Outlook junk folders are dangerous territory for email marketers. Make one tiny mistake in your HTML, and you can unwittingly cut your broadcast response rates by 25% or more. And yet it doesn’t need to be this way…and you don’t need a high-end email service provider to solve it for you. Here’s how:

1. Get a copy of Outlook 2003 (don’t go to 2007 if you don’t have to).
2. Set your “Junk Folder Rules” to “High”. This is the default for anyone installing it for the first time. Assume that’s the minimum bar you need to achieve.
3. Do NOT whitelist your broadcasting “from” address…just let the emails come into your inbox with the highest chance of getting caught as possible.
4. Send yourself a “test” before every broadcast, and check to make sure it arrives in the inbox.
5. If it’s in the junk folder, here are some likely culprits, edit it, and resend:

• spam words/phrases (duh) such as “40% off”, “sale”, “discount”, etc. etc.
• focus on the subject line and try to alter it (shorter, alternative wording, punctuation)
• look for odd url’s and links (we find that URLs are often the culprit):
  - don’t use url’s with numbers in them
  - use full domains (http://www.this.com = good, http://this.com = bad)
  - try to use only ONE url domain. Lots of different links to different sites can be a problem
  - links that do not end in a file extension (e.g. “.htm”, “.asp” are better than
     http://www.this.com/asdf342 )
• emails that have a lot of images, or have a large single image can get caught. The onslaught of image-spam within the last year is to thank for that (image-spam is where the sender hides their message in an image so as to get around spam-filters).

It’s not that hard, frankly, yet I just went to my own junk folder in Outlook, and within the last two hours I have emails from Marketing Sherpa, MarketingProfs, Saks, and Williams-Sonoma - all sitting innocently next to Cialis offers, Webcam sites, and who-knows-what from China. Imagine that: two of the top online advisors of email-best-practices have their emails regularly go into Outlook junk folders. Say what?

Outlook’s junk folder algorythm is pretty darned good, but it does catch the occasional email I really want to read. Personally, I scan and delete my junk folder inventory 3-4 times/day. Microsoft updates the Outlook junk-filter rules all the time (approx once every 3-4 weeks), and there’s no way to legitimately reverse engineer it…which means the marketer just has to be smart…and it only takes 2 minutes to conduct this free self-test. We often focus so much attention on AOL, Yahoo and others that we forget that Outlook represents between 30 and 65% of your email list, on average!

One final reason to take the time to fix this: Outlook’s junk-folder system will convert your message to text, and even (at times) disable all the links…which is highly upsetting to any VP of Marketing who prides themselves on quality branding.  I encourage you to peruse your own junk folder and see what I mean - it’s not pretty. If most consumers are like me, when I see a big brand name in the junk folder I actually start to second-guess the quality of that company as well.

Isn’t it interesting that so many organizations these days use multiple vendors for their different departments for their email marketing needs? You have corporate marketing sending out their own campaign and message to their own lists with one vendor, sales doing the same thing but with a different message to their list with a different vendor, then you have the store doing their own interactive campaigns with yet another vendor, etc. So all these different messages are going out with a corporate identity attached to them, but no consistency in the messages, and all from different vendors. And, some subscribers may even receive duplicate messages from the different departments because of list sharing. Wouldn’t it be easier (and save employee time), to use one vendor to centralize email marketing and deliver one consistent message across all departments?

Moving to centralized marketing, not only benefits the employees, but gives corporate a better understanding of what efforts and strategies are being deployed by operations. They also discover a greater intelligence of their consumers, and can plan more successful campaigns based off of this knowledge. Of course, switching to a system that offers organizations the ability to do centralized marketing takes a little more convincing on behalf of corporate, but the results in the long run are definitely worth it.

One reason that organizations haven’t consolidated and centralized their email marketing campaigns is because the departments tend to want to keep ownership of their email lists and don’t want to share them across departments, however there is a solution to this.

So now you’re probably asking yourself, what robust email marketing system out there that can handle all this? Stay tuned for our next post to find out.  In the meantime, check out this blog post for some other things to keep in mind when looking to centralize your marketing.

