From iMedia: Social Media & Intellectual Property RIghts

How to avoid getting sued over social media

By Anthony J. Biller

February 02, 2010

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Traditional intellectual property rights still apply to the internet and online forums
• Make sure your agreements give you the right to use material in a new form of distribution
• If your copyright is violated, put the offending party on notice

The online arena is still an emerging landscape for intellectual property (IP) where it is easy to misstep in trying to avoid IP landmines. Whether you are a small business looking for content to help get your website up and running or suddenly find an image or text you created on another company's site, it's possible you haven't taken the appropriate steps to protect yourself and prevent IP theft.

Marketers and online content creators often struggle to understand how traditional IP best practices apply to internet content. Major companies like Toyota and Skittles have recently come under fire for their usage of user-created media.

When Toyota launched a new microsite to promote the 4Runner SUV, the company did what others before had done: aggregated content from social networks to help promote the brand. This strategy didn't necessarily break the mold. After all, Skittles launched a similar website earlier this year with a much-publicized social media home page including Twitter feeds, comments from Facebook fans, and content from Flickr and YouTube.

Skittles ran into a problem with the inappropriate, and sometimes vulgar, content that appeared on the site, Toyota faced accusations of copyright infringement from photographers who had posted images on Flickr.

Social networks are free and flourish with user-generated content. The platform lends itself to a sharing environment, where copyrights and trademarks often aren't considered. However, as these sites become increasingly popular venues for marketing, a basic understanding of how IP law applies to online property will help you avoid finding yourself on either side of a dispute.

Here are a few simple steps to prevent an online intellectual property theft accusation:

1. Traditional intellectual property rights still apply to the internet and online forums.
There is a misconception in some quarters that if content appears online, particularly in a social forum or blog, it's public domain material. That's false.

An author of a statement and a trademark owner still control the rights to their copyrights and brands when they place their materials on the internet. One common element for online content is that the forum host typically posts a policy that notifies contributors that by placing content on the host website, the poster is granting the host a license to use and republish that content. While such policies might provide a valid license for the website host to republish material actually owned by its posters, it provides no license or rights to third parties visiting such websites.

2. Register your IP and know the scope of your licenses.
These are fundamental prerequisites to IP management. Copyrights protect expressions, which include a wide range of on- and offline content including writings, drawings, songs, pictures and movies. Trademarks protect identity. Registering your copyrights and trademarks enhances your rights, provides significant leverage in enforcing those rights and, in the case of trademarks, provides constructive notice nationwide of your rights.

Also, if you obtain permission to use material offline, you can't assume that it's fine for you to post or distribute that material electronically. You need to verify that the preexisting license included the right to use the material in the new form of distribution.

3. Prominently display your IP protection.
Many people copy online content out of ignorance. To help prevent this, post your notice of copyright in near proximity to your works. The notice should state the year the work was completed, the legal name of the entity/person that owns the work, and the copyright symbol.

The following is a standard format: ©2009 by Coats and Bennett, PLLC. A copyright footer on each page is not highly effective for giving notice that particular works on the page are copyright protected. If you operate a high-content site, it's a good idea to dedicate a page to "copyright information" where you state your position on other people using your content.

4. Understand who really owns the content you use.
Even if you incorporate properly licensed art in your brand's online presence, look behind the license. While you may have licensed the right to use an image from a particular author, does the image contain elements that the author has no rights to license for advertising?

For example, if you license a photograph of a person driving a sports car for use in an advertisement, you are most likely only licensing the copyright in that picture. If the person or car is identifiable, has the person in the picture and the product owner licensed or otherwise agreed to the use of their images in your advertisement? Such embedded images raise trademark and publicity rights, beyond the overall copyright.

Also, explore if agreements that were in place before you put the content online give the right to use the material in a new form of distribution.

5. Take action.
If your copyright is violated, put the offending party on notice that they must immediately take down the image or text, or properly attribute credit and pay your licensing fee. Because there is a third party involved, you can also put the ISP and web host on notice that the website is violating your rights. If you receive notice that you are violating a copyright, react quickly. An uninformed mistake can typically be rectified, but you may face serious consequences if you ignore fair warning.

