made us feel even better about our decision, just a few months earlier, to implement Message Systems' Momentum.  Our previous MTA would not have handled that kind of rapid growth.  But with Momentum as the engine powering our email, we didn't miss a beat, and delivered a record number of messages.  In fact, we've eclipsed that monthly record volume several times since then.

Our experience with Momentum has been so positive that Message Systems featured Delivra in a recent case study!

Click here to read the entire article.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Marketers thrive on information about customers and prospects. It's one of the reasons email is such a powerful marketing channel--the ability to see in real-time exactly which recipients are interacting with your content, and how (opening/clicking/sharing), and to what effect (page hits/conversions).

However, the marketer's desire to collect as much data as possible, when applied to signing up new email subscribers, can have unintended consequences. Aggressive collection of personal information and preferences can backfire. Here are a couple of ways we've seen it go wrong, along with suggestions for avoiding these pitfalls:

1. Asking for too much personal information. Many consumers are concerned about privacy in the digital age, and there is widespread disagreement about how much privacy one should be expected to give up in exchange for the benefits of new technology. Identity theft is a rampant problem, and even reputable brands have been victims of hackers, or otherwise found to have mismanaged personal data provided by their customers.Given these circumstances, it's natural for customers not to want to share any more information than is strictly necessary. Therefore, don't scare them off by requiring them to provide more than is needed to deliver the emails they're signing up for. If your program truly requires responses in seventeen different form fields, then set expectations clearly about how you will and won't use those responses.On the other hand, if you don't expect to use all that information, why overwhelm the user by asking for it? They may decide that subscribing to your email is more trouble than it's worth. Consider asking for minimal information up front, to lower the barriers to subscribing. Then, after building some trust with the subscriber (by sending relevant content that doesn't abuse the opt-in permission you were given), follow up with a request for more details to serve the subscriber better, and give some incentive for them to cooperate.
2. Asking for preferences, but not honoring them. Related to #1 above, subscribers tend to assume that information requested on the signup form is somehow needed to deliver the messages they're subscribing to. If you ask for their preferences about the kind of content they're interested in, it's reasonable for them to think that you intend to honor those preferences.Consider a profile form for a fictional video game retailer that lists all of their product lines with checkboxes next to them. Suppose that a subscriber checks only the boxes indicating interest in "Sony Playstation" and 'Xbox 360", but doesn't tick the box for "Nintendo Wii." If you've recorded these choices, and yet persist in sending the "Wii New Release Deal of the Week" email to your entire mailing list--without regard for subscriber preferences--then the subscriber of our example has reason to feel that you're sending them unsolicited email. And when users feel they're getting more than what they signed up for, unsubscribes and spam complaints are likely to result.

   The rule of thumb here is simple. In the context of an email signup form, don't ask what subscribers want, if you have no intention of delivering it. If you seek preference information for other reasons, like trying to decide how to allocate your marketing budget, then consider sending out a survey instead. But definitely do ask my preferences if your aim is to send me the most relevant and engaging emails possible.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Not long after joining Delivra in September 2008, I embarked on a research project.  I wanted to sample the end-user experiences offered by competitors to Delivra and compare those to our own subscription/profile management tools.  So I set up a brand new Gmail account and immediately subscribed it to about three dozen newsletters.

The companies I picked were those I knew to be doing business with other ESPs.  I purposely picked a cross-section of well-known brands from across multiple industries: restaurants, hospitality, consumer goods, retailers, not-for-profits and service providers.  Without listing their names, let us just say that you've heard of most of them.  They were the only senders to whom I've ever given this new address.

That was over sixteen months ago.  Since then, I've only logged into the account three times.  The most recent of those logins was yesterday.   Care to guess how many unread messages I had?

To stop marketing email takes more than just never checking your email.

Now, we've preached here before about the importance of engaging your subscribers.  To review, those who operate mail servers take an increasingly skeptical view towards messages sent in bulk but not widely read or acted upon.  For this reason, there are people in the ESP community far more experienced than me who recommend regularly cleansing your subscriber list of recipients who don't show--by their actions of opening, clicking links, or forwarding--any interest in your mailings over a long period of time.

Some of the sages giving that advice work for ESPs who handle the mail for the companies that filled my inbox with 1015 messages that I never read.  So I made a list and started tracking to see which, if any, senders had given up on me.  Surprisingly, only one company (hats off to you, ULTA) appears to have concluded that I was not interested and quit emailing me back in September.  The rest continued sending to me through 2010 in the vain hope that I might change my pattern of doing nothing with their messages.