We all get it. The economy stinks. The stock market keeps plunging with big numbers. The Federal Reserve keeps lowering interest rates. The real estate industry is all shook up. Gasoline prices are climbing and refusing to ever return below $2.50 per gallon. Stamp prices keep going up, threatening our direct-mail budgets.

No matter how gray the economy looks, we still have a business to run and market. Don’t take our word for it. Bill McCloskey of MediaPost reports good news for companies that rely on email marketing. “While a recession is certainly not good for anybody, it may have a beneficial effect on email marketing,” McCloskey says. He attributes email newsletter successes to their low cost, high return-on-investment, and being a proven marketing tool.

Lessons learned
Though this recession isn’t the first one in years, email newsletters have one advantage — time. They’ve been around long enough for marketers to get them right. People have learned what works and doesn’t work.

Internet marketing doesn’t require stamps, gasoline, groceries or anything that keeps denting the bill. The only thing technology does is use up energy. But green companies can control that. At least, online marketers use less paper and ink to get their message out.

We also know how to target our customers better using email marketing. When we reach the right customers, they’re more likely to listen.

Get ahead of the other guy
Though we cut the budget in many areas of a company during a recession, don’t cut the marketing budget. Let your competitors do that while you get ahead. How do you convince the CFO or money holder to let you keep your budget? Remind the person that staying in customers’ minds is what drives the company to stay on target.

Email newsletters also affect relationships with customers. MediaPost blogger Loren McDonald says, “Now is the time to reposition email as a strategic relationship-management channel.”

Cut marketing, customers forget you, and then you’ll have to do more cutting. Drew Neisser writes in iMediaConnection, “In truth, awareness can decline as fast as 50 percent a month when you go silent, and the cost of buying back that awareness will be horrendous.”

Neisser also advises talking to customers to find out how the downturn affects them, their businesses and their choices. What better to do this than through an effective email newsletter? You reach all of your customers at once while keeping your company’s name in their minds.

Sure, go ahead and individually contact some customers by phone or an email message. That always pays. Email newsletters let you talk to many folks at once, which you would not have time to do on an individual basis.

What about social networking and search marketing?
Businesses are discovering the power of using social networking sites and tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter. Yes, these work for business-to-business marketing — when done right. Making the most of social tools means investing time and research.

Unlike email newsletters, these tools are still in their infancy. We know they’re valuable and they work, but getting there takes longer as we don’t know the magic formulas yet.

McClosky also points out that mobile marketing and RSS haven’t proven themselves, banner advertising isn’t as direct as email newsletters, and search engine marketing is more expensive.

Social network sites don’t always come to the customer. People have to go to the sites for updates or turn on notifications to receive updates. But these updates won’t necessarily include your company, depending on your connection.

Add personality
Who says a business can’t have personality? Which do you prefer? Formal communications that give the impression the company behind the words is one with no feelings or no people. Or a company that interjects personality, showing a person in the company cares about you and your business.

We tire of the gloom and doom of the news that comes with an economic downturn. We welcome humor and laughter. Customers and soon-to-be customers will appreciate relief from their stressful jobs and problems that come with a lousy economy.

Don’t abandon other tools
Despite all this rah rah for email newsletters, other marketing tools still have value. Investors diversify because they know they’ll have greater success across the board rather than hedging their bets on one number. Customers prefer to receive messages in different ways: some by email, some through feed readers and some through direct mail.

Give customers the opportunity to state their preferences for receiving communication from you. Ask them in new sign up forms. For current customers, include a poll or ask them to update their options by providing a simple link to their account where the options live.

You not only don’t want to abandon other marketing tools, but also don’t abuse email marketing knowing what you now know. This means: Avoid the temptation to send more email blasts. McDonald explains, “This might deliver short-term results, but it can also hurt your brand and deliverability, increase costs to replace lost subscribers and potentially anger many otherwise happy customers.”

When we read the morning newspaper or turn on the evening news, we constantly hear about the lousy economy, the depressing stock market, the miserable real estate market. We know all this.

The gloomy economy doesn’t have that affect on online marketing efforts. In fact, email marketing is in great health —it’s cheap, fast, targeted and proven effective. Don’t get too “send” happy and abuse how much email you send to customers and prospects. Take advantage of all the research and expertise available on making email marketing work for your company.

The online marketing outlook is bright and sunny.

