Many companies are focused on growing their e-mail list, and rightfully so. But if you could improve the return on investment of your e-mail marketing program by pruning your list, would you?

First, I’d like to clarify that I’m not referring to “cleansing” bounces or unsubscribes from your list. Your e-mail vendor/software should do that for you. I’m saying that a large percentage of subscribers in your list don’t open or click any of your e-mail campaigns. So is it worth keeping them in your list?

Many companies don’t effectively track statistics of their e-mail lists, so you may be surprised to find out how few members of your e-mail list actually take action on messages you send to them. According to MailChimp, e-mail open rates average at about 25%. But that data is only based on a single campaign. How do you know what percent of your list takes action over time?

I’ve been a MailChimp customer now for a number of months and am increasingly impressed with the analytical information they provide on e-mail lists and campaigns.

MailChimp uses “Member Ratings” to rate each subscriber in your mailing list. The 5-star rating system uses a rating for “member” (subscriber) activity and is a quick visual measure of how engaged your subscribers are.

• 1 Star- negative rating, this person has unsubscribe and re-subscribed, or soft bounced in the past
• 2 Star- no activity, never opened or clicked, most likely a new member
• 3 Star- this recipient has started opening or clicking your campaigns, limited activity
• 4 Star- this recipient has started opening or clicking your campaigns, a little more activity
• 5 Star- this recipient has started opening or clicking your campaigns, lots of activity

Why would you want to remove subscribers from your list?

If you’re working with a vendor to send email, you must limit abuse complaints to an extremely low number. A client of mine was sending e-mail to a list they had been building since the late ’90s, and when we brought the campaigns to MailChimp there were a relatively high number of spam abuse complaints when we sent the mailings. We needed to reduce the abuse complaints or risk MailChimp pulling the plug on our e-mail program.

Pruning also lowers the cost of mailing. If you aren’t sending to those that don’t open or click, your list size is smaller and you pay for a smaller subscription plan (or a per e-mail fee, whichever plan you have). In turn, you’ll generate a better return on your investment.

The pruning process

Here’s how we went about pruning our list, how we completely eliminated abuse complaints and improved the performance of our client’s e-mail campaigns.

Create a “best customer” segment
Because your marketing department might be uneasy (to say the least) about deleting names from your list, start by creating an audience segment in MailChimp. When you’re ready to send your next campaign, add all subscribers with a 3-star and above rating to a new audience segment. By doing this, you’ll be sending the campaign to only customers that have opened or clicked prior campaigns.

You’ll be amazed — and perhaps alarmed — that you’ll reduce your list size dramatically by doing this. In some cases, your new audience segment might be 20-40% the size of your complete list. Send a few campaigns to this audience segment and measure the results. For comparison purposes, you may also want to create an audience segment of only 2-star subscribers so you can compare results.

Caveat: The 2-star subscriber
The 2-star subscriber must be treated with care. While some subscribers with a 2-star rating might have never opened an e-mail from you in years, there also may be 2-star subscribers in your list that are brand new subscribers who have only received one or two mailings.

To solve this issue, create a new list and route all new subscribers to that list. Alternatively, MailChimp will also let you create an audience segment of 2-star subscribers that have recently joined your list.

Prune the list with confidence
Download a backup copy of your complete list, then delete all subscribers with 1-star and 2-star ratings. Note that if you don’t have a seperate list set up for new subscribers, be careful to only delete subscribers that have a long history of not opening your e-mails. This will reduce your list size dramatically and ultimately decrease the cost of sending campaigns.

Prune periodically
Note that you’ll need to repeat this process of segmentation and pruning periodically since some subscribers may naturally become disinterested or fall out of the purchase cycle for your product or service. I always recommend downloading a backup copy so you never actually delete subscribers that you prune from the list — rather, they are stored in your list backup file.

Real-world results

Our client, mentioned above, has been sending out e-mail marketing campaigns since 1998 and has been slowly building the list over time. We decided to prune their list using the above technique and saw the following results.