6. Don't confuse copyright infringement and plagiarism.
Copyright infringement occurs when someone makes an unauthorized copy of someone else's expression, or makes an unauthorized derivative that is substantially similar to the original works (when comparing the similarities). Plagiarism is passing off someone else's ideas or thoughts as your own. While it may get you expelled from some schools and professions, plagiarism itself is not illegal. Plagiarism might also involve copyright infringement, but not typically.

Plagiarism is avoided by giving proper attribution to others when you use and repeat their thoughts and ideas. Attribution avoids the charge of plagiarism, it is not, however, a defense or excuse for copyright infringement.

Conclusion
Managing copyrights and trademarks online typically involves applying traditional best practices and law to this new medium. Expanding to new forums like online sites can help grow your brand and connect with consumers, but also means that you have to steer clear of IP infringement and protect your content.

The old adage "if it looks too good to be true, it is" applies more than ever to online content. It is easy to copy and paste content onto your site or post it online without a copyright. However, this practice leaves open the possibility of an ensuing legal battle that could be far more costly and time-consuming than following best practices from the onset.

The potential consequences for infringing someone else's copyrights and/or trademarks include loss of your profits associated with the conduct, the other party's damages, enhanced damages, attorneys fees, and a permanent injunction prohibiting further publication, as well as corrective advertising explaining the past infringement. Under certain circumstances, a party can be liable for up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each instance of willful copyright infringement.

The IP rights landmines are real, but with proper attention and knowledge, they can be avoided.

Anthony J. Biller, Esq., is a member of Coats and Bennett and leads the firm's litigation practice.

From iMedia: 3 metrics for evaluating site performance

By Jason Prescott

January 29, 2010

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Marketers blame search providers for low conversions, but the key is going back to their website to find out why users aren't converting
• Identify your site goals
• Know the difference between hits, visits, and conversions, then monitor page views and time spent on site

As CEO of several vertical search engines and directories, I often overhear conversations between my customers and salespeople that tell me marketers are constantly making the wrong decisions after installing Google Analytics because they don't know what to do with the data. Analytics is a vital component for success in the B2B business world, yet this tool is greatly misunderstood.

When asked, "Doesn't every marketer understand the importance of analytics?" Google's Avanish Kaushik told Search Engine Land: "Numbers are hard to come by on this, but in my humble experience, a tiny fraction of people who should use data productively access it, and a tiny fraction of that actually ends up using data effectively. We, as a universe, have a long way to go."

Save the date! Looking for more web analytics best practices? Attend ad:tech San Francisco, April 19-21. Learn more.

Many small businesses are rushing into analytics without knowing how to use the software. They have no benchmarks and absolutely no understanding of the metrics provided and what they mean. A lot of the problems are due to poorly constructed websites. While many marketers blame the search provider for poor traffic and low conversions, the key is going back to their website to find out why users aren't converting. Perhaps these consumers are converting in other ways and the marketer just doesn't know it; the consumers could be making phone calls, bookmarking and coming back a few weeks later, requesting a catalog, or visiting a trade show and forgetting to mention where they first heard about the site.

Conversion attribution
From my observations, few marketers bother to define and track a conversion or a user. Even fewer recognize the attribution problem in SEM. In a B2B world, not all conversions come from the first click because many products are complex and have longer sales cycles. Some users may need telephone assistance, while others put a product or service on their "to do" list.

Additionally, marketers can use multiple media in an ad campaign. As a result, it's hard to attribute conversions directly to online search advertising.

Due to the sophistication of search algorithms, paid search is complex to begin with, and understanding analytics data is difficult as well. Kaushik has an excellent post on Occam's Razor about conversion attribution that can give you a better understanding of your SEM campaign performance. He covers the following five points in this post:

1. Identifying keyword "arbitrage" opportunities
2. Focusing on "what's changed"
3. Analyzing visual impression share and computing lost revenue
4. Embracing the ROI distribution report
5. Zeroing in on the actual user search query (and match type)

Tip: If you're new to analytics, don't rely on sites like Compete or Alexa because they don't count incoming paid traffic to websites due to their own unique user-defined criteria. To make a decision based solely on the reporting metrics of an independent analysis system without transparent rating measurements would be foolish.

Three simple metrics to better site performance

It's important to know your site goals and how to determine whether or not you are achieving them. Analytics is the foundation for your online business strategy and can make the difference between success and failure. Below are three tips that can help you improve your site performance.

