MarketingSherpa Blog

14 Microsoft employees who are signed up for MarketingSherpa emails aren’t getting them. Seven Nortel staffers are in the same boat, not to mention three at Eagle Creek Travel Gear.

And while Nationwide may be on your side, it’s not on Sherpa’s. 15 Nationwide staffers currently are not getting Sherpa newsletters despite signing up for them.

Why? Mainly corporate email filters. If you, like Sherpa, email opt-ins at their work addresses, you’re highly likely to be blocked by at least a few of them. It’s not about permission, it’s usually about content. Unlike public email services, such as AOL, which mainly filter based on mailer reputation, the filters companies use are more likely to filter partly based on old-fashioned content rules. (See below for link to stats on this.)

If they see certain words in an email, they leap to conclusions that this must be junk and block it from getting through. This is called a “false positive,” and it’s nuts-making for the person trying to get *wanted* mail through.

IT people who chose which filters their companies will use are for the most part blithely unconcerned about false positives. In fact, when I met with Sherpa’s own IT guy a few weeks back to discuss filters, he was unaware of the problem.

He showed me a thick stack of brochures and CNET printouts detailing each of the filtering software solutions. Each had big fat headlines blaring about how much junk mail it stopped. He suggested choosing the one with the highest filter rate.

I suggested he squint at the fine print to see which software had the lowest false positive rate instead.

Want to know how much your sends are being filtered? Your email bounce report will not show you the complete picture. (It only shows which email recipient’s systems replied with a message. The vast majority of filters do not reply; they just silently block.)

One way is to pull a list of your non-responsive names by domain. If 100% of your names at a particular domain have not opened and/or clicked anything you sent recently, you’re probably filtered.

B-to-B marketers are most at risk and should be pro-active about pulling this report. Especially if you are marketing to large organizations and are relying on your email program to educate and warm prospects. You need to know if mail to a particular account simply isn’t getting through.

Then, you take the next step, contact that organization’s IT staffer via your connections or emails to “postmaster@”. You’ll need to assure the IT department that you are an opt-in mailer with permission. You’ll also want to share a sample copy of a typical email sent to their company so they can see for themselves it’s not junk.

Good luck!

If you’d like to add your own advice and/or comments, please click on the Post a Comment link below.

Useful links related to this article

Here’s a link to the presentation I mentioned above where our research team showed charts about how public and corporate email is filtered:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29823

Is email no longer a super-personal medium? 10 years ago I used to train marketers in the art of email best practices. “Make your creative personal,” I’d say. “Email is a more personal medium than direct postal mail. It’s one-to-one. Not mass.”

But, after looking over our latest Creative Samples Gallery of Email Awards (see link below if you missed it last week), I suddenly realized email-creative-that-works has changed a lot in the past decade …

I and other email “experts” used to counsel against the mass-marketing look and feel for email creative. However, I’ve seen the (often private) results data for hundreds of campaigns in every marketplace you can imagine in the past 12 months … and, the truth is, email creative that works has changed.

Email creative that looks like an advertising flier; that looks like a mass communication; that looks punchy and promotional; absolutely can work gangbusters in the right market.

I guess consumers who used to think of their in-box as a personal, private space don’t anymore. The email box has become much more like a real-world mailbox. People expect to see, and respond to, a range of styles — from glossy fliers to multi-offer catalogs to plain transaction notes.

In fact, the old adage about making your email creative appear to be from one person to another is probably far more true of mobile marketing for now. If you’re going to text message (AKA SMS) your mobile opt-in file, then it should be personal.

Now, I’m NOT saying email marketing that works isn’t one-to-one. One-to-one really, really matters. But it’s a different kind of one-to-one. It’s all about personal relevancy.

Is the offer (or content) being presented in the email truly relevant to the individual receiving it? Or are you sending the same offer (or content) to the masses? If you segment carefully so each part of your list gets what really matters to them individually, then they’ll respond. Big time.

So, the big shift for email creative boils down to this:

Instead of making our email creative appear or read like it’s from one human to another human (which was nearly always a lie, after all), it’s OK to let it look promotional. However, that promotion *should* be targeted to the individual as much as possible.

You’re sending an ad, so use your best (tested) ad creative. One-to-one in email is now all about sending the right ad to the right person instead of the same personal-looking ad to everyone.