• Their initial list size was cut by 69%, saving them $75 per month in fees.
• Open rate was well over twice the industry average and their list average.
• Click rate is 45% higher than the industry average and their list average.
• Bounces are almost non-existent.
• There have been no abuse complaints.
• There have been only a handful of unsubscribes, and only one 4-star or 5-star subscriber has unsubscribed.

Our next step is to segment the most recent 2-star subscribers and send them a special discount to encourage them to visit our client’s site and purchase.

This isn’t a political post, rather to show you how not to keep your “customers” up-to-date. After hearing today that the bill the US Senate passed last night included hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for manufacturers of wooden arrows for children, Puerto Rican rum manufacturers and American Samoa. Wanting to read the bill myself (all 400+ pages, I hear), I went to senate.gov.

The fact of the matter is that you, the American citizen — the “customer” — won’t find any mention of the bill on the Senate’s homepage. Matter of fact, I spent 20 minutes searching for it, and think I found it, but I’m still not sure because half of the bill isn’t about the economy. I turned to a news site that offered a clear link to the legislation, and I found:

Sec. 308. Increase in limit on cover over of rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa.
Sec. 314. Indian employment credit.
Sec. 502. Provisions related to film and television productions.
Sec. 503. Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

…and the list goes on.

Why do the American people detest Congress? Perhaps it’s because Washington doesn’t provide us adequate usable access to the legislation that crosses the floor. Here’s a link to the bill, and if you’re for or against it, call your Senator or Representative, but good luck trying to find their contact information on their web sites.

Our friends at Campaign Monitor have recently updated their Guide to CSS Support in Email, a resource that we use when building e-mail marketing campaigns.

If you build e-mail marketing campaigns to send to customers, this resource is essential to show you how to code campaigns in a way that all e-mail clients will render properly. Just like any good web developer tests their web site in multiple browsers, you should test your e-mail campaigns in multiple clients. Knowing how to develop to comply with the rendering of each e-mail client will help you build an e-mail campaign that can be seen properly by everyone.

As we’ve discussed before, it’s still best practice to build your e-mails with a table-based layout, using CSS sparingly to format text. CSS should always be used inline in the HTML code, never declared in the <head> of a document and never by referencing an external file.

There’s a new blog post over at Campaign Monitor that discusses what’s changed in e-mail marketing design in 2008. I found this article helpful as it is an updated list of best practices for the industry. These include the following topics:

• Don’t waste your readers’ time
  Inboxes are full — give them something useful.
• Permission matters
  Remind customers why they are getting the e-mail.
• Relevance trumps permission
  You need permission, but a relevant message generates action.
• Make unsubscribing easy
  Why pay to send to customers that aren’t interested?
• Image blocking is common
  View your design without images to see if the message still comes across.
• Bring back tables
  E-mail clients are not standards-compliant and your table-less CSS layouts will be totally trashed.
• Add inline styles
  Gmail will strip out all other stylesheets.
• Don’t forget your plain text version
  Make it readable and encourage scanning.
• Meet your legal obligations
  Brush up on CAN-SPAM regulations.
• Test, test, test
  Want to get more action from your e-mail? Test new versions to see what works.

With the economy in its current state and gas prices through the roof, many shoppers are leaving the car keys in the drawer and shopping online (Source: Harris Interactive — “one-third (33%) of online US adults say they are more likely to shop online rather than at a store because of high gas prices“).

Relevant, timely e-mail campaigns are a great way to drum up online business, and following the guidelines from Campaign Monitor will help you manage a better campaign.

Web designers, take note! The folks at Campaign Monitor are undertaking the valiant effort of trying to establish baseline standards that e-mail clients should meet, and they need your input.

Campaign Monitor is asking designers to contribute ideas for what should be supported in baseline cascading style sheet standards. Go leave your comment now.

Notes for the non-technical: If you aren’t a web designer, designing and coding an e-mail is a difficult process that often involves using antiquated coding techniques because e-mail clients (i.e. Outlook, Gmail, etc.) don’t support the same types of code. Establishing standards would not only make it easier to code HTML e-mail campaigns, it would ensure proper rendering in all e-mail clients so your e-mails look as intended.