With social networking being all the rave now, email marketers need to be savvy about integrating them into their campaigns.

There’s a cool feature called AddThis, which email marketers can add into their campaigns and allow their readers to save part or all of the campaign as a bookmark, or send to themselves or someone they know at one of their social networking sites. This feature is a great way for marketers to start sharing content to new people through their subscribers, and gives viral marketing a whole new meaning! 

We’ve recently added this feature into our client’s templates, and the response has been great.  Recipients of TailoredMail powered campaigns are now able to send all or part of the email they received to be saved on their social networking page, or pass it on to one of their “friends”.  Social network “friends” are typically curious about what their “friends” are interested in, so they’ll click on the link for the recently added item to view more. This is an easy way to quickly build subscriber lists. Delivering relevant content just became that much more valuable!

The FTC posted on its website today the long-awaited updates/stances on some proposed clarifications to CAN-SPAM. While I need to likely re-read it again to fully understand, I’ll list here some notable changes - and what impact they may have on you:

1.) They’ve gone to great lengths to further define who the “sender” is and who “initiates” the email, for the purposes of defining WHO needs to comply with CAN-SPAM (valid subject-line, valid postal address, 10-day honoring of opt-out, valid permission). This gets a bit complicated when you read it, but in short - the definitions were updated to help sort out multi-party commercial emails (e.g. when more than one company participates in an email campaign, such as participating in the content, the advertisement, and/or the list of email addresses that are used).

In short: Before, if more than one party participated, it was unclear if one or ALL of the participants needed to honor opt-outs, for example. Instead, only the “sender” needs to honor all elements of the CAN-SPAM act. The “sender” is defined as the “person” who is clearly labeled in the “FROM” of the email message. Finally, the definition of the “person” was clarified to mean “an individual, group, unincorporated association, limited or general partnership, corporation, or other business entity.”  Prior to this clarification, it was unclear of the “person” had to be a natural person, or could be a business, association, etc.

2.) It’s OK to use a PO Box as your official “postal address” (often placed in the footer of commercial emails), as long as it’s registered with the US Post Office.

3.) Forward to a Friend mechanisms were clarified. The concern was, again, WHO is liable to honor the CAN-SPAM ACT in cases where a “Forwarding” mechanism is used (unsubscribe requests, honoring previous opt-outs). This gets fairly complicated as well, so here are my suggestions:

- if you entice the subscriber to fill out the form (e.g. entered into a contest, rebate/$$ on services, or overtly encouraging people to do so for a specific reason or cause), then you (the marketer) must verify that the person being forward-to (by your website visitor or email subscriber) has not previously opted out of receiving emails from you (unsubscribed). Also, those emails need to abide by the rest of the CAN-SPAM provisions (valid postal address from the marketer included in the email, an unsubscribe mechanism, etc.).

- if you simply provide a form, or a button that says (roughly) “Forward this to a Friend/Colleague”, and it does not provide some kind of inducement to do so, then the “initiator” and “sender” of the message is that of the person who filled out the “forwarding” form. (Note: as a rule, All of TailoredMail’s ‘Forward to a Friend’ forms automatically check for previously unsubscribed/suppressed users…keeping you and your subscribers out of trouble and in compliance).

3.) There were clarifications about the ease of opting-out. The clarified rules prohibit senders from charging a fee to opt out, prevent the collection of additional personal information or require email recipients to interface with more than one Internet Web page to opt out from receiving future commercial email messages from the sender.

Important: Make opt-out dead simple and automatic. For example, ensure your system automatically processes unsubscribe requests from people who REPLY to your campaigns, and place something akin to “Remove”, “Unsubscribe“, “Stop”, etc. in their subject lines (and in the first paragraph of the body). It’s wise to have your system also look for these words in multiple languages. It’s also imperative to NEVER force the user to make more than one-click to unsubscribe. As a fall-back, you CAN place a link on the subsequent page (that the opt-out links resolves to) that asks something like, “You are now unsubscribed. If you did NOT intend to do so, please click here to be reactivated or to update your profile settings.”

4.) There were several other proposed changes that were denied by the FTC, including the request to shorten the processing time for unsubscribe requests from 10 days to 3 - but that was deemed too difficult for smaller organizations.

