From Lyris: 8 Building Blocks of Email Relevance

Marketers, it's time to put down the fire hose. Your email subscribers are more sophisticated today and more particular about what they want to receive - and it's not a steady stream of undifferentiated messages blasted relentlessly to a mass audience.

What do email subscribers want instead? Customized messages that:

• resemble conversations rather than lectures or sales pitches
• are personalized to reflect their interests, needs and wants
• arrive at logical intervals
• reflect their buying history, click stream data or their position in the customer lifecycle.

Need a number to back up this statement? According to a 2008 report from Forrester Research, "The top reason for unsubscribing from marketing messages was irrelevance: An overwhelming 74% of consumers unsubscribe for this reason."

Are your email messages relevant, or are they just more noise in the inbox?

How Relevance Builds a Stronger Email Marketing Program

Highly relevant email messages strengthen your marketing program in three key ways:

• Increase customer/subscriber retention
• Create higher return on investment through more customer engagement and lower email list churn
• Improve email deliverability by reducing unsubscribes and spam complaints

Besides the benefit that higher relevance brings to your email marketing program, consider what your competitors are doing. Your customers who unsubscribe or simply ignore your broadcast email messages might well be taking their business to a competitor whose messages are more relevant.

Maybe you think: "My subscribers opted in to receive email from me, so anything I send is relevant." True relevance is more complex. It actually has four dimensions: "The right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel."

8 Building Blocks of Relevance

Upgrading your email marketing program from a simple broadcast model - sending a single message to every address on your mailing list - to a differentiated program can seem like a daunting task, but every step you take will lead you closer to the goal of a relevant conversation. Keep in mind, you don’t have to tackle everything at once - take it one step at a time!

1. Content relevance: The look and feel of your online presence is consistent across all your marketing channels, from email messages to landing pages, your Web site and your mobile initiatives.

2. Welcome program: Engage email subscribers at the start of the relationship. Restate subscription details, manage expectations for content and frequency, provide links to FAQs, privacy policy, and other subscriptions, and invite subscribers back to your site. This also sets up to opportunity to gather information to start populating your preference center.

3. Preference Center: Subscribers have one-click access to a page where they can customize for content, format, frequency and channel, manage their subscriptions and account information, and opt in and out of message streams. This also provides the richer data that you will use for advanced personalization and segmentation.

4. Personalization: Using the information collected via your preference center, your messages employ dynamic content, reflecting subscriber interests, preferences, buying history and demographics.

5. Segmentation: Using preference, click stream and buying data you create a variety of message streams that reflect subscriber interest in different brands, products, purchase frequency, average order value and other factors.

6. Customized trigger and drip campaigns: Customer actions launch these messages automatically (see the previous Matches example), whether by a purchase, a data point such as a birthday or purchase anniversary, or an inaction including an abandoned shopping cart, or email reactivation program sent to subscribers who haven't acted on messages for a set time. Drip campaigns reflect the customer's place in the purchase cycle with content designed to answer questions and move the customer closer to a purchase.

7. Transactional emails: These are some of the most relevant and thus most acted-on emails and should be customized to reflect the action taken, such as a purchase or customer-support inquiry, account payment, subscription or cancellation, shipping or out-of-stock notice. Take the opportunity to up sell or cross sell customers on related items, offer them added value, update their preferences, make referrals, or take a survey on how you can improve their customer experience.

8. Unsubscribe program: Subscribers can easily opt out of message streams but are also given other options: change email address, change frequency or move to another communication channel (RSS feed, mobile, social network, direct mail).

Wrapping Up: Relevance and Your Marketing Budget

These days, many people are thinking they need to make their marketing budgets work harder for them. They're spending this money anyway, so they are seeking a better return.

Relevance is the key to those better returns: you have already identified people who are your customers or prospects through acquisition. You now have a much stronger opportunity to persuade them to do business with you again. You can do without having to pay the financial penalty of acquiring them again.

Relevance is the compelling path to growing your business.