Useful links related to this article

If you didn’t get a chance to review Sherpa’s Gallery of Email Awards 2007 here’s the link — it’s incredibly inspirational and open year-round for the benefit for the marketing community:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29889

If you’d like to learn about other marketing awards, you can nominate yourself for, Sherpa tracks a grand total of 251 for you here:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/awards.html

In November 1999, I woke up abruptly at about 3 a.m. in a hotel room outside Phoenix where I was attending a marketing conference.

I’d had this strangely intense dream. The vision was so overwhelming that I fumbled in my bag next to the bed for a pen and paper and started furiously scribbling.

The result: a blueprint outlining every aspect of what would become MarketingSherpa — an encyclopedic resource with practical research data, inspirational real-life samples and instructional how-to to help marketers get better results.

I’ve kept that piece of paper tacked up on my office bulletin board all these years. Although the ink is now faded, it still inspires me.

Today, at long last, we’re officially launching beta versions of not one but five major new services all initially envisioned in that dream:

#1. MarketingSherpa Membership Beta

Many of you have emailed and called over the years to complain that buying Case Studies one at a time was inconvenient. Now that pain has ended. When you join as a Sherpa Member, you’ll get complete access to everything year-round, including 744+ Case Studies and 526 how-to pieces.

And, yes, we’ve improved search and added 52 topical microsite sections so it’s easier to quickly find what you need.

#2. Research Database Beta

I’ve had a team of four, headed by a research librarian, working behind the scenes for more than a year now to make this for you. They’ve created more than 2,000 searchable records of every type of research to do with marketing, ads and PR from more than 500 organizations.

If you’re looking for a number, chances are you’ll find a source referenced in this handy, ever-growing database.

#3. Creative Samples Library Beta

We’ve gathered, organized and cross-referenced more than 2,200 creative samples from MarketingSherpa Case Studies into a searchable library for you. Each one includes hotlinks back to the original story so you can see how effective the campaign was.

Yes, you can search by brand name so you can see what we have for your company and your competitors.

#4. Awards Calendar Beta

A personal favorite of mine, we track 254 different awards in marketing, ads and PR throughout the year. It’s easy to search by topic, location and — most importantly –nomination deadlines!

#5. Events Calendar Beta

Many of you write in asking if we know of good events for marketing professionals to attend, sponsor or speak at. That’s why our research team created this calendar for you tracking 577 events and trade shows throughout the year.

You may be wondering why all of this is called “Beta.”

I stole the idea from Google, who call lots of their new services Beta. Beta to me means that I’m very much looking for your input as you try the new services so we can improve them further. You understand the site is not locked in stone, but rather a work in progress based on your feedback and demand.

It also means that as a Beta user, you’re one of the first. Some people don’t like being first; others really do. The choice is in your hands. You can learn more at:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/membertour.html

In closing, all this weekend I thought a lot about the past seven and a half years — what an incredible journey it’s been from that waking up alone in that hotel room with a Big Idea to an office packed with researchers and reporters working to make it a reality.

So, I’d like to quickly thank some people for their help along the way:

o Andy Bourland, Founder ClickZ, and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director MarketingExperiments, for sending in two of Sherpa’s very first reader testimonials years ago.

o Aimee Kessler Evans, employee No. 1 and now one of our very first Beta Members.

o Tad Clarke, our editorial director, for leaving his decade-long position at DM News and moving from Manhattan to Rhode Island to take a chance with Sherpa.

o Stefan Tornquist, our research director, for making the exact opposite move so we’d have a New York-based research presence.

o Reporters past and present, especially including Jennifer Nastu, Mark Brownlow, Dianna Huff, Alexis Gutzman, Chris Heine and Sean Donahue.

o Longstanding team members Sharon Hamner, Ron Perry, Aimee Croke, Kim Pezzetti, Terra Hughes, Meinhart & Associates and the guys in our Sombor, Serbia, branch office.

o Newer Sherpas including Cintia Miranda, who’s taken on the, perhaps, daunting task of running the marketing department.

o All the programmers and designers from Matrix Group to CVanek Studios, who made the site’s evolution possible. Plus, Holly Hicks on the newsletters front.

o Tech suppliers, including Omniture, ExactTarget, WebSideStory Search, Kowabunga and SurveyGizmo, who make our services possible.

o Hope Hopkins, Membership Services Producer, and Erin Donovan, Research Librarian. To you two falls the now even bigger task of keeping our new services growing healthy and strong.