I hope this helps! Feel free to post questions or thoughts here….and do your part to offer responsible emailing!

Matt Highsmith
TailoredMail

Your subscribers are trying to tell you something: If you’re looking to achieve higher open rates and happy subscribers, then you need to focus who you’re delivering to, what you’re delivering, and how it’s received. Add the following to your list of email marketing best practices, and you’re sure to have a successful campaign…

Quantity is not always better than quality. Building an email list is important, but you also need to be sure to keep it clean. A “dirty” list (old email addresses) can negatively affect your campaigns performance. Clean your lists each year, but don’t just flat-out purge inactive users (see out tips below on how to deal with these subscribers). “List hygiene” reduces spam complaints and helps to keep you off the spam cop’s radar. One rule of thumb we use is, “if the subscriber isn’t willing to give you their name, then they are probably not worth keeping.” If you have their name, you can personalize the message, and it shows that the beginning of your dialog with them isn’t completely anonymous - which is where most spam complaints and inactive accounts come from.

Test your email deliverability.Set up your own little email testing environment, to monitor whether your emails are triggering spam (going into the junk folder), and as importantly, whether the layout of your email is displayed correctly. Consider using Outlook 2003 and 2007, as well as Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL (you can use their free web mail service at aol.com). Outlook spam rules change monthly so it’s key to always update your Outlook “junk rules” (go to Outlook’s Help, and select ‘Check for Updates’).

Ask your readers what they want - and stick to it! Clients who use this approach (as opposed to one-size fits-all emailing) generate 60-70% higher open and click rates. Ask subscribers to segment themselves on the sign up page (job function/title, state/country- something that helps you know any geographic preferences, topics of interest, level of interest in your company, how often they’d like to hear from you, etc.). The key is to think through, “if I were a subscriber, how might I want to personalize what I get?”. It is very rare for any company to have all their messages be 100% applicable to all subscribers. Avoid this 20th century marketing mentality, and let your subscribers CHOOSE what they want - and it will pay off significantly.

Email format.Ask your users if they prefer HTML or TEXT…and better yet, whether they will likely read your email on a PDA or phone (if so, set their format to TEXT). Then, start redesigning your templates so that:

• HTML: You are designing for images off, the preview pane, the elimination of background images, and strong usage of inline styles. Remember that although you may have put together an amazing layout, some of your subscribers may not be able to see it the way you want them to. Make your template work for everyone.
• TEXT:  If you have a reasonable amount of mobile users, setting your text template width to 40 characters wide as opposed to the traditional 72-80 characters. Test this with a Blackberry, Treo or iPhone. Keep link design short…and work with your web designers to create mobile friendly landing pages.

Don’t forget the inactive users!

• Resend your emails a week later to those who didn’t open/click anything in the initial broadcast. Reset your subject line to reflect the most popular link or articletitle from your first broadcast. You’ll improve your overall open/click rates by 10-30%.
• Another popular resending idea is to take the non-open/click people a day or two after the original broadcast, and send a TEXT email telling them, “In case you missed it, our latest newsletter is now available online”, along with a brief outline of the key topics included in the newsletter.
• Finally, another clever strategy is to take the inactive people from the first broadcast, and resend it FROM their sale representative(s), with a subject line
  of “FWD: [firstname], I thought you might like to see our latest newsletter…”

Regularly monitor and manage your soft-bounces.Look for challenge/response emails and fix them (e.g. Matt is trying to reduce his spam. Please verify that you are a human, not a spammer by clicking here). Watch for client inquiries. The vast majority of people who receive your emails actually believe someone is monitoring every reply, and when you don’t - they get quite upset. Also watch out for AOL users who have set their email client to reject images. If you receive these, simply go into that user’s profile, and change them to TEXT - and you will retain them as an active subscriber.