Why, in the face of evidence and expert testimony that engagement matters, do marketers find it so difficult to let go of disengaged subscribers?  Cost may have something to do with it.  The costs of emailing an individual who has already opted-in are negligible compared to the cost of acquiring a new subscriber.  And while emailing uninterested subscribers en masse is known to impact deliverability, the methods used to by ISPs to determine things like throttling and bulk foldering are proprietary, making a true cost/benefit analysis difficult, at best.

Whatever the reason, this much I know...those senders will never have a less engaged subscriber.  They're not going to make any money off of me, and if they send to enough inboxes with similar lack of response, they may find themselves penalized by receiving systems for sending mailings with recipient activity similar to spam.

It's only been sixteen months, so perhaps some of these senders are on an 18-month list cleanup cycle?  I'll report back in a few months on whether any more of them have decided to let me go.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Proof that spam is evil. (Image credit: Lindsay Evans)

Someone not involved with email marketing recently asked me if the anti-spam positions taken by Delivra and other email service providers aren't hypocritical.  "After all," he reasoned, "if spam weren't a problem for the ISPs, then there wouldn't be a need for spam filters, and therefore your clients wouldn't need an email service provider to help get their mail delivered.  Seems to me that you need there to be spammers for your service to have value."

There's at least some truth in that statement.  Yes, ESPs "benefit" from the problem of spam in the same way that police officers, judges and jailers benefit from the problem of crime.  As long as there are criminals, those professions will enjoy a certain measure of job security.  Similarly, as long as there are spammers, ESPs will be needed to help legitimate marketers send opt-in email campaigns in ways that won't be mistaken for spam.

Further, I guess you could technically argue that, occasionally, ESPs profit directly from sending spam.   We've had to terminate clients for violating our terms of service by sending unsolicited email.  But when we fire them, it's not as if we're also refunding their payment for services already used.   There are costs involved in sending as much mail as we do (and abuse only drives those costs higher).

But believe me when I say that we at Delivra would rather live in a world without spam.  For one thing, we're email users ourselves; unsolicited emails in my inbox annoy me as much as the next person.

Second, the problem of spam complicates our sales process.  In most other industries, "qualifying prospects" refers to making sure they have the appropriate budget, decision-making authority, and reasonable timeframe for making a choice to purchase.  For ESPs, there's an added dimension of "making sure we trust the prospect's opt-in practices enough that we feel comfortable accepting the actual money they're prepared to pay us."  Someone who meets all the other criteria of a "qualified" prospect can still be someone with whom we decide we shouldn't do business.

But most importantly, if there were no spam, we wouldn't have to spend time dealing with deliverability concerns, because there would be no need for filters.  Then we could give even more attention to the other services we provide.  Even in a world without spam, marketers would still need tools for managing their mailing lists; creating attractive content; segmenting their recipients and targeting them with most relevant message possible; monitoring mailing results to know what techniques do and don't work with their constituents; and integrating email marketing with other critical systems.

Anyone who sees the role of the ESP as limited to preventing spam filtering would have good reason to fire their ESP in a world without spam.  But the smarter marketer also values the other services of an ESP--those that actually help them make money or retain subscribers.

A world without spam is pure fantasy of course, just like a world without crime.   Spam is part of our reality, but it's not the whole reality.  If you think email marketing is all about avoiding spam filters, I know some people who would be glad to help you broaden your view of what's possible.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

A few months ago, I blogged on the importance for marketers of understanding how email differs from other media.  To illustrate my point, I used an example from my own inbox of a campaign that demonstrated a poor grasp of the medium.

If you receive enough email, then you know it's not hard to find a marketing message that misses the mark.  I could have chosen my example from a field of many, but ultimately decided to pick on a mailing sent by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) on behalf of their sponsor, KYMCO USA.

That mailing had no obvious connection to my interest in the IndyCar racing series.  The subject line, "KYMCO USA Introduces New Scooters and All-Terrain Vehicles for 2010" meant so little to me that it might as well have read, "Rep!ica W@tCheS."   I only opened it because I was curious to know if the presumed spammers had at least followed CAN-SPAM guidelines.  Only then did I discover the mailing had been sent by IMS, whose mailings I subscribe to.