And, last, but overwhelmingly not least, you, our 237,000 weekly readers, who have made this incredible journey possible — and who give us the reason to keep on building a newer, better Sherpa every single day.

Thank you for your support and guidance.

Wow — loads of you wrote in letters of support and advice in response to my blog last week about the agony of choosing new site colors. Thanks so much!

Finally, after a quick live test of ‘Dark Gold’ (I adored it; pretty much everyone else in the Sherpa universe complained vociferously), we ended up with the color scheme I fondly call ‘Manila Folder.’ It’s calm, warm and professional. Or at least I think so.

So, we’re sticking with Manila Folder for good. Period. End of discussion.

Except, of course, because on the Web, the discussion never really ends. Got feedback, color choice tales of your own, or other ideas to improve our new site?

On a completely unrelated note:

I would like to apologize to the 60+ Sherpa readers who waitlisted themselves for Sherpa Email Summit tickets. Despite adding 30% more capacity than last year, we just didn’t have enough room for everyone who wanted to attend.

Which means our Events Director Aimee Croke is touring larger facilities in Miami this week looking for a bigger space for Email Summit 2008. (She’s gloriously pregnant, so her progression through the city’s conference centers is rather like that of an ocean liner majestically entering a tropical bay.)

In the meantime, she has asked me to warn you that the room capacity for our upcoming May 7-8th Summit in New York City is *only* 220 seats, including speakers. Which is tight indeed.

The New York Summit in May focuses solely on the topic of selling online subscriptions. Case Study speakers include TheStreet.com, Blockbuster, NASCAR.com, Books24x7 and Symantec.

If you’re considering attending, please reserve tickets as soon as possible to ensure you get a seat. Sherpa’s Subscriptions Summit sold out for the past six years in a row, so you can see why Aimee is concerned. You’ll find the 2007 agenda and info at:
http://www.sherpastore.com/selling-subscriptions.html?1150

These past two weeks, I’ve been in endless debates and design meetings trying to choose new colors for our revamped and expanded Web site.

If you’ve ever had to choose site colors, you’ll understand completely. The three biggest problems:

(1) Everything’s really subjective. What a color “means” can be personal or cultural, but it’s not the same for everyone. Did you know baby girls wore blue and boys wore pink 150 years ago? Did you consider the green-means-money rule doesn’t work outside the US?

(2) Everything looks slightly different on differing computers. Non-dithering hues notwithstanding, most people’s screens look a little different. Laptops vs desktop monitors, old vs new screens, Macs vs PCs, varying background glare … the differences are not massive. But they are enough to make a pale brown appear to be pink.

(3) There’s virtually no data on marketing and color.

I know because I checked our site’s new Research Database, which has more than 1,800 records, for stats on color. Very little came up.

Turns out, you can find loads of articles on the Web about color choices. However, most are based on hearsay instead of lab tests, cultural associations and/or broad generalizations that don’t help much when you’ve got a palate of hundreds of hues to choose from.

My next step was to check out our Case Study Library with nearly 750 Case Studies. Did anyone test color choices?

Well, yes, they did. However, results were disheartening to a marketer stuck in a design meeting. Aside from the twin factors of legibility and good taste (based on target demographic), color tests were *never* a big factor in improving conversion rates.

The important factors were invariably things such as:
o Traffic source
o Offer
o Specific words in copy
o Ease of navigation (including lack of distractions)
o Relevancy of images
o Trustworthiness
o Reading comprehension (type size, type color, background color)

The last item on the list nearly always resolved to fairly big type (11-12 points+), in black “ink” on a white background. So that’s not color so much as eye-enablement.

So, you could say to yourself, well, since color doesn’t matter like this other, far more important stuff, I’m not going to pay attention to it. Let’s pick something quickly and end the debate.

Except for one thing: branding.

It’s how I found myself in this pickle in the first place. If you check the Wayback Machine — http://www.archive.org/index.php — for 2000, you’ll see Sherpa’s first site colors were bright red and yellow. These were chosen non-scientifically because they are my absolute personal favorites.

However, nobody else liked them, so I was shanghaied a few years ago into picking new colors so MarketingSherpa’s brand would feel more “corporate.”

What’s corporate? We ended up with red and gray. Which looked fine, if a bit boring to me. Unfortunately, red and gray also looked fine to a bunch of our competitors. If you’re a color-sensitive person, Jupiter, eMarketer and MarketingSherpa all looked pretty much the same.