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About the Author

Mike Weston is VP UK & EMEA Sales for Lyris. He's a leading figure and a regular speaker on the London digital marketing scene, with a particular focus on customer communication tools including email marketing and social media marketing.

From iMedia: Marketing Tools for Small Businesses -- 3 must-haves

3 must-have marketing tools for small businesses

By Eric Groves

February 02, 2010

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Email marketing delivered $43.62 for every dollar spent in 2009
• Online survey tools allow you to easily request anonymous feedback from your customers
• Countless small businesses have made valuable connections through their participation in social networks

Small businesses naturally gravitate to tools and strategies that quickly generate revenue without incurring significant costs. So it's no surprise that web-based marketing technologies have become a boon to small businesses because of their low cost and ease of use. Tools that are purpose-built for small businesses project a more professional image and deliver a richer set of management and monitoring capabilities than online tools targeted to consumers, which are often ad-supported and limited in function.

The essential small business marketing tools described below encourage stronger customer relationships and are easy to use and affordable, which makes them must-have tools in the small business marketer's toolkit.

Get connected. To stay abreast of the latest developments in email, survey, and social media services, check out the exhibit hall at ad:tech San Francisco, April 20-21. Learn more.

Email marketing
Despite critics who have called email marketing's effectiveness into question, email marketing continually delivers the highest ROI for any marketing method. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing delivered $43.62 for every dollar spent in 2009.

What makes email marketing so effective? It's simple: permission and relevant content. This means that the recipient is looking forward to receiving messages and considers the content of the emails to be beneficial. For marketers, this translates into a pre-qualified list of prospects and returning customers. All you need to do to keep them is stay in touch with content that is compelling and useful.

Businesses can achieve several important goals with email marketing, but the most important are strong, lasting customer relationships. With email marketing, you can consistently communicate your expertise, your offerings, and your brand, thereby building trust and recognition. When the time comes for customers to make purchases, they'll naturally turn to the businesses they're familiar with and loyal to, and they're more likely to recommend those businesses to others.

Online surveys
The most successful small business owners understand that listening to their customers is critically important. Yet, it's not always practical to engage in one-on-one conversations to find out what every customer is thinking. That's where online surveys come in. Online survey tools allow you to easily request anonymous feedback from your customers at their convenience.

Whether conducted frequently, such as after a purchase, event, or customer service issue, or just once a year, surveys are an excellent way to glean valuable information about your customers' satisfaction, experience with your business, or feedback on your product. For example, a retailer might survey his customers to find out what product lines they'd like to see expanded. A consultant could survey customers to learn what marketing challenges are most important to them for 2010. In both cases, the survey results will help guide important business decisions that neither business owner may have determined without the help of the customer base.

Another benefit of online surveys is the opportunity for your customers to feel like they're a part of your business. In fact, asking customers about the best way to communicate with them -- either via email, Facebook, Twitter, or some other mode or combination -- is a great first step in gathering useful feedback. By opening up a two-way dialogue and inviting them to offer suggestions and constructive criticism, your customers feel that they're contributing to your success. Knowing that you took their advice or considered their feedback creates a sense of loyalty that will naturally lead to longer and stronger relationships.

Your social network of choice
Everywhere you turn these days, someone is talking about Facebook, retweeting Ashton Kutcher's latest comment, or asking you to connect on LinkedIn. While all the hype can seem a bit frivolous, the business benefits of social networks are very real. Countless small business owners have made valuable connections, including new customers, through their participation in social networks.

Participation is the key to success when it comes to social media. Much like email marketing, you must first offer real value before you can expect to get anything in return. Simply being there isn't going to place your brand at the center of the conversation. You first have to establish your credibility as a member of the community and a legitimate expert in your field.

Establish yourself as a resource by sharing your knowledge. This may mean linking to your blog posts, media coverage of your product or business, or your email newsletter. You can easily add value and show you "get it" by offering your thoughts and commenting on another's blog post or tweet, or by answering a question on LinkedIn Answers.