So in the interest of fairness, having openly criticized IMS/KYMCO for the ineffectiveness that mailing, I should tell, as Paul Harvey said, "The Rest of the Story."

Yesterday, I received a mailing with subject line "Want to Live Like An IZOD IndyCar Driver?‏" from sender "IZOD IndyCar Series."  Now that's a subject that I found curious and relevant.  I opened it to find this:

That's the right way for KYMCO to promote themselves to IndyCar fans.  Instead of just having IMS "blast" their generic ad to its entire mailing list, they actually partnered with the IndyCar Series to create an email campaign that is relevant to racing fans while also introducing KYMCO products and creating some positive association with the IndyCar brand.

Good choice of imagery, too.  Ryan Hunter-Reay is a popular driver, and there's his car; both are recognizable to fans.  Good product placement, too.  I'm still not buying a scooter or ATV, but if I ever did, it would more likely be one of the more masculine-looking models in the second mailing than the featured model with the female rider from the first mailing.  And bonus points are awarded for sending this during the month of May, the one time of year when open-wheel racing is in the national spotlight because of the Indy 500.

As much as I'd like to think that these improvements were made in response to my criticism, they probably arose from dissatisfaction with the open/clickthrough/unsub results of the previous mailing.   And I happen to know that IMS works with a reputable ESP capable of giving them advice on how to improve.   So let this serve as a lesson, that even the most troubled email marketing programs can be redeemed.  If that describes your email marketing, and your ESP isn't consulting with you about making improvements, we'd love to help!

Chris Broshears | Product Development

In my line of business, I sign up for a *lot* of email newsletters.  Most of my subscriptions aren't necessarily based on an affinity for the brand, but rather a desire to stay in touch with how other companies--beyond Delivra's clients--are using email.

One observation I've made is that (in my inbox, at least) the bulk of email I receive from retailers is aimed at driving traffic to their e-commerce websites.  But brick-and-mortar retailers can use email as a way to motivate shoppers to visit their physical stores.   In fact, we recently added a feature to our HTML editor to allow retailers or retail brands to create their own scannable coupons that email recipients can print and use.

Our Creative Services team has been using our new Barcode Editor to insert barcode images into mailings they've designed for a regional retail chain in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.   We're now pleased to offer this capability to all of our Professional and Enterprise clients, available by request to your Delivra Account Manager.

Partial screenshot of Barcode Editor

The Barcode Editor supports the most popular barcode formats supported by retail point-of-sale systems, including UPC, Code 128, and Code 39 (also called "3 of 9").  Designers can control the size of the barcode image, as well as the message to be encoded.   Barcodes are inserted into mailings as JPEG or PNG images, and can be oriented vertically or horizontally with respect to the mailing content.

If you choose to send barcoded coupons to your subscribers via email, keep in mind the following tips:

1. Before sending, test your barcodes by printing the email and scanning the barcode with actual equipment used at point of sale.   Without going into too much technical detail, let's just say that not all scanners can read all formats or dimensions of barcodes.
2. Be careful about the offers you send.  A Midwest grocery chain recently found itself in hot water with shoppers after it pulled the plug on an Internet coupon offer that proved too popular and was becoming too costly.  The coupon, for $10 off a purchase of $10 or more, amounted to a giveaway of free money, with the company realizing no benefit.  Once a coupon is published on the Internet, assume that it will be forwarded and multiple copies printed.  Consider using a "percent off" offer, or one requiring a higher minimum purchase amount, to limit your financial risk.
3. The "text" of your barcode--the letters and numbers it represents--can be dynamic.  You could load a unique coupon code for each recipient into a Delivra demographics field such as Text2_, and use a merge tag (%%Text2_%%) as the text to encode in your barcode.  When the mailing is sent, a unique barcode will then be generated for each recipient.  If your point-of-sale system supports it, this would give you a way to track which recipients' coupons were actually used, or to limit each unique coupon code to a single use.

Interested in learning more or getting started with bar codes in your emails?  Contact your Delivra Account Manager today!

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Among all the emails sent through our servers over the past ten years, this message from Butler University is an all-time favorite.  It's not just us Butler graduates who are excited to see the Bulldogs reach the Final Four.   All of Indianapolis has rallied around this Butler team, because they represent our city so well, and because they play basketball the right way...the way it's been played in Indiana for generations.   Those close to the program refer to it as "The Butler Way."