1. Identify your site goals. Specify how many conversions you want per week or month. Get a baseline by monitoring with Google Analytics. Then, if you aren't meeting your goal, find out why users aren't converting by studying your conversion funnel. Many times, minor adjustments are all you need to guide users to the "submit order" button. For most sites in the B2B world, it could be a sign-up or registration form and not necessarily an order form. Also, Google Analytics allows for benchmarks to be set. If conversions are low, it could likely be the user interface on your website.

2. Know the difference between hits, visits, and conversions.

1. Hits: Defined as a server request for an item on a specific webpage (e.g., image, animation, download). When a browser opens a page in your site, you can get many hits, but they don't translate into traffic or conversions.
2. Visits: Defined as a user landing on a page in your site or navigating to other pages before exiting and counting as one visit. This metric is useful because you know how many visitors go to your site and how many items were requested by the server from each page. The "new visitors" and "returning visitors" metrics help you analyze how much new business you are attracting and compare it to repeat customers.
3. Conversions: Defined as the number of visitors to your site who completed a pre-defined goal or action (such as a purchase, download, or registration). This is your most important metric.

3. Monitor page views and time spent on site. Visits can be further examined to help you learn more about visitor behavior. Monitor how many page views a consumer had during a visit and the time spent on those pages. Generally, you want users to visit more pages on your site and stay as long as possible. Analytics can tell you which pages are more popular and which need work to gain popularity.

Monitoring these metrics can tell you a lot about what your site visitors are doing so you can fine tune your site with changes that will increase visitors, page views, and time spent on site. This will translate into more visitors and conversions.

Conclusion
When it comes to analytics, there is no silver bullet, but knowing what metrics to focus on and which to ignore can help you make simple changes to your site that can have a big impact on conversions. Set your site goals, determine whether or not you are achieving them, and then take the necessary steps to improve your site's performance. At the end of day, tribal knowledge of your landscape can be a great indicator. You can also be observant of what others do in your industry, and implement what works for them.

If you see your competition advertising on a website that you know is actively engaged in your industry (because you see that company at trade shows, in print media, or sponsoring media events), then chances are, the same website will be a solid play for your ads, so give them a shot.

In any type of advertising, it is frequency and consistency that matter. Most people, especially B2B customers, will not respond to an ad unless they've seen it many times over. Keep promoting your brand, maintain your site with fresh content and image changes, use internal monitoring mechanisms other than analytics, and you'll be well on your way to success.

Jason Prescott is CEO of TopTenWholesale.

From iMedia: 3 qualities that all digital talent must have (VIDEO LINK)

iMedia asked some top digital agencies to tell us what characteristics they look for when hiring new team members. Watch to find out what ranks at the top.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/25766.asp?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ImediaConnectionAll+(iMedia+Connection:+All+Stories)##

From iMedia: Why top brands struggle with mobile

By Andy Bovingdon

January 28, 2010

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Even when a mobile page is available, the user is often presented with the traditional version
• Simplify mobile payment systems so they provide choice and consistency
• Established metrics systems typically use unreliable factors, such as JavaScript

With a rapidly increasing number of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones, the world's leading brands and developers are committing serious resources to engaging with their customers via the mobile channel.

However, even with considerable amounts of time, effort, and budget committed to building mobile solutions, many of these companies are still making simple mistakes that are preventing them from delivering a good mobile experience.

So, why are big industry players that are successful on the web still struggling to understand mobile? The answer is simple: Mobile is often assumed to be a smaller version of the desktop web. Companies fail to realize it is actually a much more complex platform where the usual online rules typically don't apply.

If you look at the mobile market as a whole, you can see that, with nearly 4 billion mobile phones, its size and reach are vastly bigger and more diverse than the desktop internet. New and more sophisticated handsets are launched into the market almost daily, each with very different capabilities, browsers, and settings. With such complexity, solutions that work on the desktop internet often do not translate easily onto the mobile internet.

Here are three key areas and typical scenarios where some of the big players are failing on mobile:

1. Mobile search
The division between desktop and mobile web pages often remains unclear, and leading search engines still regularly index and return desktop results on mobile. Even when a mobile page is available, the user is often presented with the traditional version, which doesn't render properly on the phone.