Once you've committed to a particular mode of communication, be consistent in using it. Frequency of communications is always a challenge for busy small businesses owners, but a regular effort to communicate will help deliver your message most effectively. Eventually, your audience will begin to anticipate your outreach and even look forward to your next tweet, post, update, or newsletter.

Low cost, high return
Today's small businesses face an ongoing battle for mindshare among their target consumers. These low cost, high return marketing tools provide small businesses with the advantage they need to cut through the noise and get their messages heard without breaking their budget.

Eric Groves is senior vice president of global market development for Constant Contact Inc.

Email Marketing: 4 Essentials for Awesome Emails (From iMedia)

4 essentials for awesome emails

By Christopher Golec

December 18, 2009

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Stop thinking of "a list" -- think in terms of building a highly targeted audience
• To create the offer, you need to determine where recipients are in the purchase cycle
• Be cognizant of the time the email will be sent

If done right, email can be one of the most cost-effective tools for a B2B marketer, given the ease of the delivery method and timeliness of both delivery and response. With email campaigns, marketers know that their messages are delivered instantly, recipient response time is generally less than 48 hours (and most often in the first few hours), email works for both inbound and outbound marketing campaigns, and nearly all business professionals have an email address.

But, given the increase of spam, phishing, and email viruses, the world of email marketing is changing dramatically. The CAN-SPAM Act went into effect in 2003, and was updated by the FTC in 2008, setting new rules and requirements for commercial email. Techniques that may have been effective just two years ago are likely to generate only half the open and response rates today. Keeping up with the newest ideas in creative, as well as the latest regulations, can become a job in itself but, by honing in on the following four key areas, you can drive a highly successful email marketing campaign.

List
How can marketers make the most of their target list? To start, stop thinking of "a list." Instead, think in terms of building a highly targeted audience. Avoid adding names for the sake of trying achieve a certain number of responses or to satisfy a minimum purchase from a list vendor. By sending a non-relevant message to a mass audience, you're likely to miss your goal and tarnish your brand.

Rather than building a mass list, leverage insights available from your website traffic to identify which companies have visited and are already interested in a product or service you have to offer. It's much easier to convert companies with a need than to generate interest from scratch. Having a process in place to regularly identify and add key contacts from your website visitors to your marketing list will yield better response rates. Also be sure to include website registrations, as well as attendees of trade shows and webinars, but segment them by industry, company size, and role within the company.

Place opt-in forms on multiple high-traffic pages in order to collect contacts; you don't need the full, detailed form -- just basic information. This generates leads on an opt-in process, which can provide much higher response rates. Include existing customers in your outreach campaigns. Regular correspondence will help to reinforce your brand, and gives you the opportunity to cross-sell products and services. Generally, these house-built lists generate the highest response rates in email campaigns.

If you need to supplement your list with additional contacts, relevant trade publications offer a good channel to reach the right people in the right industry. As with any partner, find out about their CAN-SPAM compliance, learn how the contacts are validated, and find out about their co-op marketing programs.

Offer
Email marketing has the most success if the message provides immediate value and personally connects to the recipient. The message should help them do one of the following:

1. Learn through educational content, news or tips
   
2. Address a pain point of the recipient or support an immediate initiative
   
3. Demonstrate a clear savings of either time or money.

To create the offer, you need to determine where recipients are in the purchase cycle. Are they gathering information, evaluating alternatives, budgeting, in negotiations, or already a customer? This information can often be uncovered from your website traffic by evaluating the level of engagement and types of web content being viewed. Map this information to each contact in your database so you can get these people to know and understand your company. Segment your existing database accordingly, in order to provide specific and personalized messages every step of the way.

Creative
Look at how your email is designed; it's important that you capture your audience upfront -- is your offer located within the preview pane of the message? Think about your subject line; refrain from capitalization and excessive punctuation, and include the company name. Include links to specific landing pages or pages on social networking sites rather than sending people to a general homepage that is not highly relevant to the offer.

Note that if you are renting a contact list for any part of your email marketing campaign, the CAN-SPAM Act requires that the offer and email come from the marketing partner. The act further requires that the sender have a valid postal address for each person and that there is an easy unsubscribe process.