We needed a new color scheme to stand out from the fray. Our first choice, nicknamed ‘Operation Desert Storm’ was finally vetoed because sometimes a palette of khakis and dark red don’t have thrilling associations.

Our second choice, nicknamed ‘Kindergarten’ was far more cheerful, but also vetoed because, well, you can guess why.

We actually went live last week with our third choice, ‘Brownie.’ And then too many people on staff complained the softer hues looked unpleasantly pink on older laptop monitors. (I got emails from folks with the words ‘Pepto-Bismol’ in the subject line.)

Anyway, all of this is to explain, if you’re in color choice meetings yourself, I feel your pain. Deeply.

And also, if you’ve been confused by the odd changes our site colors have been going through over the past few weeks (and days to come), this is why. Please bear with us. It will all be over soon, and then we can concentrate on the
important stuff.

If you want to improve email campaign conversions — at least incrementally — the answer may lie in your customer service department. Here’s why:

Every time you send an email broadcast, instead of clicking on hotlinks or order buttons, some percent of recipients will click on “reply to” and send you back a message.

What percent? Sherpa Reader Don Hoyt at Deerfield.com (who admittedly is in the business of helping companies handle these replies) says his own house mailings get 20% replies for big offers and 5% for non-offer messages, such as informational newsletters. That sounds a little high to me, but it probably varies a lot based on the quality of your list, your marketplace and your relationship opt-ins. Hoyt’s list is B-to-B and includes customers.

Campaign replies fall into roughly four topical groups:

o Questions/response about the offer in the email – lion’s share
o Questions about buying your other offerings – 10%
o Technical or service questions about past purchases – 10%
o Email preferences (i.e., Take me off your list) – tiny %

Hoyt’s customer service team has a goal of personally responding to all these replies within 30 minutes of receipt. Their conversion rate from answers to the first two reply topics is 30%.

30% is a darn high close rate on an emailed offer.

So, you might consider a quick research project. Reply four times (once per topic above) to one of your own email promotions as if you were a “real” recipient. This will work best if you use a personal email account so it’s not obvious that you’re with the company.

Then sit back and see how long it takes customer service to reply to each and what’s in that reply when it comes.

If it’s gloriously and swiftly handled, give them very public kudos at the next interdepartmental meeting. If it’s not, don’t blame them. Instead, start a research program of your own to find out:

o What percent of campaign sends get reply-tos?

o How do the replies break down into topics by percent?

o How long does your email program or ESP take to sort these and get them back to your company for handling? (It can be as long as two days.) What would it take to speed this up?

o Who at your company receives them now and what training and tools has marketing given them?

o What about reply-tos for rented lists, affiliate campaigns or other partnered sends?

Your goal is to estimate how many possible conversions you’re currently leaving on the table due to slowly answered or uncompellingly answered replies. And how much would it cost you to fix the problem.

You may discover that handling reply-tos will continue to be imperfect. The conversions won’t be worth the extra work. Or you may find that you can optimize right away.

By the way — I had a meeting with our own ESP on Friday on this very subject, so I’ve just started my own research project into this same thing for Sherpa. We’ll see how it turns out.

Just before last Valentine’s Day, marketers at Idea Art, an
ecommerce site run by a small family owned printing firm in the South, sent an email blast to their list of 72,000 opt-ins. The offer: beautifully designed papers with which one could create homemade valentines.

Results were OK. But only just OK. Everyone blamed holiday email clutter. How could they expect a fabulous response rate with so many competing offers hitting recipients’ inboxes?

Most marketers would have heaved a sigh and moved on to their next campaign. But, the Idea Art team were too stubborn. Valentine’s Day is one of their biggest holidays. They were determined to make email work harder.

So, they whipped out a follow-up email before Feb 14. The creative was similar although not identical. The big change was the list. Instead of sending to their whole file, they sent only to the people who had opened and clicked on the last campaign … but not purchased.

Results were so outstanding that the campaign won a MarketingSherpa Award for Best Email Test of 2006. (I’ve popped links below with Idea Art’s creative samples and how you can enter this year’s Awards.)

I’m focusing on this campaign in my blog today not just because this week is Valentine’s Day, nor because this Friday is the deadline to enter this year’s Email Awards. Those two items are serendipitous.

