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Delivra is sponsoring All About eMail Live! - a one-day event for email marketers. This intensive workshop will allow you to join your peers and collaborate with an all-star lineup of industry leaders who will discuss the hottest email marketing trends, including best practices and strategies, acquisition, data management, email and social, rendering, and more. 

It's being held at: 

New York Marriott 

http://live.emarketingandcommerce.com/agenda/

I'm moderating a roundtable at 1:30pm entitled: 2012 Email Marketing Best Practices. 

We will be discussing the top trends and best practies for 2012 such as: data integration, relevant list building, content, content, content, mobile (design and messaging), testing and analysis and much more!

Look me up if you plan to attend...

Justine Jordan from Litmus has posted a fun infographic that outlines, "ten important guidelines to an amazing mobile experience, as well as six things you'll definitely want to avoid."  

See it here.

By the way, Litmus also has a tool to help you determine the kind of mobile device your email subscribers are using to view your messages. Rendering is limited to the following list. 

• Android 2.2
• Apple iPhone
• Apple iPad
• Blackberry Text & HTML
• Symbian S60
• Windows Mobile 6.5

Delivra uses their service and we like it!

Price:
Fancy Feast $0.62
Chunk Light Tuna $0.64

Weight:
Fancy Feast 3 oz
Chunk Light Tuna 5 oz

Ingredients:
Fancy Feast - Fish broth, salmon, liver, wheat gluten, meat by-products, chicken
Chunk Light Tuna - Light tuna, water, vegetable broth

My Cat's Reaction:
Fancy Feast - smell, stare, lick the gravy, back for the good stuff later or never
Chunk Light Tuna - meow for dinner, then head is down until the dish is licked clean

Packaging is an art form for consumer goods but does not always have your best interests in mind. Packaging with email service providers can also be misleading.

How do you evaluate software tools, deliverability, rendering, training, service, security, success quotient vs. price between providers?

Feature sets, service, results and price varies widely. The phrase 'email marketing' is used liberally. What you don't know can be defeating against the crush of email that recipients contend with on a daily basis.

How do you know when the fancy packaged service appears to offer more but actually offers less than the plain tuna variety?

Here at Delivra we take our tuna seriously. Our values statement reads, "We exist to serve our customers."

Now, Delivra does not have the only straight-talking tuna philosophy in this business, but my advice is to seek out those that share our vision of how to partner with people rather than those that prefer to partner with the paycheck.

Have a comment or story to share? Contact me at n_berman@delivra.com.

Neil Berman | President & CEO

I was afraid to fail.  It had been programmed into my mind that failure was unacceptable.  Isn't this true for most of us?  Are you afraid of failure?

If you've read Robby Slaughter's book Failure: The Secret to Success, you may think differently about failure.

In fact, after reading this book, you will understand how failure may have a purpose and can sometimes play an imperative role in creating a victory.  Robby offers numerous examples and insights into errors and failures throughout history that have led to success.

I'll share one of my favorite failure examples. This example is in reference to the Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's observation,"well-behaved women seldom make history."

Robby writes, "Case in point: the reference above to Ulrich's quotation about "well-behaved women" might seem like an appropriate suggestion about the historical importance of intentional misconduct. In fact, the selection of this passage is an example of a white lie and is an intentional failure. The original scholarly article where these words first appeared was about Puritan funeral sermons. In context, the remark merely notes that women in that culture held a high regard for being modest, unassuming and mostly invisible. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wanted to comment that historians don't know much about women in Puritan society because those individuals preferred to go unnoticed."

This certainly is not what I thought it was pertaining to, that's for sure!

Now, can I claim after reading Robby's book  that I am completely able to accept all of my imperfections?  No, but I am able to see how they are not all necessarily devastating like I can make them out to be.  I can understand the lessons in failure and how they can potentially lead to a greater success.

All this being said, we have important systems in place to avoid failure.  For example, in regards to email, testing an email prior to sending it is an effective way to make sure failure doesn't happen.  You can check to make sure your email is rendering right, with appropriate content, and all your spelling and grammar is correct. Testing can help, but if a mistake were to happen - would it be the end of the world?