Timing
As we all know, timing is everything. A study by Smith-Harmon in January 2009 found that Monday and Tuesday are the most popular days of the week to send email. Be cognizant of the time the email will be sent. Is it going out too early for the West Coast or too late for the East Coast? Also, make sure you're not sending multiple emails to a prospect too close together; instead, space them apart over weeks.

The most effective marketing campaigns -- whether they are delivered via email or billboard -- are all about providing the right message, to the right audience, at the right time. With these four elements in mind, you'll be on your way to email marketing success.

Chris Golec is the founder and CEO of Demandbase.

From iMedia: Social + Email Marketing

How to integrate social and email marketing

By Chris Marriott

How to integrate social and email marketing

With the holidays upon us, let us give in to our innate desire to get social. And by that, I mean let's talk about the right ways to integrate email and social networks.

Over the past year or so, marketing writers have often spoken of email and social networking as mutually exclusive channels -- if one, then not the other. The growth in social networking, many have said, comes at the expense of email. Some data, notably comScore web traffic data, show a rise in time spent on social networking sites and a decline in time spent on webmail sites. First of all, these numbers do not include the time spent on PC- or mobile-based email or social networking, so the true extent of any shift from one to the other remains unknown.

But more importantly, these channels work together. Before social networking, email acted as the online social sharing channel. People emailed pictures, updates, and, yes, bad jokes to one another. With the advent of social networking, people shifted a behavior from one channel to another. Email remains the de facto requirement of social networking membership. Neither channel will eliminate the other.

On a grander level, social and email inform one another. Many marketers have used their email lists to drive social activity in two ways: 1) share-with-your-network (SWYN) calls to action and 2) friend/follower recruitment. While the emphasis today seems to fall on driving consumers from email to social, the potential exists to drive the opposite behavior as well. So let's explore the possibilities.

SWYN
In essence, SWYN represents the social equivalent of forward-to-a-friend (FTAF), the feature that allowed consumers to use the marketer's email system to send along emails. That approach had a major limitation: It took more effort than simply hitting the "forward" button and dropping in names from the user's own address book. SWYN allows sharing with one button push.

As with any tactic used in email, applying SWYN universally has its limitations. So first of all, don't assume that every offer or piece of content merits sharing. Take a hard look at what goes into your emails and only share the things that really stand out, such as a once-per-season sale or an exclusive piece of content.

Similarly, design the SWYN call to action with discretion. Learn what social networks your customers use the most, potentially by polling. Also, test different designs for the SWYN call to action to learn which design drives the most clicks. Lastly, ensure that the content or offer has an appropriate thumbnail image and descriptor for easy scanning on the chosen site.

Friend/follower recruitment
Recruiting email opt-ins to become friends or followers on social networks offers an opportunity to open up a secondary channel to consumers. For email addresses that have become unresponsive, social messaging may allow for an opportunity to re-engage. Even for active email respondents, the social networking channel offers the prospect of an officially unofficial channel -- a forum that conveys a sense of being an insider to the consumer.

Accordingly, the CTA for recruitment should offer something of value for the consumer, whether it be a discount or access to information first. By the same token, messages sent via social network should not repeat email messages. If you can't commit to doing something special via social networking, you shouldn't bother.

Social networking lacks the measurement capabilities of email, but that shouldn't stop a marketer from measuring it completely. By embedding distinctive links in the social communications and measuring usage of those links via web analytics, the marketer can get a rough idea of success.

From social to email
Many marketers overlook the opportunity to recruit email opt-ins from a social environment. Status updates and tweets are natural places to put in a link for an opt-in, provided the offer has appeal. For instance, a marketer can use social networks to promote email newsletters or sales emails.

More aggressively, a marketer can create applications for social networks that encourage email opt-ins. The trick here is to create an interesting application. Games, contests, and fun interactive applications can engage consumers with a brand, thus giving them a reason to want to opt-in to email.