Actually, my inspiration is an email Sherpa received last week from Michael Goldstein, who is Director Internet Subscriptions at PRIMEDIA Enthusiast Media. Turns out he’s running campaigns nearly identical to Idea Art’s (although to a completely different audience). The results are outstanding. Here’s what he told Sherpa:

“Some rough stats for you on our remail campaigns:

1. Remail campaigns (we’ve only done about 6 thus far) range from 12%-50% added production to the overall campaign (mitigated by premiums and price tests vs. previous campaigns without)

2. Open rates on remails are 4-5x higher than the original
campaign (which really makes sense since we’re remailing the people who either opened or clicked the first time around)

3. CTR is 2-3x higher than original campaign (for the same reason as above)

3. Unsub rates on remails are 30%-40% lower than the original blast

I should note that remails on a campaign are by default a much smaller select since we’re only remailing those who open or open and click. Still, if you have the means to do it with your email vendor, it’s a no-brainer.”

Thanks, Michael, for sharing your results with Sherpa readers! This indicates to me at least that nearly every emailer — including B-to-B marketers — should figure out how they can test the re-email idea.

In the meantime, here are those two links I promised you:

Creative sample and details from Idea Art’s test:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/emaw2006/37.html

How to enter this year’s Sherpa Email Awards:
http://emailawards.marketingsherpa.com/
(Entry deadline is this Friday, Feb. 16th)

Last week, I had the honor of meeting a top email vendor’s Client Advisory Board. I won’t reveal names here because I wasn’t there as a reporter, so it’s unfair to “out” anyone. But, trust me — everyone in the room was from a well known company, including B-to-B and famous consumer brands.

The occasion was a little intimidating — these were the heads of email marketing for some of the smartest brands I know. Luckily, the organizers did one smart, simple thing to put us all at ease: each of us had to introduce ourselves and say how we ranked our organization’s use of email on a scale from 1 to 10.

No one ranked their company as high as a ’10’.

Nor even a 9 or an 8. Most felt they were anywhere from 1-5. Why were some of the top emailers in the world dissing their own programs?

Because we all know what can be done with email, and we’re nowhere near that glory yet. Example, I rated Sherpa’s email programs a “3.5” because we need to improve or create:

o Delivery, especially past corporate filters
o Dynamic, triggered messages with personalized content
o Integrating Web site measurement further
o Tying email in with our SFA system
o A/B testing our opt-in forms
o Outreach programs for hard bounces

Everyone around the table agreed that “the challenge is execution.” Not externally – the vendors seem to be ready to meet our needs or are going down the R&D path very quickly. (Which makes sense given how incredibly competitive the email service provider marketplace is.)

Instead, that execution challenge is a two-fold internal battle for most companies:

Battle #1. IT

“I’m tired of dueling with IT,” one marketer at the table said. Some solutions others suggested:

“IT likes building things, let them help you write email system requirements. Never develop an RFP without them, you can’t write requirements in marketing that are sufficient for IT.”

“You need an owner of email marketing over on the tech side; if you’re constantly shuffling and educating people on the help desk, you’re in trouble.”

“Make your next email hire someone with an IT background.”

“Give IT credit for the help they’ve given you when you report to senior management. Become the marketer for their campaign for internal recognition.”

Battle #2. Staffing

“A year ago I would have said we’re a 10,” said one heavy direct response marketer. “But, now the bar has been raised. Email has gone beyond the blast to one-to-one marketing.” Other marketers said their bar was raised when email moved from multiple corporate silos to one central department.

Both one-to-one marketing and centralizing are best practices and will increase response rates substantially in the long run. But, the big problem for 2007 appears to be the fact that few email departments are staffed up to handle the work.

Corporate thinks marketing should be happy to have this fairly new department focused on email. Marketing thinks corporate needs a reality check on how much work email actually is. Many around the table had only one dedicated email staffer. Some had to share email staff with ecommerce or Web marketing tasks as well.

“I did a presentation where I showed other departments exactly what goes into creating a single email newsletter send, how many hours. They were shocked,” explained one attendee who just got the go-ahead to hire more email staff.

Another marketer said his team had just finished a carefully pre-tested newsletter template re-launch. The goal? To keep response rates steady while reducing the hours it takes to create a typical send. He hopes that by saving staff time, they’ll be able to field more campaigns and tests, thus increasing overall program health.

The meeting as a whole was a revelation to me. I discovered that, as much as I am frustrated with our own email’s deficiencies, my fellow marketers are equally frustrated. There’s something terribly comforting about that.

I also set up a meeting with Chris Heine, the Senior Reporter on our team who is in charge of the email beat. “Pull some focus off of cool-creative or cool-strategy of the week,” I told him. “It’s time to focus on the practical realities of running a successful email program.”

