The Creative Side

In an effort to consolidate all our blogging resources, from now on we’ll only be posting to one website, http://blog.listrak.com/.

See you there!

There are a number of extremely valuable links to a wealth of email marketing information that have been recently posted out to the Listrak resources area.  Here are a few you may have missed:

Webinars

Secrets of Social Media Marketing
Special Guest - Paul Gillin

The impact of New Media on effective direct response copywriting
Special Guest - Herschell Gordon Lewis

White Papers

221 Email Marketing Do’s and Don’ts: Best Practices Reference Guide

Email Marketing Strategies to Maximize Returns in a Struggling Economy

Podcast

Email Marketing Today Podcast

A few years ago, we released the Geo Tracking system within the Listrak application.  Listrak clients have come to appreciate the geographically targeted data that they have been able to pull from this system. There has always been the question though: “Can we get even more granular with this segmentation?”  Well, I’m happy to announce that with this latest Geo Tracking update, Listrak users can now navigate from the world view, to the country view, to the state or province view, and all the way to the zip code level to see open, read, and click through data.

The other major upgrade with this release was to the visual mapping area of Geo Tracking.  The maps that we had in the past had become a bit dated and we had requests for more interactivity in order to sort through the amount of location based data available.  With this update, we have integrated our data with Google Maps.  Now, using a familiar mapping interface, you are able to navigate and view your data displayed on a global map and zoom all the way down to the individual zip code level.

Check out this video to see a demonstration of the Geo Tracking and Google Maps Integration.

In the email marketing world, we are always discussing segmentation and targeting your message to your individual contacts.  The more relevant the message, the more likely your contacts are going to take action and the more unlikely they are to unsubscribe form your list or worse report your message as spam.

At Listrak, we will continue to work towards providing you with segmentation data, like the Geo-data in this feature, to help you take your email marketing campaigns to the next level.

If you have any questions about the Geo Tracking updates, please email us at support@listrak.com.  If you are not an existing Listrak user and would like a more in depth tour, please contact one of email marketing experts.

Yesterday, a group of us took a trip down to Philly to visit and make some final arrangements for our Email Marketing Days Conference coming up from Sept. 7th to the 9th.  This conference is really going to be incredible.

We’ve talked a lot about the amazing speakers and value of the conference sessions; I wanted to take some time today to discuss the venue and special events.

From the amazing art and design seen throughout the building to the friendly staff, the Lowes Hotel will be a fantastic setting for our event!  The opening welcome reception on Sunday night, September 7th will be at the Loews’ restaurant SoleFood, so this was our first stop for lunch.  Wow, the food was delicious!  This chic restaurant is beautiful and will be an awesome way to kick off the conference.  We reviewed the menu for the evening’s event… I can tell you there will be a wide range of delectable foods as well as an open bar for conference attendees.  It’ll be the perfect place to get to know each other as well as talk to any of the Listrak staff face to face.

Speaking of meeting up with us, make sure if you have already registered for the conference that you also register for a one-on-one session.  This is your opportunity to talk directly to session speakers and Listrak email marketing experts about your campaigns, your issues, and ask your questions.

On Monday night, September 8th, we will have our networking event at Lucky Strike.  We took a walk down to Lucky Strike from the hotel (about a block and a half walk).  The “bowling lounge” atmosphere will make for a lot of fun! I love the mix of retro and modern design of this place.  If you’re not a “bowler” you can enjoy a game of pool or there’s plenty of space to sit back and relax while enjoying a drink and more delicious food.

If you haven’t registered for the conference yet, make sure you do by the end of the month to get in with the early bird pricing.  If you are going, make sure that you flag me down and say hi! 

I look forward to meeting you in September!

The revisions to the CAN-SPAM Act that were published 45 days ago take effect today. If you have not become familiar with the latest updates, please read the “New CAN-SPAM Rules for 2008” article we posted back in May.

Other Resources:
FTC Press Release
Full Federal Register Notice

In our ongoing email marketing educational series, Matt Elliott and I presented a webinar titled “List Management Strategies for Email Marketers” on Tuesday.  We discussed a wide range of list management topics including initial acquisition best practices, clean list maintenance, subscriber lifecycle management, list segmentation, dynamic profiling, and much more.

The webinar is now available to watch on demand and the slides are available in a PDF format.

Of interest to those who tuned into last month’s webinar “Creating Effective HTML Email Campaigns” there are two new checklists that have been published by the Email Design Roundtable of the Email Experience Council: Code QA Testing Checklist and Email Design Checklist.  These checklists are available for free this week, so go download them now!