Clearly, there is much left to be written about integrating social networking and email. These ideas should give any marketer exploring social networking a good start. While the holidays will end soon, this story will not.

Chris Marriott is vice president and global managing director for Acxiom Digital.

Email Marketing series: Preview Pane Design (from Lyris)

One of the best ways to learn about effective design is by actually seeing the design in action. In this article, we'll show you seven real-world examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to preview pane design, highlighting both preview pane pitfalls and successes. Consider these samples as you work to improve your recipients' own preview pane experience, as well as your open and click-through rates.

The preview pane, also known as the ‘reading pane’, is the part of the email client typically on the right hand side or at the bottom. It gives recipients a sneak peek at what the email is about. And the way an email displays in the preview pane can make the difference between the recipient opening and interacting with the email, or quickly hitting the 'delete' button.

Especially Important for Welcome, Reactivation Campaigns

Certainly, mature email lists are less likely to encounter ongoing preview pane issues--after all, long-term customers have ostensibly added your email address to their whitelist and are seeing your emails as you intended. But the preview pane is especially important when you're reaching out to first-time customers or attempting to re-engage customers who may not have responded in some time. The first impression (or re-impression) you make will help recipients decide whether to pay attention to your brand or search for the unsubscribe link.

Preview Pane Pitfalls to Avoid

Understanding how your email appears in the preview pane is one of the keys to email design success. Realizing that many email clients block images by default, ignoring how your email looks with images turned off can end up turning off recipients. It is vital that you test your emails in a variety of different email clients, and that you use a separate account that doesn't have your sender address added to its whitelist. By doing this, you'll have the most accurate view of how a first-time or reactivated recipient may experience your email. (Note: Click on images to view full size)

Single-Image Emails Leave Recipients Uninformed

Many emails that appear in the preview pane look very similar to the example above: a large blank square with a red x in the upper left-hand corner, indicating that the image has not been downloaded. Outlook will also populate the 'Right-click here to download pictures' message by default--not exactly the most welcoming, customized message your brand could deliver.

Emails like these rely solely on the subject line and the hopes that the recipient recognizes the 'from' address as the incentive for the email to be opened and fully viewed. When an email looks like this in the preview pane, it's easy to see why a recipient may make the decision to hit delete.

Centered Images Miss the Mark, and Negative Text Sets the Wrong Tone

We see a similar situation with this email. But instead of one red x showing up in the left-hand corner, all that is being displayed is the black background color of the message. The images are actually centered and therefore the 'can't download image' message simply falls off the right-hand side of the screen. When you fully open the email, it displays just fine, but in the preview pane recipients don't get the full effect--and may reach for the delete key as a result.

Notice too the 'Having trouble viewing this email?' message at the top of the email. This is the only text that recipients can read, and the tone of it is negative. Consider a more neutral statement like 'View this email in your browser' as a way to help set the proper tone for your interaction.

More Images, More Potential Issues

Whether you're using one large image or a series of small images, one thing remains the same: if there is no HTML code that is supporting the email, then you simply don't have a lot that you can do to make a good impression in the preview pane. In the email above, you see a handful of red x's--not exactly an invitation to explore further.

This very common design practice also has another potential downside: if your email has an unusually heavy ratio of images to text, many spam filters interpret it as potential spam and score it lower, which may have a negative impact on your inbox deliverability.

Personalization and Relevant Text Provide Incentive to Open

My personal inbox sees between 200-300 emails per day, so I have a vested interest in quickly browsing through emails to see what needs my attention and what can be deleted. The email above was one that was opened rather than tossed, because it did a good job of giving me an incentive to open. How?

First, they've addressed me by name--'Dear Andrew' shows me that there's a good chance that I've interacted with them at some point. Secondly, with a quick glance at the text below I can see that this email has to do with cricket, a sport that I love. Yes, this is definitely an email I intended to receive and want to open and read. With a design that considers the preview pane, this sender is quickly showing me what this email is about, even though no images are displayed.