The folks at Campaign Monitor recently posted 30 free HTML e-mail newsletter templates on their web site. These newsletter templates, while generic from a branding perspective, have been tested in a variety of common e-mail programs (and web-based e-mail apps like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) so you can rest assured that your e-mail newsletter will render properly and consistently.

Because you’ll also want to include a text-only version when you send out your e-mail newsletter, Campaign Monitor has also provided three well-formatted text-only newsletter templates.

The latest Marketing Sherpa brief arrived in my inbox today and had some great insight into sending marketing e-mail to BlackBerry and mobile device users. While marketing to users with mobile devices is still under the radar of most marketing executives, it’s prudent to know that business users are adopting these devices and reading carefully crafted HTML e-marketing campaigns on them.

Here are my takeaways from the article. Feel free to read yourself — you can access the article for free until August 1st.

• 64% of key decision makers are viewing email (and your company email marketing campaign) on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.
• BlackBerrys are more heavily used by business users than Treos and iPhones. BlackBerry users are younger (under age 45).
• You don’t have to communicate with BlackBerry users with all-text messages. While text messages are the best strategy, multipart-MIME messages (HTML and text version in the same message — the email client decides which to display) can be a good option.
• Companies should market to mobile device users separately so display issues don’t occur. The best way to do this is survey your customer base or ask for mobile preferences on a newsletter sign-up page.
• Messages should be crafted differently than traditional e-mail marketing. Message width and wording are both considerations. Displays on newer BlackBerry devices are 320 pixels wide.
• Your company name should be the first thing the user sees, followed by a short “hook” or offer. Personally, I liked the way Marketing Sherpa advises marketers to “be brief, be brilliant and be gone.” Mobile device users scan email, not read it.

The article also provides a link to download Blackberry simulators in case you’d like to see how your company’s e-mail marketing messages look on the BlackBerry platform.

Finally, I feel that while BlackBerry devices are the most popular devices right now, iPhone is sure to make a splash among a more consumer-oriented crowd in the next 6 months to a year. Now’s the time to research your customer base to see how many customers read email through mobile devices. If more than 10% do, perhaps it’s time to start a new segment in your e-mail marketing list for mobile users. Besides HTML and text, offer your customers a mobile option when subscribing to your company’s e-mail newsletter.

With tools like Instant Messenger, text messaging, MySpace and Facebook, e-mail marketers face increasing challenges in trying to reach younger audiences.

It seems hard to believe, but younger web users such as Gen Y’ers view e-mail as a pass?© communications tool. Jeremiah Owyang on his web strategy blog shared the following anecdote:

“A few weeks ago, I had a discussion with my kid sister, in a humorous way she told me that she ‘Only uses email to communicate with old people like me.’ And I‚Äôm not even in my mid 30s.”

In fact, many younger people interact more with MySpace, Facebook and their cell phones than e-mail. I asked an intern at a client of mine for his reaction to this, and he responded that he either uses IM, Facebook or text messaging to talk to friends. He only uses e-mail when at work.

With these trends in mind, it’s not surprising that companies are either experimenting with or starting alternative “online” marketing programs. The New York Times recently profiled outdoor goods retailer Moosejaw Mountaineering, which started a mobile marketing program this year.

With text messaging’s popularity among many younger folks (under 30 years old seems to be the profile of the text messager), it’s a logical choice to allow those customers to interact with companies via their cell phones. In Moosejaw’s case, they have a “texting” link on their homepage that allows text message users to interact with the company, even offering to send order tracking numbers, account information and rewards information to customers via text message.

While text messaging hasn’t reached the critical mass that e-mail marketing has (Moosejaw sends text messages to just over 1,000 customers according to the Times article), the potential is there. 115 million Americans have used cell phones to send text messages, and this number is only more likely to grow.

Moosejaw gets it — they have a well-established MySpace page as well. They seem to have struck the balance between being promotional and “hip.”

While we’re probably not talking about tens of thousands of customers using these technologies yet, it will become important that companies consider new ways to market to their customers. It will be interesting to see how the iPhone and other advanced mobile devices change trends in marketing as communication evolves.

The holidays are here, and if you’re in internet retail you’ve hopefully already solidified an online marketing plan for the holidays. That plan probably involves email marketing, so I’ve devised some reminders of what you should do and avoid doing so your email marketing is as effective as possible during this crucial time of year.