Here at Delivra, we appreciate the Butler Way, and this 2009-2010 men's basketball squad, because we see a lot of ourselves in these Bulldogs.   They're a disciplined crew, who put team success above individual achievement.  Butler's team isn't necessarily flashy, but they're always well-prepared, winning games by executing on fundamental skills of defense, passing, free throws and jump shooting.   They do this while remaining true to the university's high academic standards--two Bulldogs made the Academic All-American team this year.  Mostly made up of native Hoosiers, the team and university were not very familiar to the national experts, but they've proven through this NCAA tournament that they can compete with larger, richer, and better-known rivals.  We like to think that describes Delivra, too.  We're proud of our home team and honored to count Butler University among our hundreds of clients.

Butler isn't the only Delivra client whose talent will be on display this weekend in Indianapolis.  We're also wishing best of luck to the NCAA for a successful Final Four.  The NCAA is headquartered in Indy, and stages its marquee event here every few years.  We appreciate both of these organizations for all they do for our city.

GO BULLDOGS!!

Chris Broshears '95
Lavon Temple '09

One of the most common questions fielded by our Support team goes something like this: "My email looked just like I wanted in the editor and when I tested it, so how come it didn't look the same for my recipients?"

It's a common misconception that HTML is a "standard."  Web developers have known for years that different web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) interpret HTML in slightly different ways.  I like the way this web design tutorial puts it:

Your Web browser is a translation device. It takes a document written in the HTML language and translates it into a formatted Web page. The result of this translation is a little like giving two human translators a sentence written in French and asking them to translate it into English. Both will get the meaning across, but may not use the same words to do so.

There was a time when browser compatibility was a bigger problem for Web page designers than it is today.  Years ago--during the so-called "browser wars," when Microsoft and Netscape were competing for market share--both browsers added their own proprietary "extensions" to HTML, instructions that only worked in their web browser. The difficulty faced by designers, trying to write HTML that would look good in either IE or Netscape, gave rise to a "Web Standards" movement, which held that:

If Netscape and Microsoft persisted in building ever–more incompatible browsers, the cost of development would continue to skyrocket, tens of millions would find themselves locked out, and the Web would fragment into a tower of digital Babel. In fact, we said, it had already begun to do so.

Adoption of Web Standards by the browser makers has eased the burden of compatibility testing on Web page designers.  But what about those who write HTML for email rather than for Web sites?  Unfortunately, there hasn't been widespread adoption of standards among different email clients (Outlook, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc).  Worse, some of the recommendations of the Web Standards movement aren't fully applicable to the current state of email clients.

For example, one of the principles of the Web Standards movement is that HTML should only be used to define document content and structure, while CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for formatting.  Therefore, use of HTML tags like <font> for formatting is no longer recommended.  And while the <table> tag still has a purpose, it has nothing to do with aligning and positioning text on the page. But if a designer tries to apply those recommendations to email, they're not going to be pleased with how their message looks in, say, Outlook 2007, or Gmail, or Lotus Notes.

So what's an email designer to do?  May I suggest:

1. Test, test, test.  Set up accounts on the free web-based email services, and use them to preview your email before releasing it to the world.
2. Use tools like EmailAdvisor, which send your email to a seed list of addresses, then provide you with snapshots of how the HTML message looked in each of several popular email clients.  Or...
3. Use a simulator that doesn't require sending to a seed list--this is especially useful when the designer is not the same person who will be triggering the email send (and therefore doesn't have access to a seed list).  Our designers at Delivra find a tool called "Email on Acid" particularly useful.
4. Design for the lowest common denominator.  Our built-in HTML editor purposely does not generate code that uses the newest instructions.  That way, when you create an attractive-looking mailing, you have fewer worries of it breaking in, say, Outlook 2007 due to lack of support for certain CSS features.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Driving to work the other day, I noticed a billboard advertisement for a local law firm.  The ad gave the name of the firm and also included the predictable picture of the attorneys, a couple of nondescript, middle-age guys in suits.   In other words, it was mostly unremarkable.

But what made this billboard unusual were the other words that appeared under the firm's name.  There was no address or phone number given.  There was no catchy slogan, like "Tell them you mean business" or "Don't get hurt twice."  The only inscription was...

"Back Cover of the Phone Book"

Now, there's nothing wrong with billboards as part of a marketing plan.  Outdoor advertising will be around as long as there is automobile traffic.  (And when we finally get our flying cars, billboards won't go away, they'll probably just be higher!)

But a billboard ad campaign based on the phone book?  Really??