The Power of HTML to Add Brand Triggers

The example above looks different than other emails we've seen thus far, but how did they get their logo to display in the upper-left hand corner? They didn't. The headline at the top may look like an image, with the attractive colors and the bold font, but it isn't. It's actually a hard-coded HTML that reiterates the site's brand name and mirrors the color scheme used in the company's Web site design. Using HTML code to add brand triggers to your email designs is an excellent way to ensure your emails make it past the preview pane.

Navigation Elements Invite, Capitalized Text Informs, Coupons Inspire Action

The email above does an excellent job of giving recipients an incentive to open and further explore. Notice that the email has navigation elements that are similar to those that may appear on a Web site, and that the navigation elements are repeated as inline links within the body copy. This provides recipients with a very subtle but compelling invitation to browse the site even if they are not responding to a particular offer.

Another technique that this retailer has used is simple, but very effective. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft adds alternative text to the images reminding users that images are not automatically downloaded. But the designer's alternative text also appears. The designer of this email very cleverly decided to capitalize his alternative image text (GREAT CHRISTMAS OFFERS) as a way to help it stand out from the text that the software automatically generates.

Finally, pay attention to the special offer and coupon code in the red box. The bold color helps draw the eye to this very important call-to-action, and showing the coupon code within the preview pane shows the recipient that this is a legitimate offer.

Text-Only Email Can Offer an Effective Alternative, Especially in the Follow Up

After seeing a slew of red x's, one can see how effective a text-only email is when it is displayed in the preview pane. Not only are they effective, but text-only emails are also relatively easy to produce--just put together some compelling copy and go.

One smart way to use text-only emails is as a follow up to HTML emails to capture additional opens and click-throughs that you may have missed. Use your email marketing software to segment your mailing list, sending a text-based version of the HTML email to recipients who did not open. This is something that we've done in our own campaigns: sent an HTML-based email on a Thursday, and then on Friday sent a text-only follow-up message to those who didn't open Thursday's email. Our results have been impressive--our follow up text emails achieved open and click-through rates of between 3-6%.

Preview Pane Design Gives a Competitive Edge

For marketers wanting to fully optimize every possible aspect of your email campaigns, the preview pane offers the potential to maximize often overlooked territory. Through testing, designers and marketers can work to create a preview pane display that meets both marketing and design goals, and gives recipients a good reason to double-click.

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About the Author

Andrew Robinson is the director of international professional services at Lyris, located in the UK office.

Email Marketing: Why we use Silverpop (inspired by an iMedia article)

At Leo Burnett, we use Silverpop for our email marketing needs. We're fortunate to be able to take advantage of ridiculously low cost-per-email rate because of our global contract with Silverpop. But that's not the primary reason why we use Silverpop. It's because its one of the best email service providers (ESPs) that make deliverability a primary concern.

Deliverability refers to whether or not email arrives at its destination, what limits its delivery and what we can positively impact in this process. E-Marketer reported in 2006 that 20.5% of permission-based email do not get delivered. That's an alarming rate if you consider that these recipients have already signified their intention to receive email from you. List hygiene is the primary cause of this thus the onus for email marketeers to keep their lists clean.

Since Jupiter began covering ESPs in 2003, Silverpop has been ranked consistently within the Top 3 ESPs, higher than any ESP ever covered, garnering two #2 rankings and two #1 rankings in the past 4 years. And they boast of a 96% client retention rate, in an industry where the standard is less than 70%.

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I believe that Silverpop's strengths lie within how their Marketer tool and processes are designed for deliverability, and how they evangelize to their clients all the best practices to achieve optimal deliverability.

We've had great experiences with Silverpop, and our clients are impressed.

P.S. I got inspired to write this post because of a Mashable article I found more than a month ago, which I'm re-posting below. Happy reading!

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Email deliverability: The real way to measure it

By Spencer Kollas

April 27, 2009

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Many marketers' email deliverability measurements are incomplete
• True delivery measurement requires both your failure logs and your seed list results
• Tracking your "potential rate" will determine the real value of your campaigns

Next in Email

Lately, I have heard a number of people talking about email delivery rates and what they really mean. While the topic of deliverability is not new to the email space, it is an important one that deserves discussion. Most of the time, when marketers are talking about numbers and various metrics, they invariably focus on opens and clicks, not delivery rates. With that being the case, I wanted to take a look at what delivery rates really are and, more importantly, how you should be looking at them.