Make your content more compelling by employing any/all of the following:

1. Include external content/articles from the web. This makes your messaging more valuable and credible, showing that you are looking around the web for content that can help your subscribers.
2. Make your email subscription an RSS feed as well. Some subscribers prefer to receive your content in this fashion
3. Create a multi-authoring environment. Maybe it includes your salesforce, product managers, executives, or other team-member of your marketing department. Perhaps it’s even your PR firm or ad agency. The more contributors, the better the collaboration and end product.
4. Incorporate an “archive” into your mix, allowing subscribers to search and read previously written content. This can also improve your company’s search-engine rankings.
5. Always split up your content into two parts- a “brief” that appears in the email “front page”, and the balance that resides on the web (landing pages).
6. Add your most-important message to the very top of your template. Similar to the “view this online” or “add us to your address book” notations….write your most compelling headline there. This will drive people to read your email more than you think. These messages also will be the first things subscribers see in Outlook and Gmail.

“If at first you don’t succeed. Try, try again.” - Thomas H. Palmer

One of the most often overlooked opt-in email strategies is the “confirmation email”. The TailoredMail system - as a default - will send a “confirmation” email to any new subscriber who signs up to receive your content. Most send either a simple ‘thank you’ email. But there are several important considerations and strategies at play here that can dramatically improve your overall results, response and retention…Read these important tips:

Tips for a better confirmation email:

1.) Offer them something. We like to refer to it as “offering a gift”. In fact, we strongly recommend that each and every email you send provides some kind of “gift” to the recipient. Gifts can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes - and they don’t need to cost you money.  Perhaps it’s a white paper, or a one-time discount offer, or a series of your own “tips”. Maybe it’s a letter from a high-ranking executive sharing their thoughts on your industry. One client of ours offers multiple white paper choices from leading industry analysts, others offer industry-specific “tips” (e.g. ‘5 key strategies for securing your network’), one even delivers a home-built cartoon that muses over the latest industry ‘fad’, and yet another provides a $20-off coupon code on a future purchase.

Our studies (and others touted within the industry) show these kinds of offers dramatically increase the open rates and click-through for new subscribers in subsequent email broadcasts. This is CRITICAL, especially because of the ever-growing ‘images are turned off’ dilemma. More and more email applications and services initially ‘hide’ images from their recipients in an effort to ‘protect them’ from unwanted email (images being shown are how we know if someone opened an email).

Images-being-displayed-in-email-by-default should be a very important strategy within your email programs as they enable more reliable tracking (e.g. opens), they present your email as you intended it (when they’re turned off your email can look awkward), and they also help keep your emails out of the dreaded ‘junk folder’. How? Most email applications and services turn images “on” if, and only if your email address is in their address book. This “Personal White List” approach works under the logic that if your email address is important enough to go in their address book, then you must be a trusted source. (TailoredMail deploys a “Having trouble with images? Go here” capability that renders an identical version of the email in a web page, complete with open trackers and subscriber activity tracking).

This confirmation or thank-you email is also critical in establishing your brand identity and future recognition with the subscriber. Our studies have shown that programs without a confirmation email perform MUCH lower than those with one. Why? A confirmation email gives the subscriber instant gratification - a critical emotion within the web world. Without it, your future emails will arrive out-of-the-blue without any prior exposure to what they look like, who the “from” email address might be, and what they ‘expect’ to receive. We’ve even seen spam-complaints from highly reputable opt-in clients even though the users had subscribed 30-days prior - they simply forgot they had opted in.

2.) Show/give them a sample of what you typically send. Not only should you provide a link to see a sample of your email communications (e.g.”Go here to view a sample of our newsletter”), but several clients have great success by also SENDING them the latest newsletter as a part of their confirmation email. This is a great way to provide instant gratification. This also give you the opportunity to get the subscriber to “edit/update their preferences”. For example, you could go ahead and deliver interesting articles in multiple subject areas, and encourage the recipient to fine-tune their subscription.

TailoredMail makes it VERY simple to create/segment content into different topics of interest - and just as easily add links to the end of each article such as “remove this topic from my profile”.

3.) Reinforce to the subscriber what you captured on the sign-up page. We always recommend displaying in the confirmation email their profile information, as well as their subscription preferences and interests. This reinforces to the subscriber that you truly are treating them individually. Nothing smells more like “bulk email” when the email itself looks as if it were the same thing everyone else gets. Be sure to take advantage of your email database’s capapbilities by embedding the subscribers preferences in each email (preferably in the footer).

4.) Be sure to monitor your “replies” at least once a week. With a good confirmation email you will potentially get some subscribers “responding” by hitting the reply-to button. To that end, we see clients get a lot of feedback and dialogue with their subscribers by simply putting a big, fat, “Give Feedback” button at the top of their email.