Don’ts:

• Use XHTML code in your emails (Use HTML as there are delivery errors with XHTML).
• Don’t reference external CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in your HTML email as most email clients can’t read it. Instead, use inline styles or font tags. You can also reference my earlier guide for using CSS in email campaigns to learn what CSS definitions email clients can handle.
• Send email without validating it. Make sure you close all of your HTML tags so the page renders properly in all email clients. You can validate your HTML email with the W3C Validator.
• Embed forms or surveys in your email marketing campaign. Instead, create a landing page on your web site with the form or survey and include a link to this page in your email campaign.
• Send an all-graphical email. Some email clients will hide images by default, and your customers won’t see your message at all when accessing it through a preview pane.
• Use javascript. This will trigger all kinds of SPAM filters.

Do’s:

• Include some “administrative” text at the top of your email containing your company name or web site address.
• Post the HTML email on your web site and offer a link to it at the top of your email campaign. The text should read, “View this email at our web site” or something similar. “Having trouble viewing this email? View it on our site” is also a popular option.
• Link all of your images back to your web site.
• Include heights, widths and ALT tags on all images. Some email clients that hide images by default may assign a value to the height and width of your images, pushing content further down the page.
• If you offer a phone ordering line, include it in the email campaign.
• Design all HTML email for a 500-600 pixel width.
• Include your site categories/hierarchy as text links. Again, if your customers’ email clients hide images by default, customers will still see the text links to your main site categories. My research has shown that as many as 60% of customers click the navigational links to the main categories of your site.
• Check spelling. Not only is a misspelled word unprofessional, it can also increase your SPAM score.
• Produce a text and HTML version of your email campaign. Multi-part MIME email requires both and not including a text version could increase your SPAM score.
• Make text versions no more than 60 characters wide.

If you’re looking for a good editor to create your email marketing campaigns, try Macromedia Dreamweaver. Using Word or FrontPage to create HTML email marketing campaigns is not a good idea since they do not render “clean” HTML and assign styles to your campaign that most email clients cannot decipher.

I just love this blog entry from Chris Baggott’s Email Marketing Best Practices blog. Chris tells the story of how he signed up for a small internet retailer’s email newsletter and was pleasantly surprised how helpful and relevant the communique that he received was.

There’s a valuable lesson to be learned here. Email‚Äîand all internet marketing efforts‚Äî don’t have to be terribly complex. They just need to be relevant and helpful to the customer. Sometimes it’s best to step back from your marketing program and ask yourself if the email you send or the search engine ad you write address your customer’s needs.

I like Perry Marshall’s take on marketing to consumers:

“If you sell drills, you can write about how to make better holes, and you’ll get lots more sales leads than merely advertising information about your drills.

Why does that work? Because nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. Offer information about making holes and you’ll be much more successful.”

Well said.

Internet Retailer reported today on a blogworthy e-mail marketing study recently conducted by Silverpop. The study reported the following findings:

• Branding in the subject line of your e-mail marketing campaigns produced an increase of 32% – 60% in clickthrough rates. By “branding,” I assume the study refers to the web site name or company name.
• Lifestyle photography–people enjoying products–raised clickthrough rates for B2C campaigns by about 1%, while B2B marketers saw a decrease of about a percent.
• The “newsletter” e-mail marketing format yields better clickthrough rates than the “postcard” design. The clickthrough rates of the “newsletter” design were about a percent higher than the postcard design.
• Be careful not to include too many links in your e-mail campaigns. Clickthrough rates drop off after between 6-10 links per email.
• Interestingly enough, dollar-off promotions performed 45% better than percent-off promotions. For instance, consumers responded better to promotions that demonstrated savings in dollars, even for low-cost products.

These findings are interesting test variables for your upcoming e-mail campaigns.

A lot of companies use web analytics to track how many people open their emails, how many customers click and how much revenue they generate from e-mail marketing campaigns. But how many companies track creative performance of their e-mails? What in e-mail marketing campaigns do customers click on?