One of the things that always makes me laugh is when clients or prospects tell me that some other email service provider promised them 99 percent delivery. Here is the problem with that: It's impossible to make such a promise without knowing anything about your list, your previous practices, or other important factors affecting deliverability. When it comes down to it, the sending platform is only half of the deliverability equation; a sender's practices make up the other half.

There is also confusion around how people look at deliverability. Some folks in the email space think that delivery rates are simply the number of messages sent minus the messages failed, while others look at it strictly from an inbox percentage perspective. I would argue that neither view by itself is correct. Instead, I see it as a combination of the two. While this viewpoint may be a little more complicated and harder to track, it is the most effective way to look at deliverability over the long term. Both of these statistics should be monitored, followed, trended, and acted upon, but they don't tell the whole story. What we really need is a new metric: "productive rates." But, I'll get into that a little later. First, let's discuss these two approaches in more detail.

Tracking your delivery rate based on the number of messages sent minus the number of messages bounced will tell if you are keeping your list clean and not having any issues with ISPs from a blocking standpoint; however, it won't tell you where your messages are landing. Did your messages get to the inbox, the bulk folder, or did the ISP just accept the messages and then never actually deliver them to its users? This practice of "dropping messages on the floor" is not as uncommon as you might think; ISPs do it to help protect their networks and monitor mailings from suspicious senders. This makes it all the more important to know what ultimately happens with your messages.

I'm sure you'll agree that if your message isn't in the inbox, you will get very little response. Fewer and fewer people are checking their spam folders, and that's not surprising since 99 percent are typically messages that they don't want. The increasing number of messages landing in the spam folder makes it less likely that people will take the time to search for a marketing message.

That being said, you might think it's better to use a seed list to determine your inbox delivery and use that as the actual delivery rate. Unfortunately, there's a problem with this approach as well. Seed lists can only offer you a representative sample to show you what likely happened with your mailing, which can't account for users who have changed their default email settings. For example, customers could change their settings to junk any message received from an address not already in their address book. On the other hand, the seed list could show your message arriving as spam, but if the recipient has added your email to the safe sender list, it will arrive in the inbox. In short, there are several different scenarios that could affect these numbers, which is why I am continually stressing the importance of testing.

So, what's the best approach? Should you be looking at your failure logs or your seed list results? The answer is "both." Think of email delivery as a puzzle, where you need to use all the pieces to get the complete picture. If you are missing any piece, the puzzle is incomplete.

Measuring email delivery comes down to using both your failure logs and your seed list results to determine what I call your "campaign potential rate" (i.e., the potential your campaign has to reach customers and get them to act on your email).

In order to figure your campaign potential rate, you must first gather failure data from your email system and then compare it to your seed list results. For example, let's say your delivery rate is 95 percent, but your seed list shows that your mail was sent to the spam folder at MSN/Hotmail, which makes up 30 percent of your overall list. In that case, your actual campaign potential rate would be 65 percent.

While it's possible that more than 65 percent of the people will have received the message in the inbox, this is still a good way to look at your mailings. Not only will this approach allow you to do trending, when you fix the spam problem, you will also be able to measure the actual effect it had on the overall ROI on your campaigns. So, say you earned $10,000 from the campaign with the 65 percent campaign potential rate, but the next campaign got to the inbox at MSN/Hotmail and you earned $15,000. You can now see the direct impact of getting junked at MSN/Hotmail. This is very valuable information that can be used to push for the best practices that will help ensure inbox delivery.

The bottom line is that you should use all the tools available to you to better understand your delivery rates and the overall potential of your campaigns. No one metric should be used to evaluate your email marketing programs because they are all interconnected.

Good luck and good sending.

Spencer Kollas is director of delivery services for StrongMail Systems.