For more information about Failure: The Secret to Success, click here.

For guest blogs that Robby has written for Delivra, see the links below:

Email and Productivity Go Hand-In Hand

The Double Audience, Double Editing Rule

Leave your comments regarding the book in the comments section!  I'd love to read what you thought!

Lavon Temple | Marketing

Implementing an email marketing campaign is not easy.  There are several things to consider when starting an email campaign and then, of course, several more added when you decide to take the necessary steps to improve your email marketing efforts.

With so many things to remember when it comes to email marketing, here are a few reminders to keep top of mind when making the most of using email marketing.

A. Always Get Permission. It is no longer acceptable to buy a list of email addresses and send a "blast email" to numerous amounts of people that didn't sign up to receive your emails.  It's so much more effective to send to a smaller, more targeted list of subscribers that actually want to receive your information and are engaged with your emails. Delivra prides itself on being a permission - based email marketing software provider.

B. Basics, Basics, Basics. People have been telling marketers to get back to email marketing basics for a while, but the truth is some haven't even started to use them yet. It is so important to start using the email best practices that are available.  You want to make sure that you are using them because if done properly - it really does have an impact on your marketing efforts. You may find that your click through rate is increased, readers are more engaged with your emails, or that the amount of people sharing your email has substantially increased.

C. Content is King. Still. People want to read emails and forward emails to others that have content that is intriguing and informative. A new focus has been placed on content marketing and making sure that the information is educating customers.

D. Design. It's so important that you plan the design of your emails.  As marketing that is being presented to your subscribers, you want to make sure that it looks professional and will render well in email providers. Delivra has a Design Team that writes blog posts in order to share information about email design best practices.

Have other ideas that could be used for these letters?  Add them in the comments section.

Lavon Temple | Marketing

On the Delivra blog, we've written several times to the fact that email marketing is not dead and is very much alive. Of course, there still exists the occasional nay-sayer that argues that email marketing is dying out.

A recent article by Steve McGrath of Big Dot Media offers some great examples to explain why email marketing is not dying out; in fact, he states that it's merely changing.

I love the part, in particular, where he says: "Email marketers have to work smarter not harder to combat the distractions of today's modern social media and spam filled world."

It's so true, although there may be "distractions" pulling the attention away from email marketing. There are ways for email marketing to stay relevant and even work along side some of these "distractions."

Steve highlights a number of various ways to improve your email marketing efforts to ensure that they can combat through those distractions. Listed below are a couple of examples. (Click here for the article.)

Segmentation. I agree that segmentation is a great way to personalize an email. In the article, McGrath points out that "an email should contain some kind of personalization, even if it just says 'Dear <name>' at the top".  Although, yes, that's a starting point, I have to point out that segmentation is much more powerful than that and can be used to add a lot of personalization to your marketing if done correctly - using an email marketing service provider like Delivra can help you learn more about how to use segmentation to send targeted emails to subscribers.

Transactional Emails. These are a great way to increase open rates because they are sent via a timely manner. Say for example that someone signs up for your newsletter - send them an email that thanks them and provides them with what they should expect from signing up.

Here are some further thoughts:

Social Media. I don't see this as a distraction for email marketing if these two tools are set up to work harmoniously with one another.  Social media can be a route to encourage people to sign up for your email marketing campaign.  You can easily place a sign up form on some social media platforms that people can fill out quickly to become a subscriber.

Mobile Marketing. Email marketing can work really well with this new marketing channel.  There are several ways, in fact, that mobile marketing can play a role in your email marketing campaign.  For example, partaking in simple best practices can improve how your emails render on a mobile device.

Clickstream tracking. Clickstream tracking is a great way for email marketers to be proactive - especially for online retailers.  For example, a marketer can see, using purchase tracking, that a client has looked at a particular item on their website, but didn't follow through with a purchase.  The email marketer could send an email encouraging them to buy with an offer.