Got ideas for Chris’ coverage from now on? Please post them online at the comments link below link, and/or contact him directly at ChrisH(at)MarketingSherpa(dot)com

Thanks.

Last Thursday I met with our new Senior Reporter, Sean Donahue, who covers the B-to-B marketing beat for us. He wanted to know best practices on how to get more people to sign up for webinars.

I said, “And don’t forget the thank-you page. When a prospect signs up for a webinar — or a white paper or newsletter for that matter — be sure to include more hotlinks or offers on the ‘Thank you’ page they see right after submitting their registration. Prospects are in the perfect mood right then to learn more about you, so they may click on links for white papers or other offers. Why not deepen the relationship right then?”

He said, bless his newly Sherpa-ized heart, “Got any data on what percent will click for another offer?”

Naturally, I did. The number was 40% … but it was from 2001. It was time to get some new benchmarks. To get a quick read, I looked into our own in-house numbers.

When folks sign up for an email newsletter on MarketingSherpa’s Web site, the thank-you page features opt-in offers for additional newsletter titles.

When I checked the data last week, 39% of all visitors to that thank-you page took advantage of another offer. I was surprised to see how little has changed since 2001 (you can’t say that about most things on the Internet.)

Another interesting fact: the most popular offer on that page gets a 29% acceptance rate, which is fabulous, but not the whole 39%. That means giving folks a choice on that page has helped our overall offer conversions increase by 10 percentage points.

(This is *not* true of all promotions on the Net or in postal DM. Most often, single focus gives better results.)

My final takeaway — if you have any thank-you pages out there for anything that only say, “Thank you,” you are wasting very valuable real estate.

Why slam a blank wall in people’s faces just when they’ve begun to respond to you? Keep that response curve coming.

And let me know if you have any data of your own on this front. I’m definitely interested.

If you’ve read more than a few articles (or heard speeches) about what lifts email campaign response rates, you’ve probably noticed they all boil down to the same word: relevancy.

Now, it’s all very well for experts to proclaim, “Be more relevant,” from the podium. But how do you actually put relevancy into action?

I was just blown away by a real-life example based on data from our own programs and wanted to share the results with you.

Last month, we did a complimentary teleseminar to review our latest Benchmark Study data for MarketingSherpa readers. We asked folks to sign up in advance, and then we emailed them hotlinks to the presentation and the special telephone number to call at the appointed hour.

Everyone who registered received the same three emails over 48 hours. So these went to the same list, same general topic and the same “From.” Only the time and subject line varied:

Email #1. Sent Dec. 18th
[Sherpa] Your Access Info for Tomorrow’s Teleseminar
Measured open: 18.6%

Email #2. Sent Dec. 19th
[Sherpa] Just 1 Hour Until the Email Marketing Teleseminar
Measured open: 50.5%

Email #3. Sent Dec. 20th
[Sherpa] Thanks + “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007”
Measured open: 48.7%

Wow, huh? The difference is striking. I don’t know about you, but this data inspires me on two fronts:

o Time-of-day-triggered campaigns

Auction and last-minute-discount sites already know this. But the rest of us, including B-to-B marketers, can probably create more time-driven campaigns.

Check with your email service beforehand though — sometimes sends don’t go out precisely when you think they will due to backlogged servers. Plus, some system resend messages to ‘soft bounces’ for up to 24 hours after the initial send to get more mail through, which could make your “one hour left” message look pretty silly.

o Post-transactional thank-you campaigns

Have you added an offer — even just to evergreen best-of content– in your new opt-in Welcome letter yet? How about testing special links in other transactional messages, such as shipping notes? Our research team is conducting studies on this right now; we should have some more data to present at Sherpa’s Email Summit in March. I’d love to hear your data, too.

Speaking of relevancy, here are three relevant links for you:

If you missed the teleseminar discussed above, you can get a transcript, MP3 file and, yes, the PowerPoints — they’re complimentary for Sherpa readers:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29823

Have you done any email campaigns (or newsletters) recently that got great results? Consider entering MarketingSherpa’s annual Email Awards. Ten categories (including B-to-B) to choose from:
http://emailawards.marketingsherpa.com/

Finally, here’s a link to info about Sherpa’s Email Summit; it’s nearly 70% sold out already, so quick ticket reservations are recommended:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Email-Summit.html?1150