Sure, there was a time when there was only one Yellow Pages for every community, and every household had one.   Directing passers-by to look for their ad on the back of the phone book might have been a clever marketing strategy in, say, 1983, when the phone book was both indispensable and everywhere.

But now, there's more than just one publisher dropping off directories on our doorsteps.  And increasingly, consumers are dumping them straight in the recycle bin, because we have this thing called "the Internet" now.   Anyone with a computer or cell phone can use Google to find an attorney.  And with reviews and recommendations from other consumers being published online,  shoppers are relying on more than just advertising when choosing a service provider.

As a result, the phone book industry is hurting.  When your product makes a list of "Top 25 Things Vanishing from America"--along with VCRs, the milkman, film cameras, and outhouses--that's never a good sign.  So I have trouble believing that the law firm got their money's worth out of that advertising--both  the billboard and the phone book cover.

So what does this have to do with email?  For one, email is more like the billboard than the phone book; it's not going away anytime soon.  But if you've been using email in your marketing for some time now, it's important to understand how email is changing.

Just like society used to have a place for the Yellow Pages, there might once have been a role for "email blasts," but both recipients and network operators have higher expectations now.   We've been writing here about some of the trends: personalization, behavioral targeting, integration with social networking, and video are among the most prominent.

So avoid being like the lawyers on the sign, and don't assume that all the practices of yesterday will give you the same results today.  Stay in step with the times, and invest in what your audience is looking for now.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Our own Neil Berman wrote in his recent MediaPost Email Insider column about lessons that email marketers can learn from the recent 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  If it's not too late, I'd like to add one of my own.

On Friday, February 12, I tuned in to watch the Olympic opening ceremony.  I had already read online about the untimely death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, a member of the Georgian luge team who died following a crash in training earlier that day, so I wasn't surprised that NBC opened its programming by covering the story.

But I was shocked that NBC chose to air the gruesome footage of the accident.  It was among the most horrifying, disturbing things I've ever seen.  I even tweeted my disgust with the network, because no journalistic principle required it to air the moment of Kumaritashvili's death, and the standard disclaimer about "graphic" content just didn't seem like enough here.  If you haven't seen the video, I urge you, don't.  It was that unnerving and unforgettable.

But then, on Friday, February 28, I tuned in to watch the closing ceremony, and was shocked once again.  This time, it wasn't because of the video, which NBC wisely chose not to re-air.  Instead, I was shocked by my own reaction to the tribute to Kumaritashvili that was part of the ceremony.  When IOC President Jacques Rogge referred to the tragedy in his remarks, I found myself thinking, "was that only two weeks ago?"  Because it seemed like longer to me.  In fact, I had put the accident out of my mind until being reminded of it in that moment.

And this, for me, is the email marketing lesson: people forget stuff.

I'm not proud that it only took me two weeks to forget one of the most terrible and "unforgettable" things I've ever seen.  During those two weeks, it was crowded out of my consciousness by the hundreds of conversations I participated in; thousands of emails, tweets, and articles read; and dozens of other Olympic events watched.  Given the increasingly short attention spans of so many in our culture, I'm sure I wasn't alone in letting the tragedy slip from the front of my mind.

So if I can't remember the truly horrific thing that I witnessed two weeks ago, why would an email marketer expect me to remember a comparatively insignificant decision to subscribe to a mailing list three years ago?  (I'm talking to you, ancestry.com.  I haven't used your service since 2007, but you suddenly started mailing to me a couple of weeks ago.  How am I supposed to recall whether or not I opted in to receive your marketing email?)

Permission is only useful to the marketer if the recipients actually remember giving the permission.  If you sign up subscribers, but wait months or years to start mailing to them, don't be surprised if they forget about that long-ago transaction and complain about your email as spam (that is, if they address they gave you even remains valid after so much time).  For practical purposes, mailing a stale opt-in address is only somewhat less risky than mailing someone who never opted in at all.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Here's the latest spin on why email marketers shouldn't have to worry about opt-ins.   According to the CEO of one marketing database company, this time, it's the economy.  Because, really, who can afford to follow best practices these days?  Desperate times, desperate measures, and all that.  Naturally, his company is there for you in these troubled times. Go ahead and read the whole thing, including (especially) the comments.  I'll wait right here...

