Email4Thought

Our UK office has moved!

Our UK office has moved and we're very excited!

Our new home is now in London so please make sure you update your contact details for us.

Address: 16-19 Southampton Place, Holborn, WC1 2AJ, London
Phone: +44 (0) 207 745 7124

View a map of our new location

Lycos Europe to shut down email service on February 15th

Lycos Europe is shutting down its email services as of February 15th 2009. This means that you only have a couple of weeks to obtain the new contact information for your European Lycos and tripod email users.

The domains which will be affected are:

• mail.lycos.de, mail.lycos.co.uk, mail.lycos.it, mail.lycos.nl, mail.lycos.es
• caramail.lycos.fr, caramail.fr, multimania.com
• firemail.de
• jubii.co.uk, jubii.com, jubii.de, jubii.dk, jubii.es, jubii.fr,
  jubii.it, jubii.nl

Please note only the European domains will be affected. The US based domains; lycos.com, lycos-inc.com, lycosmail are not currently being effected by this shutdown.

Thanks to our friends over at emailkarma for this info

Aussie's are buying more online

News Digital Media’s latest Digital Insight Report, was released today and they found that:

    * More than 50% have increased their expenditure on cars and groceries online during the past six months. At least 33% are spending more on travel and technology and more than 25% are spending more on financial services, home entertainment, music downloads, entertainment bookings and games/software.
    * Approximately 40% of respondents now spend more than an hour each week researching their purchasing decisions – up from less than 30% six months ago.
    * Time spent online is continuing to grow with nearly half of all respondents now spending more time online than they did six months ago, with those respondents averaging more than 1.5 hours online each day.

Read the article

The True Secret of Successful Email Marketing

The October issue of Infobox is out:

We have some great articles lined up in this month's issue...

The legendary Bill McCloskey reveals what makes an email campaign successful and gives some great examples; Stephanie Miller of Return Path looks at how we can improve our ROI and Skip Fidura of OgilvyOne reviews the changing role of marketing over the years and comes to an interesting conclusion.
And guess what?... they all have something in common...but I won't spoil the surprise - you'll have to read them to find the common denominator.

Read the newsletter

New Name, New Look.....

You may (or may not) have noticed that this blog has slowly been evolving...so, falling in line with this blog evolution I thought that it was the right time to have a change in looks as well as name.

If you're a regular reader you will have realised that this blog tends to deal with more than Ezemail's new features and products, and so the new name - email4thought - seemed to better encompass the wider scope of this blog.

Love to hear any feedback as to your thoughts and looking forward to bringing you more email4thought (...yes, it has 2 meanings!)

Kath

Become a Fan of Ezemail on Facebook

If you're a Facebook user, then why not become a fan of Ezemail on Facebook? All the blog posts are listed there which makes it an easy way to check the Ezemail blog (if you haven't already subscribed -which I encourage you to!) http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Ezemail/22125934279?ref=mf

Labels: facebook

Blog Olympics - Passing on the stick

The DMA Email Marketing Blog has been named by 2 esteemed email marketing blogs, Be Relevant and Denise Cox's Blog, as being on their list of favourites...so congratulations to all our contributors! You can read Tamara's posts here and Denise's post here. The idea behind this is that we're expected to pass the baton on and list 7 of our favourite blogs - with the rules being that we have to link back to the blog(s) which passed on the stick, but at the same time we're unable to include them in our list of 7 favourite blogs. So, on behalf of all of the DMA Email Blog contributors, here are 7 (+1) of my favourite blogs: Email Experience Blog The Email Wars Getting Email Delivered Email Insider Email Marketing Water Cooler Smith-Harmon Creative Review No man is an iland Email Karma Original Posted: DMA Email Marketing Blog

Labels: DMA

DMA Conference Feb 08 Takeaways

Earlier this year in February, the DMA Email Marketing Council held "Effective Email Marketing" conferences in Bristol and Edinburgh. The events were very well attended and feedback was extremely good. As chair of them both I had the pleasure of attending both conferences and here are some of my 'takeaways'. Phil Singh, emailvision gave some great pointers on building your list, database management and segmentation.

• In answer to a JupiterResearch quesion: "how do you acquire email addresses for your email marketing efforts", 83% of respondants selected 'web site registration'.
• Make it quick and easy to subscribe
• Give newsletter examples when subscribing
• Always obtain permission with affirmative consent (i.e don't use negative tick boxes "If you don't want to recieve emails, tick here")
• Let them know the 'From address' so they can add it to their address book
• Only 32% of forms had privacy policy highlighted (JupiterResearch executive survey 2006)
• Remove spam flag addresses: go through your database and remove all addresses which contain abuse@, postmaste@ or nospam@.