To read the rest of the article and learn more about why email marketing is not dying, click here.

For more information on how to implement some of these tools and make your email able to combat distractions, contact Delivra today!

Lavon Temple | Marketing

When working with HTML in emails it is very important to know what works and doesn’t work.  Below are some tips that can help make sure everything is readable and works well in different email clients.

1. Maximum recommended mailing “weight” is 50kb, which includes the actual HTML document (10kb or less is ideal) to be delivered and all referenced images (40kb or less). Minimize mailing weight as much as possible through image optimization, markup refinement, the removal of all embedded comments and indentation, etc.

2. Layouts should not exceed a web-standard 600-pixel width limit. Layouts should accommodate the resizing of copy by recipients changing their default font sizes.

3. Do not rely on BODY attributes (i.e. – background image, background color, text color, link color, etc.) or markup present in the HEAD of HTML documents, as web-based clients tend to filter out such layout cues prior to final presentation.

4. Do not use any form of stylesheets, whether it be in the HEAD tag (e.g. - CSS) or inline stylesheets.

5. JavaScript should be avoided as many email clients filter it out.

6. Avoid reliance upon the background image attribute. Any kind of background image whether it be in <body>, <td>, or <table> may not render properly in all email clients.

7. Avoid using Image Maps. Many email clients strip out all Image Maps.

For more tips on how to improve your emails, click here for some from our design experts.

These tips are just a taste of the knowledge of email that Delivra has.  Contact Delivra today and be in the hands of email experts to make sure your mailings look great and get out the door.

Patrick Love | Marketing

If you are like me or anyone I know, you are likely always on the go.  Life today is not as simple as it used to be.  One of my saving graces has been my smartphone.

• It literally never leaves my side
• It serves as my alarm clock
• It provides me with entertainment
• It has my calendar
• It has my email
• It has my contacts
• I can get movie tickets with it
• I can watch videos
• And so on....and so on...and so on

Sound familiar?  I could go on all day, but simply put mobile devices have become a way of life for everyone these days.  It's not just businessmen anymore.  It's every generation.  My kids are even using them non-stop.  I was in a restaurant earlier this week and saw an elderly woman pull out her cell phone to call her daughter since there was bad weather.

The point is this, while mobile may be exploding, email is just as important if not more than it ever was!  Why, you ask?  It's simple...with smartphones today your email marketing campaigns become a quick way a mobile user can get to a phone number, an address, a map, or even a link.  In fact, I will often  forget to save a contact in my email.  My solution...my smartphone.  Where else can I get to a phone number, click on the link and be able to call that person quickly.  Not only that, but my phone is advanced enough to remind me to save that contact while I am at it.  I even use my smartphone to map out directions.  Don't have an address?  I bet that email I just received has a link!  I was even recently shopping at a store that sends me email coupons.  And as usual, I forgot my coupon!  When the cashier asked me for my coupon I grumbled that I forgot it at home.  She asked if I had the email on my phone.  Can you believe I still got the discount because she was able to take the coupon info right from the email on my smartphone.  ONE DEVICE, but so many uses.  As technology evolves and cost goes down, people like me will be the bulk of your database one day.

Remember, when you are creating email campaigns to include some of those simple things you may think your recipients might already know.  Your website, phone number, address, or even links to email or maps.  Chances are that your recipients might have that info or have seen it in the past.  But if they are like me, they will refer back to emails from key senders for those very links they might need on a smartphone.

You don't necessarily have to have an advanced or costly mobile marketing strategy.  But, what you should always keep in mind is where your emails might be read, how they render, and what information you include (even if you feel you are repeating often) that might link on a smartphone.

Need help making sure your email incorporates some of these strategies? Contact us today at info@delivra.com or at 877-915-9465 and we'd be happy to help.