We hope these tips and ideas surrounding the sign-up/confirmation-email portion of your email programs come in handy, and offer you improved results.

Anyone who has been involved in email for the last couple years knows all too well that open rates are going down. Much of the blame has been attributed to one of the following:

• Images being turned off, by default, by most email clients
• More emails getting caught in spam filters or junk folders
• Not enough compelling content

One more reason (but most often overlooked) is list burnout or churn – that doesn’t get correctly cleaned up on a regular basis…often referred to as list hygiene. This “best practice” has almost as much, if not more, to do with lowering open rates.
Let’s talk about how this happens, and what you can do about it. I promise you MUCH higher open rates and list quality…not to mention the potential to save some money while you’re at it!

Is that a boat anchor attached to your leg?
Most lists are full of, from the get-go, people who have no interest in your company or message. You have had them in your list forever. This pollutes your list, of course, and drags down your open rate – obviously. Additionally, industry norms suggest that every year up to 10% of your subscriber base converts into this category, for a variety of reasons:

1. They WANT to unsubscribe, but simply don’t. Maybe they label you as “spam” and force your emails to go straight to their junk folder. They don’t trust your (or any for that matter) unsubscribe links.
2. They get burned out. The first 1 or 2 emails they get will likely dictate how active they are longer term. If they take the time to read your first or second email, and there’s nothing relevant or interesting for them – they bail. Again, they don’t unsubscribe, and likely just keep receiving your emails but don’t read them.
3. They change email addresses, but don’t close out the one YOU have. Your emails continue to pile in an unattended inbox. Many people open several email accounts, and eventually look at 1 or 2 of them as their “spam addresses”….they get so much spam there that they’ve basically given up on it…and keep it around to use as an order confirmation address, for example.

It is believed that as many as 7% of your list will change jobs, and therefore their primary email address. Most of those eventually turn into “hard bounces” (e.g. “This user does not exist. Please delete from your records”). But, many don’t – and you’re hanging on to them in the hopes they’ll come back.

So what’s a marketer to do?
I’ve seen industry pundits declare that the ultimate best practice is to find the dead wood, and regularly purge them. I only half agree, and think there’s a much better “conservative” strategy that can prevent you from throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. I believe so strongly in the following approach, that we designed several tools in TailoredMail to ease the management of it all:

A. Find out, and create a list of people who match (roughly…you feel free to adjust as you see fit) the following criteria:

1. Users who have been on your list for more than two years
2. Users who have NOT opened or clicked anything in the last 12 months

B. People who fall into the above group, store them as a separate “Inactive List”, and resend your most recent broadcast to them as a TEXT-only message. The key here is to identify if anyone in this list is NOT getting your emails because of a spam filter…and perhaps the HTML version is getting caught up in the filter. Anyone who clicks anything in that broadcast should be moved back into your regular list, and reset their profile to receive TEXT only.

C. Plan out a quarterly email strategy for the remainder. Make these quarterly messages POP with your best stuff. Focus heavily on the subject line. Make it short, compelling and action oriented. Again, anyone who triggers an open or click, move them back into your regular list. You will be VERY surprised to find as many as 5% of this inactive list will reawaken (we call this the Wake-Up Percent). If you had followed the pundits’ advice and purged them from the get-go, you would lose these folks forever.

D. Eventually (after one year of quarterly messages, or when the Wake-Up Percent is at about 1-2%), you should try sending an email to the Inactive List with the subject line, “We Want You Back”…along with an article asking them to confirm their continued interest – or unsub altogether.

E. Update the Inactive List each year, and do this all over again.

The key benefits to this approach are numerous. First of all, your actual regular list will now give you a MUCH MORE accurate assessment of the success of your campaigns and newsletters. The results won’t be adversely affected by a chunk of users who will NEVER open your emails anyways. Secondly, you will create a process/program that allows you to try and win subscribers back – without inadvertently getting rid of them forever. Finally – you’ll likely save some serious money!

The entire process above is a great example of why email marketing is such a valuable component of your mix….because you can test, measure, improve and convert customers by simply using the technology that’s already available to you. So don’t panic over lower open rates….just roll up your sleeves and go fix your most valuable asset….your customer list!