Tink Taylor, Dotmailer and Nick Cole, Blonde shared how to create effective emails:

• Rendering: 19% of recipients assume an email is spam if it fails to render properly and 19% of recipients delete mails entirely constructed from images assuming it is blank
• Friendly 'From' address: For B2B, a known contact may work best. For B2C, company branding is extremely important.
• Subject line: 35% of email users open messages because of what is contained in the subject line (JupiterResearch) and consider the length & key message
• Consumers deal with more than 250 emails per week (Forrester 2007)
• 32% of consumers thin that email is a great way to find out about products or promotions (Forrester 2007)
• Email delivers the most value when they offer a timely, coherent message in a tone the reader can relate to.
• There should be a clear call to action above the fold, (i.e within the preview pane) with other paths elsewhere in the email to entice the user to take action.
• Image Blocking: The message should be able to be read without graphic aids.
• 83.2% of marketers listed email as #1 advertising tactic (Datran Media 2007)

Originally Posted: dmaemailblog.com

Labels: creatives, Email Rendering, Subscriber Forms, takeaways

Are we conditioning our non-responders?

I attended the list attrition presentation at the EEC Conference in February and as expected, the subject of non responders arose. I guess my concern is similar to Stephanie Miller's in her recent blog about subscribers becoming hooked on discounts, so much so, that they don't respond to regular emails. Albeit a different subject matter - the principle is the same. As marketers, we need to use re-activating campaigns wisely so that we don't condition our subscribers to tuning out from our regular email campaigns unless they are immediately 'rewarded'. Ideally we need to encourage long term re-activation of the subscriber, rather than rewarding those who are in it for the 'goodies' and then sit dormant until another reward is offered. In this recent interview for the DMA UK's newsletter, Stefan Pollard has some suggestions for long term subscriber reactivation and better still, just plain keeping them interested. Originally Posted: Be Relevant

Labels: inactives, non responders

Email Evolution Conference Takeaways, San Diego, February 2008

In February the EEC held its inaugural conference at San Diego. It was an agreed success and those who attended came away knowing more than when they came (always a good thing!). These are some of the 'takeaways' I took with me when I left. Consumers David Daniels of JupiterResearch said: • 42% of consumers are interested in receiving relevant emails • 51% of consumers unsubscribe when the offer and content is not of interest • 29% of email marketers are using click behaviour to segment Online David also went onto say that • There's a parity between watching TV and being online (same amount of time is spent on doing both) • Main activity online is email Top sales influencer before purchasing • Internet 39% • TV 18% • 80% of online buyers say product views are helpful when making purchasing decisions, according to David. Spam & Phishing Chip House, Exact Target quoted: • 79% hit spam button when don't know sender • 64% never look in bulk folder Craig Speizle, chairman of the Authentication & Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) and director of online safety and security at Microsoft says that authentication is the answer to phishing. He went onto say that: • Up to 80% of email from leading brands is spoofed. • 1 million phishing attempts weekly, are stopped by Internet Explorer 7 Attrition • Treat honeymooners differently. They should be the most active during this period. After 60 days they start to drop off. • The earlier a customer is active, the more active they will be. • Mindsets need to be changed so that a communications stream is being developed not an email marketing program Brand and Style Suzanne Norman, Emma had some wise advice for email design: • Craft an experience for your campaign • Think of your email as part of a brand experience • Compare your print piece with your email piece. They need to be similar in quality as well as design and reflect your brand in both. • Invest in great creative, as spammers don't. This will assist in having your emails delivered. • Don't forget to extend the brand to the landing page. Mobile Marketing Michelle Eichner, Pivotal Veracity had some interesting mobile marketing figures: • Prediction: There will be email in every pocket • Smart phone sales have surpassed laptop and PC sales. • Mobile design has very special requirements and there is very little standardization in mobiles - which makes designing for them a challenge. • Links need to be kept as short as possible in order for them to be usable. • Emails should be less than 20Kb with images. The same goes for landing pages and websites. • Design for images off and use alt tags • A potential concern is that unsubscribe links don't work in all mobiles due to the varying degree of link clickability. • Different providers also allow things - they can turn things on and off -which is another thing to validate Blackberry: • They currently vary in their rendering ability - some show text, some just show code. • Need to send in multi-part otherwise it will just show the raw code. So you always need to send the text version. Windows Mobile 6: • They support HTML and images. • It allows you to hyperlink words. Iphone: • Iphones supports HTML and images Palm:• Palm shows HTML, but no images • Palm supports alt tags and allows you to hyperlink words Symbian:• Renders the text of an HTML version. It skips all code within the email. • Therefore it drops all HTML within an

tag, therefore as a work around you would have to use http://nameoflink.html. Blogging • Q: Why blog? A: It's a powerful marketing tool • It is brilliant for Search Engine Optimisation as the content is continually changing and updating the website with fresh content. • It is recommended to have some form of editing process to check spelling and content. Search and marketing (SAM)• Most budget increases have gone to SAM • 41% browse (using search engines) - (Jupiter Research) • 48% email (Jupiter Research)

Labels: Email Evolution Conference