Carissa Newton | Marketing

Last week, Delivra exhibited and attended the EEC's Email Experience Evolution Conference in Miami.  The conference was a chance to meet email marketers from around the world and hear their best practice insights for email marketing.  The event was an excellent chance for us to learn what email marketers are doing and what works.  The overriding theme of the event was email best practices and how email can serve as a bridge to multiple channels.  Here is a Top 5 List of what we learned at the event.

The conference opened with Brian Harniman of Kayak speaking about how they have used email marketing to efficiently communicate with travel subscribers around the world.  A relative newcomer to the travel marketplace, Kayak has to attract new customers in a highly competitive marketplace, but also do so efficiently given their size and resources.  A veteran to email marketing, Brian outlined how Kayak has built their email marketing efforts through the use of testing.  He emphasized that testing is one of the most important methods to employ to ensure you are engaging your audience regardless of size.

As the conference progressed, there were a number of helpful sessions outlining email best practices in testing, design, optimization, list management, incorporating new medias along with numerous case study presentations from companies successfully using email to generate ROI for their organizations.  The key takeaways from these sessions for me were:

Sometimes the largest list is not always best. The key is to ensure that you have engaged recipients and to do that, email marketers often have to trim their lists for best results.

Building a list is easiest when you engage your audience. Mailing to recipients that have requested your email is the BEST way to drive action from your email campaigns.

Testing is probably one of the most underutilized resources that an email marketer has to use. Testing for subject line, content and design are all important and should not be overlooked.  While this effort does take a little additional time, it can increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns ten fold.

Measurement of email success should be measured at every stage throughout the campaign. It is so much more than simply opens and click-through rates.  How effective is your email in driving action?  In driving results? Measure that and you will learn ways to make improvements and changes with every email campaign that will meet what your audience wants.

With all of the various methods to market, email STILL is one of the more effective ones out there. New medias are having an impact on email campaigns, but only if they are integrated throughout the marketing strategy.  Social media, video, rich media landing pages and other methods are all ways to further engage your audience and grow your list.  However, they cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather as part of a whole.

There you have it, Email Evolution 2010 in a nutshell.  Surprisingly, even with the wide spectrum of attendees, email marketers are all facing many of the same issues.  The takeaways may seem simple and common sense, but remember that when employed efficiently and integrated throughout your marketing strategy, they will drive results.  Which is after all why you try to engage your audience through your email.

Wrapping up the conference, Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon led a lively session titled "Email Idol" where a team of expert email designers evaluated two email campaigns (one for USA Funds and the other for National Geographic).  In their review, the team was challenged to review the email campaigns, redesign the email layout, call to action and update any content to ensure a higher success rate.  Interestingly enough some of the improvements made to the winning emails were simple changes, yet they changed the impact of each email entirely.  The team recommended the use of pre-headers in each email to ensure that regardless of rendering, the email's purpose is clearly understood.  Simplicity is better in both design and content.  Using too much information can often cause confusion and dilute the call-to-action within the campaign.  Keep it simple whether it is in your navigation, look and feel or even in your text.  Test multiple versions of a campaign with a sample of your audience to see what messaging and imagery speaks to your audience.  Mighty Interactive led the Email Idol face-off with clean and simple design that illustrated that less is truly more.

Closing the conference, Don Shula spoke to the attendees and covered the importance of setting and achieving goals. During his entertaining presentation Shula outlined his gameplan for success.  His quote,  "Strive for perfection and settle for excellence" couldn't be more relevant to marketers today.

Last, but certainly not least, Ali Swerdlow of the Email Experience Council awarded the 2010 EEC People's Choice Award to Mighty Interactive.  Congratulations to a clear leader in email marketing design and best practices!  To view additional coverage of the conference, read The Email Guide's Wrapup Report , the Retail Email Blog, or view the Twitter feed at #EEC10.

Excellent conference with so many resources available to marketers.  I hope this wrap-up provides you a glimpse of the event along with a wealth of actionable information you can use to improve your marketing efforts.  Looking forward to next year's event.