In a recent post, I spoke of Outlook 2007 issues for email marketers (limitations), and as a part of that process, I upgraded to that version on my own desktop. There are a couple improvements I liked, but quickly became so irate when using it that I came within a few minutes of uninstalling it.

At issue is performance. It’s awful. Every time your email “checks” for new mail, it locks up for a few seconds. Since I set mine to check every minute, you can imagine my frustration. At issue is supposedly a memory problem….and, fortunately, there are fixes for this. There’s a new Office Service Pack 1 (update) that you will want to download. Simply go to the Help menu in Outlook, and select “Check for Updates”. This is a smart thing to do on a monthly basis anyways, as the Outlook junk-mail-filter is one of the better in the industry, if you ask me…and you often have to go “ask” for this update using the above method, otherwise it can take several more weeks before it automatically gets sent to you via the Windows Update service.

I also found this post on the web which provided some simple tips for improving the speed of your Outlook with or without the new Service Pack. I’ll let you know if the Service Pack solves my woes…

Breaking up lists can generate up to 10 times as many opens/clicks…

There’s a quiet shift in email marketing strategy these days that is producing big results and should be familiar to anyone who has put together direct marketing programs before — segmentation. Segmentation is the process of breaking up your leads/lists into logical groupings, so that content and/or promotions are targeted to the right audience, and in the right context. Extensive studies within the email industry show that for lists with as low as 5,000 names, your opens and clicks can improve as much as 10-times their normal performance through simple segmentation. Here are five quick, straightforward ideas on how to test this approach:

1 - Weekend versus weekday

This is one of the easiest, and often most effective, segmentation tests. Here’s how it works: we’ve learned that email addresses from many of the top Web-based Internet service providers (ISP) are often secondary addresses, or consumer-oriented, and they open their emails more often on the weekend. These domains include Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, Earthlink, AOL and GMail. For many clients, these addresses can make up more than half the subscriber base. When you broadcast your content to this group on the weekend and everyone else on a weekday — compare that to your normal results — most clients report that this almost doubled results.

2 - Interests

This is the most obvious and often requires that you capture users’ interests and preferences when they sign up. From there, segmentation can be automatic and simple. Most of our clients come to the party with zero segmentation applied to their lists, so we advise segmenting users based on their click-through behavior. For example, if content or a campaign was sent out regarding a specific subject, capture those names and put them into their own “list.” Keep doing this until you have a reasonable set of unique groupings.

You don’t need to know every subscriber’s interests — that’s not likely to happen using this approach plus they don’t want to provide more information than necessary when signing up. Instead, put the leftover names into a generic group — and you can continue pulling names out of that grouping as you go. Bachrach Men’s clothing does this based on a subscribers click-through behavior for shoes, sweaters and suits, for example. After segmenting, the results tripled.

3 - Status

An easy segmentation trick is to distinguish users based on whether they are customers, prospects, partners, press or employees — and perhaps segment them by geographical location (for example, Europe, US, Canada, Asia and Latin America). If you don’t have this information, use a poll or mini-survey and ask subscribers for more detailed profile and feedback information in exchange for a free white paper, prize-drawing or something else they want.

4 - Time of day

Often overlooked is the ability to capture the subscribers’ time zone when they sign-up. While some newsletter systems automatically do this, you can easily add Javascript to your sign-up page and put that information into a hidden field. After that, group your lists based on the best times to send out the email newsletter. Emails delivered after 9:00 a.m. their time significantly helps boost results.

5 - Topic-based opt-out

Add a simple, “I’m not interested in XYZ — please remove this from my profile” at the end of a campaign or in the footer of the email. Simply track readers who click this link and remove them from one of your defined segments. As a result, subscribers like this approach AND it lowers the number of people unsubscribing to the email. How does this happen? When given a choice — many readers want to continue receiving your content, but when they only get an option to unsubscribe — then they will. The key is to consistently promote to your readers that you want to send them the most relevant content possible, but you need their help and feedback to make it happen.

Those are some quick ideas break up your mailing lists. Let the chopping commence and get ready to see exciting results. We’d love to hear how it worked for you, so feel free to contact us. ‘Til next time, here’s to fast-growing email campaigns.