With companies like Google putting a lot of effort into building mobile applications, like Google Maps, it is not surprising to see core businesses like search fail to deliver acceptable results for mobile consumers. In contrast, Yahoo now focuses on a web strategy, and the quality of its search results has improved as a result.

As an example, I recently searched for British Airways using Google on a Nokia feature phone. But rather than being presented with the British Airways mobile site, which is a great and well-designed site, I was sent to the PC version instead. The page had a landscape layout, which did not render well on my phone, and it took a lot of scrolling to find what I was looking for.

But it is not just the search engines that are to blame. Many brands are still failing to offer a mobile optimized version of their sites. In fact, in a recent study by Bango that surveyed online brands, many admitted they do not even know how much mobile-originated traffic is hitting their desktop website.

Although most phones have very capable web browsers and can display full websites, companies should not rely on this. There is still no substitute for a properly designed mobile site. Today's made-for-mobile websites present relevant content in a way that is easy for a mobile user to read and navigate. Sites can even be made to look like applications.

2. Mobile payment
Mobile comes with a powerful operator billing solution built in. Consumers can pay their phone bill with a single click, so it is a real surprise that so many brands are still unable to give their customers a good payment experience. Often, customers are forced to enter detailed registration information, an operator network, and phone number, or send complex text messages before a payment can be made. And if the consumer connects via Wi-Fi, they often cannot pay at all.

One example of this is the Nokia's Ovi store. Nokia, like many others, has followed the app store trend, but despite its many attempts to develop a successful app store, the journey to achieve this has been more than testing. As with many other app stores, the Ovi checkout process can be a frustrating experience. In order to purchase content, you must pre-register details on multiple pages; to complete the task and make the payment, the consumer needs to have a considerable desire to get the application.

Nokia needs to realize that supporting multiple stores across multiple devices and operating systems is not the way forward. The complexity, differences, and restrictions it imposes inevitably impacts the consumer payment experience, increases customer care costs, and reduces sales for the application developers. A web-browser-based distribution model is much more scalable and delivers far wider benefits to the handset. It also delivers the same slick one-click payment experience that many other content providers offer on the mobile web. In short, it provides choice and consistency.

3. Analytics and CRM
Many web analytics tools have failed to replicate their success on mobile, including the world's most popular web analytics tool, Google Analytics. But why is this? Google Analytics, like many popular web analytics tools, relies on JavaScript to collect data and cookies to identify unique visitors -- methods that are simply not reliable on mobile, even on the latest smartphones.

Perhaps with its current focus on the Android app store and tracking application usage, Google has forgotten that the vast majority of campaigns are delivered through the mobile web. The company has acknowledged these issues in some of its recent release notes, so only time will tell if it will refocus its mobile efforts and replicate its online success on the mobile channel.

The factors and solutions

Understanding and overcoming the challenges of mobile and taking advantage of the massive benefits it brings is essential for brands to succeed. Here are a couple of the top factors that must be considered:

Visitor identification
Unlike the PC, mobile phones have unique identities -- from built-in serial codes to the unique mobile phone numbers we all use. These identities are the key to delivering services that elevate mobile above the desktop web we are familiar with.

Mobile identification facilitates secure, single-click mobile payments and is crucial to analyzing the usage of websites, campaigns, and applications with any degree of accuracy.

Mobile phones and internet connections
Most phones connect to the internet via a gateway, a mobile web connection provided by the operator or handset manufacturer. Many phones today also come with Wi-Fi, especially the latest smartphones. These phones can switch connections, and consumers are becoming savvier when browsing, choosing between their operator and a local Wi-Fi connection to get the best performance.

This habit poses identification issues and a whole range of usability problems, especially when paying for a download. Brands need to use a reliable mobile payment solution that is able to identify every user, including those connected via Wi-Fi. This way, they will be able to provide a consistent experience across all connections.

These factors, among others, pose challenges for brands delivering services on mobile. Companies need to understand them in order to get the fundamentals of mobile right. When developing a mobile solution, it is important to realize that mobile is different; there is more to consider, but the results can be far better than typical digital campaigns. Don't just use the same tools and techniques from the internet and expect them to work.

Andy Bovingdon is VP of product marketing at Bango.

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: 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%.

•

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.