Carissa Newton | Marketing

The Email Evolution Conference opened in Miami yesterday with a day full of pre-conference workshops, setup and a welcome reception.  I've been able to meet with email marketers and vendors from the U.S. and Europe.  I'm very interested to learn insight from so many talented marketers.  For those able to attend, be sure to stop by Delivra's booth #104 for your chance to win a Flip HD Camera!  If you are unable to attend, not to worry, we will be sharing plenty of insight from the various events, workshops, roundtables and discussions.

In looking at the agenda, there are a number of hot topics that will be covered in the various sessions.  Topics ranging from:

• Email Compliance/Reputation/Deliverability
• Social Media Strategies and how they blend with email
• What's working in email marketing/What's not
• Video in email
• Segmentation/Targeting Strategies
• Tracking/Metrics
• Mobile Rendering

As the conference progresses, stay tuned for more detailed insight from the events as Carissa Newton and Scott Cramer share their takeaways from the Email Evolution 2010 Conference-The Event for Email Marketers.  Interesting to see that amongst this audience we have all calibers of email marketers and yet all are struggling to stay on top of the very same trends.  Everyone's goal seems to be similar in that they are looking to enhance their email with various mediums to further engage their audiences.  They are looking to build their audience in a way that will last.  They are looking to measure their email effectively.  Bottom line, email is a powerful medium and marketers of all types can benefit from topics covered at the Email Evolution Conference.

If you are unable to attend, be sure to stay tuned to eMailChatr for up-to-date synopsis' of the events.  If you are attending, be sure to stop by Booth #104 and visit with Scott and Carissa.  The Experience Hall opens at 7:45 AM tomorrow!  Come join us for breakfast and a chat.

While the weather is not perfect, we thought we would share a few snapshots of the Miami pre-conference day views.....

Carissa Newton | Marketing & Scott Cramer | Business Development & Sales

Images in email marketing are a great way to reinforce your brand and your message, but using images does come with some inherent issues that you can avoid.

First:  Anytime you send an email using images, don't forget to reinforce that message in your text version of the email.  That way if a recipient has their images turned off, or their preferences set to receive text only emails, they still see your intended message.

Second:  Outlook 2007 recently changed its HTML rendering engine to Microsoft Word.  Up to this point, it had always used Internet Explorer.  This change has caused problems with established HTML web standards not being supported.

The most common problem I see is image sizing.  A client uploads large images, then uses the Delivra editor to set height and width.  Outlook 2007 will ignore the re-sizing and display the images at their actual size, causing the email to be distorted.

Fix: Size images appropriately before uploading to the Delivra editor.

Tip: Don't have photo editing software or want something easy to use?  Try this easy to use online editor www.picnik.com.

Have questions or need help, be sure to contact us here at Delivra and I can help you ensure every email campaign you send is a success!

Stephanie Price | Customer Support & Training

In last week's post, we looked at Marshall McLuhan's statement "the medium is the message" and mulled how it could be applied to our favorite medium, email.

Savvy email marketers take the time to get their message "right." They test different headers and subject lines. They spell check, and proofread, and spell check again. They run SpamAssassin checks and use the results to lower their message's spam score. They perform audits to see how their message will render in different email clients or browsers, or on mobile devices.

But despite all these checks, their campaigns can still fall flat with recipients. Often, this happens because the marketer didn't fully appreciate the unique properties of their medium. Marketers should also examine whether the message of their campaign is consistent with the message of the medium they're using to transmit it. As illustration, I offer a counterexample from my own inbox:

When this message arrived with the subject line "KYMCO USA Introduces New Scooters and All-Terrain Vehicles for 2010‏," my first thought was not, "I simply must know more about these new scooters and ATVs!" Rather, it was, "Who the heck is KYMCO, and why are they spamming me?"

Sure, the email is well-crafted enough: pleasant graphics, lots of links, rendered properly in my client. But the effort of the marketer was overshadowed by the more powerful message of the medium. The power of email is that it is more personal than other forms of communication. And an effect of this power is that recipients take it's usage very personally.