I recently created and sent out an e-mail marketing campaign for an ecommerce client, and we sought to measure this like I do with most of my e-mail marketing service clients. This time, I’ve decided to share the results since it is generally indicative of the kind of customer behavior we normally see.

Below, I’ve broken down the HTML version of the e-mail marketing campaign into common segments to show you how the clicks were distributed:

As you can see, over half of all clicks resulting from this HTML e-mail marketing campaign came from the left navigation containing product category links. I’ve seen this for years.

This may be a stretch, but I would correlate the willingness for customers to click simple left navigation with recent research that indicates that e-mail campaigns with fewer choices get better results. While products and offers contained in e-mail marketing campaigns often litter most retailers’ e-mail creative, the left category navigation remains the most-clicked area of the e-mail campaign.

Food for thought.

I recently read some advice from a fellow website effectiveness consultant that recommended the use of pop-up windows to advertise sales or generate email newsletter subscriptions. While most designers detest these, they are very effective. The common argument you’ll hear executives and designers make is that most people block pop-up windows. In fact, research shows that less than 10% of web users block pop-up windows.

Pop-up windows are great tools to have in your marketing arsenal since they are so effective and inexpensive to implement. Pop-ups can be used to bring attention to sales/promotions, recover abandoned shopping carts, lure users back after they exit your web site, generate leads/email newsletter subscribers and much more.

Why not test them on your site? I will be providing a case study on pop-ups in the coming week or two. I’ll be running a test on a client site, the goal of which will be to collect email addresses for the email newsletter list. After the test is complete, I will report the method, process and results of the test.

eROI recently released its first quarter 2006 study on email marketing. The results indicate that Tuesday and Sunday are the best days to send email marketing campaigns.

Typically, mid-week has been the best time to send email marketing campaigns as these days typically have higher open rates and click rates. The weekend typically has been the least desirable time to send email. This study, however, reports that Sundays have the highest clickthrough rates and the second highest open rates. Tuesdays see the highest email volume.

If you are contemplating sending an email campaign on Monday, you should probably wait as Monday has the lowest clickthrough rate of any day.

The following chart (from eROI) shows the data for each day of the week.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a “geek” link, but very helpful for those of you who create email marketing campaigns for yourselves or for your customers. Campaign Monitor has recently published a Guide to CSS Support In Email that is very informative. If you’re using cascading style sheets in your email marketing campaigns, you can compare results of CSS designs on web-based email environments like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. You can also compare support for CSS on popular Mac- and PC-based applications.

A new study by Silverpop reveals that most marketers can take care of low-hanging fruit to improve their email performance.

If you’re looking for an edge on your competitors, try taking a look at your confirmation message, or the message you send a customer that has just subscribed to your email marketing program. Including an exclusive offer or coupon in that message could lead to an instant sale.

Anther study from Jupiter today found that targeted, personalized email yields a greater return on investment. This is what I wrote about in 2002 in an article for Workz.com on email personalization. The issue with “personalization” is that it means different things to different people. If you’re interested in reading more about this, see my article.

There’s new research from eROI concerning the best day of the week to send an email marketing campaign. For some time now, the best practice has been to avoid sending on weekends since you miss people surfing at work, perhaps the best place to reach an online buyer.

The new research supports this notion, and also finds that midweek continues to be a good time to send an email campaign. Mondays and Fridays have the lowest response rates, with Wednesdays ushering in the highest number of clicks.

One other finding of the study is that quarterly response rates to email marketing campaigns have decreased year-over-year.

There are certainly ways to combat low response rates. First, make sure your list is sanitized (make sure you handle bounces properly, handle unsubscribes in a timely manner, etc.). There will always be a subset of people that subscribe because they like the products you sell or the information you publish, and many email marketing recipients are what I call “lurkers”‚Äîthey receive and open the email, but only skim it and get rid of it.

A couple of ideas to convert lurkers to buyers is to catch their attention. One method that’s worked well for me is to make a list comprised of only lurkers and present them with a percent-off coupon good for the next 24 hours or two days. Of course, you will also want to include some products that are popular, but don’t take the focus away from the coupon/offer.