This is not the first attempt to defend the practice of sending unsolicited email, and the ensuing debate was divided along predictable lines.  In case you didn't read all the comments, allow me to summarize the extremes of opinion:

"It's about time someone spoke out against the ESP's and their so-called best practices.  There's nothing wrong or illegal about sending unsolicted email, and the ESPs are just hiding behind opt-in because they're lazy."

"No, it's that people who send to purchased lists are irresponsible, unethical, immoral spammers.  And also stupid."

Me, I'd rather stay above the finger-pointing and name-calling, and discuss this issue in the universal language all marketers can understand: money.

All parties involved in sending an email marketing message have a profit motive.  The marketer's path to making money from email is clear...generate leads and convert them to sales.

The ESPs are in this business to make money, too.  Most of us get paid according to how much email we send.  So you might think our position would be, "the more e-mail the better," regardless of opt-in.  However, if the mail gets blocked by ISPs and can't be delivered, our customers grow unhappy and quit paying us.  So we establish minimum guidelines and promote "best practices" based on what we know works, in hopes that our clients listen, experience success, and keep paying us.

But what about the ISPs?  I'm talking about the companies that recieve most of the emails we send...AOL, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, telcos, cable companies...how do they make money off of email?

The ISP hopes that you'll use their email service, so that they can serve up ads within your inbox while you check messages.  They get paid not by the end users of their service, and not by marketers and ESPs who send email to them.  Their revenue comes from the advertiser.

What eats into their profit potential on email is the cost of the servers and bandwidth to handle all that incoming traffic.  As an ESP, our technology expenses are huge, but I can only imagine what it costs to run the infrastructure behind, say, Hotmail.  All I know is, it's expensive as hell, and we who send email to Hotmail are not the ones paying for it.

(Incidentally, this is why permission from recipients isn't, by itself, enough to get email delivered anymore.  Because permission is cheap.  Anyone can set up a free webmail account, and give their address to any mailing list, without it costing them a dime.  See, it's not just spam that chokes the ISPs servers, it's also the proliferation of bulk marketing emails that cost the end-user nothing to sign up for, but there's a cost to deliver them, forcing the ISPs to look at engagement metrics to determine which are the emails people actually want.)

This is why, whatever we think about the morality of opt-out marketing, it's only the ISP's opinions that matter.  Follow the money: ESPs ability to deliver email depends on their servers, paid for by their money, which comes from advertisers, who need the end-users to keep using the ISP's service, because it delivers the mail they want and filters out the mail they don't want.  Their subscribers + their equipment + their money = their rules.

If you want your mail delivered, you'll do what the ISPs want.  It's your ESP's business to know what they want, and help you conform.  And we know for certain that they don't want emails sent to people who didn't give you permission.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

Photo by flickr user mattcyp88

Now that our user interface has had its recent facelift, it's time that our online help pages were revised as well, for all the same reasons. For too long, we have relied on help content provided by our main technology partner, but that content no longer makes enough sense to our users since we've added new technology partners and made so many improvements of our own to the Delivra platform.

So we recently hired a technical writer to create an online help file that would be unique and proprietary to Delivra. Our writer was new to email marketing, so had some research to do before he could start authoring help content. One day, after he read about our clickstream- and purchase-tracking capabilities, he told me something like this:

"I had no idea that senders could see information about what pages I visited on their web site, or what I purchased from them after reading their email. That's huge! I wish these companies I buy my climbing gear from would use something like this. Then they could send me information I want about their climbing gear, and quit sending me generic ads for things like jogging strollers that I've never bought and never will."

He seemed genuinely irked to learn that such technology was available, but not being used by the companies that have him on their mailing lists. If they could detect what his interests are, and target him with emails relevant to those interests, they would have a much better chance of selling to him—he would welcome those mailings! Instead, those companies persist in using the "batch-and-blast" method of sending the same generic message to everyone who has ever opted into their list.

Often, when we talk about relevance in email, we in the email delivery business tend to focus on the deliverability benefits of engaged recipients. And it's definitely true that more people opening, clicking, or forwarding your email means that ISPs are less likely to see your email as spam. But there's another reason you want to be relevant: because your customers will appreciate it!

Figure out what your recipients do and don't want, then give them more of what they want, and less of what they don't. Accomplish that, and the engagement metrics affecting deliverability will take care of themselves.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

P.S. Delivra users will notice that the first segment of our new online help is live as of today. Covering the Members section of our application, it includes help pages for the new CSV import, which is now enabled for all of our clients who haven't already been using it.