To be clear, I'm a suburbanite with absolutely no use for a scooter or an all-terrain vehicle. So anyone sending a message like this obviously knows nothing about me. Moreover, I never gave permission for KYMCO to contact me via email. Therefore, I was about to hit the "Report Spam" button when I noticed that the sender of the message was familiar:

This email was sent by: Indianapolis Motor Speedway
4790 W 16th St. Indianapolis, IN, 46222-2573, USA

Well, that explains how KYMCO got my address. I'm a huge fan of IndyCar racing, and of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. So I had signed up for the IMS newsletter some months ago. I'm guessing they allowed KYMCO to "blast" their subscribers in exchange for a sweet deal on some ATVs or scooters.

If so, both parties made a bad deal. Had I viewed this advertisement in a race program, I might have lingered on it before turning the page. Had KYMCO been given a placement in the regular IMS email newsletter, I might have formed some positive associations between the two brands. But via the highly personal medium of email, I viewed it as an intrusion, an abuse of the permission I gave the Speedway to email me. What made them think it was OK to rent out our relationship to a 3rd party vendor? This was surely not the kind of introduction KYMCO was hoping for.

(As an aside, I hope the Speedway got a good bargain on those scooters, because I'm sure this mailing cost them subscribers. Unsubs and feedback loop complaints are the natural result when people get emails they don't want, and don't understand why they received them.)

No matter how much effort you put into crafting your email, if you misunderstand how the medium itself is perceived, you risk your message being as unwelcome as the telemarketer calling during dinner. Know your medium, or you could be sending the wrong message entirely.

Chris Broshears | Product Development

I had breakfast today with a colleague. She asked, "How long is the ride?" I replied, "Meaning what?" "Meaning how long are you going to stay with email. There are stages in a product life cycle and eventually you will need get off and find another ride."

Just so happens that during our company management dinner last week one of our staff commented that her eleven and thirteen year old daughters regularly forwarded her emails from woman's clothing stores such as Hollister, Abercrombie & Fitch and Aeropostale. They even included shopping cart selections.

My take is that if teens online shopping habits are focused on email (which renders on their smart phones), then the ride just getting started.

Neil Berman | President & CEO

I don't know about you, but I was not born a designer.  I have learned quite a bit in the years since I have been marketing and even more so since I have been creating email marketing campaigns.  One of the greatest things I learned over time is to find valuable resources that you can call on from time to time.

Now with almost every email service provider out there, including Delivra, marketers are able to create visually appealing design that aligns well with brand guidelines and renders well to the end recipient.  With the advent of WYSIWYG editors, a busy marketer like me can easily drop images, copy and links to create that final email campaign.  The key now is to find resources that will help make that job as easy as possible.  Here are a few that I have found and use frequently:

Images: While most organizations have logos and standard in place for colors and fonts, images always help make an email more impactful and engaging.  Copy is king, especially in the email world where you cannot always predict how your emails will be rendered, but you do want to have an HTML based email with images as your first choice with a text based backup.  Here is an economical site I use to find images that fit what I want to communicate:  istockphoto.com.

HTML Cheat Sheets: While I am certainly no code developer, there are times when I may need to troubleshoot why the HTML code is not rendering correctly in my testing.  I found GoSquared.com as a great resource with cheat sheets that I could reference to fix any code errors I might have.

Witty Quotes & Sayings: Not sure if you feel this way, but after writing so many different types of communications, I am often stumped with creative inspiration.  I reference Brainyquote.com often for a relevant quote or for inspiration in my writing direction.

With tools like these, I can design with the best of them.  And last but not least, here's a list of even more!  I never claim to be an expert, but I certainly know how to find tremendous resources that help me get the job done.  Now design away without the worries and remember to keep it simple and keep it relevant to your audience.

Juggling a million other marketing items like me?  Strapped for time?  Short on inspiration?  Let us help!  Did you know that we  offer full service creative design services? (here are a few samples)  At Delivra, your success is our primary goal, so leave the work up to us and we will make sure your email campaigns are dynamic & engaging.

Carissa Newton | Marketing