We had record setting registration and attendance for our webinar this past week entitled “Creating Effective HTML Email Campaigns.” The lack of standards in email clients continues to confuse many email marketers. In this webinar we looked at best practices and strategies for targeting the lowest common denominator for the widest coverage and compatibility with email clients.

The webinar video as well as a PDF version of the slides is now posted out to the site. In conjunction with the webinar, we also published a whitepaper this week entitled “HTML Design and Rendering Tactics for Improved Email Deliverability and Increased Response.”

In the webinar we talked about the Email Standards Project. I highly recommend checking out the site if you are attempting to use CSS in your creative. They have lists specific to the individual email clients and the CSS attributes that they support based on an “acid test”. You can also join the community to help fight for email client standards and accessibility.

Until standards are adopted universally throughout email clients, it will continue to be an uphill battle when working with email creative. If you stick to the basics, keep things simple, target the lowest common denominator and understand the tips we discussed in this webinar, you’ll be on your way to designing email creative that is both beautiful (even with images turned off) and that improves the conversion rates of your email campaigns.

Just remember… test, test, test!

After receiving two emails today from very reputable marketing industry newsletters with “frozen” animated GIF images, I felt I needed to post on this. Unfortunately, Outlook 07 will not render the animation of an animated GIF image… It will only display the first frame.

In the case of the newsletters I received today, the images were from customers who paid for this advertising space. In one newsletter, the image was just a big empty black box.  In the other, an advertisement displayed as a big blue banner with a small logo in the bottom right corner that I’m sure would have remained throughout the animation.

If you are going to use a GIF animation in your email, make sure that you contain any important information in the initial frame.  Look at the first frame as if it was a still image because that is how it will appear to many contacts on your list.  Feel free to continue the animation from there… just don’t start with an empty box!

Today we launched Listrak 4.2 with some amazing new features that you can use to take your email marketing campaigns to the next level. Listrak users now have the ability to take any contact level report such as opens, reads, or URL clicks from a message or a group of messages in a campaign and create a profile segment from it.  Using GeoTracking, you could literally target contacts that clicked a specific link in New York between 1pm and 2pm on a specific day. Dynamic profiling gives you the power of data manipulation directly within Listrak without have to export reports, work with the profiling data externally and re-import.

The addition of dynamic profiling to the list of Listrak features essentially closes the targeting and segmentation loop within the system.  From an initial engagement campaign, you could assign profiling attributes based on click behavior. Specific areas of your next message could use this segmentation data making use of the dynamic content system to show creative that is specifically targeted to the initial user behavior. Further segmentation could be assigned based on the behavior exhibited in this message and be used for future dynamic content. This will enable you to generate content that is extremely targeted and relevant to each contact.

The Profiling Summary Report now allows Listrak users to drill down to view contact reports that will display all contacts that have a value for an attribute.  You can even take this a step further to generate a contact level report for only those contacts that have a specific value assigned for the chosen attribute. It is extremely convenient to now have access to these reports directly in the Listrak application rather than having to export data in order to expose it.

A new visual tracking feature went live with Listrak 4.2: Heatmaps.  Heatmaps allow you to visually identify the areas of your HTML creative that received the highest click through rates by a “heat index color” overlay. This report can assist you in deciding what adjustments need to be made to your message creative in order to achieve the desired click conversions.

Another feature that went live is the option of adding a list unsubscribe to the header of your messages. Microsoft’s Live Mail is the only email provider that is actively using this header at the moment, but other’s like Yahoo and Gmail have discussed implementing it in the future.  If this option is enabled, any Live Mail contact that would receive the message and has added you to their safe sender list would see an unsubscribe link rather than the report spam link.  This unsubscribe link would have the same functionality as the normal unsubscribe link in your email, but would be labeled in Listrak reports as List-Unsubscribe.

There are a number of other additions that have been made.  Check out the release notes under the support and information menu to view the full list and links off to the help system for each new feature.

In case you missed it, we have posted out the “Dynamic Content in Action: DiscountBeautyCenter.com Case Study Webinar” that took place yesterday.  If you are interested in learning about how to take your email campaigns to the next level by using segmentation and extreme targeting to increase the relevancy of your email to each contact, I would highly suggest checking it out. The results of the Discount Beauty Center Case Study speak for themselves.

Feel free to contact me with any questions you might have.  Over the next two months I will be attending the EEC Email Evolution Conference in San Diego (Feb 11-13), the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami (Feb 24-27), and the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC (March 17-20).  If you will be attending any of these events and would like to meet up, please let me know!