Another method to improve response rates is to simply mix it up. There are quite a few online retailers out there that simply put their newest products in email. Others only run the same top sellers over and over again. Nothing draws attention like a hot offer, exclusively for email customers, or a free gift with purchase. Mix it up a little and be original, and always remember to track your results.

I was reading some news today from the ad:tech conference and read that while some chief marketing officers sitting on a panel were hesitant to reveal their online marketing budgets, Eloan spends $20M and Purina sets aside 5-7% of their budget for interactive marketing.

I learned a few years back during my Fortune 200 days that large brands should spend between 5-10% on online marketing. But does this apply to the small business owner? Sire, but you might want to consider shifting more money online.

Online marketing can be very cost effective if a campaign is properly run and the proper media is bought. Small businesses can get a lot of exposure from marketing online, and I would encourage most small businesses, especially small online retailers, to shift more of their media spending online.

One thing from the ad:tech panel stood out — most companies use outside firms to manage their online marketing. Why? Companies do this so they can keep a “skeleton” staff in-house and contract experts to manage the campaigns. Whether you’re a large company or a small company, having a pro to manage your marketing efforts is good marketing practice and makes good financial sense.

To answer this age-old marketing question, OgilvyOne recently started applying eye-tracking technology to email marketing messages for clients such as IBM, American Express and Cisco. Some early conclusions are that the word “free” is often skipped, and most readers see less than half of email copy.

If you’re interested in the research, you can see a heat map of the eye-tracking study here.

I’d be interested to see similar research done on email marketing messages from online retailers. I think you’d find that cluttered, complex messages so common to these types of email marketing promotions are skipped over by many customers. The challenge for the online retailer is to create compelling messages that get people to click to their web sites where true value propositions can be exposed.

Two new laws pertaining to email marketing go into effect today in Michigan and Utah that pose stiff penalties to marketers that don’t comply. Rather than explain the laws here, you can check out Clickz News or find out what you need to do to comply at Marketing Sherpa (this link is good only until July 10th).

I’ve wanted to write some commentary on a few interesting issues that have come up recently in my work, so this will be the first in a series. Today’s topic is email marketing and sanitizing your mailing lists.

When your web site visitors sign up to receive email from you, the information your site collected goes into a database. Unless you allow users to change their email preferences on your web site, that database never gets updated. Eventually, some of the email messages you send will be undeliverable, or “bounce” as it’s called in the email marketing industry. Today I’ll explore the two types of bounces, some reasons for them and how to handle them.

Emails can bounce for a variety of reasons. Maybe the email address is invalid, inactive or closed, the recipient’s mailbox is full, the mail server is down, or the system detects spam or offensive content.

The two types of email bounces are called “hard bounces” and “soft bounces.” Seems simple enough, right? Not quite‚Äîit’s a bit more complex than that. Let’s look at the two types and how to handle them.

“Hard Bounces”

Hard bounces happen when an email was sent to an email address that is no longer active. This could happen for a couple of reasons. One possible reason is that with the increasing adoption of broadband internet services, people are switching internet service providers and subsequently, their email address changes and their old email address is deleted.

Another reason a hard bounce happens is because people change jobs, abandoning their old e-mail address. When someone leaves their job, places of employment terminate that person’s email account. In my experience, 50% or more of your email marketing list could be comprised of work email accounts, so this is a common reason for hard bounces.

Tip For Reducing Hard Bounces

About the only thing you can do to combat hard bounces is to include a short paragraph on each of your e-mail communications letting customers know that if they change their email address they should let you know so you can update your contact list.

“Soft Bounces”

Soft bounces occur when email is sent to an active email address but the email is turned away before being delivered. Often, the problem is temporary‚Äîthe mail server might be down or the recipient’s mailbox is full. The email might be held at the recipient’s server and delivered later, or the sender’s email program may attempt to deliver it again.

Soft bounces can also occur because a person has an out-of-office notification enabled on their work email account. 90% of the replies to email campaigns that I help deploy are out-of-office notifications. As a marketer, you wouldn’t want to remove these people from your e-mail lists since they will eventually read the message and have the ability to receive future messages.

One note of caution about soft bounces: soft bounce reports from your email vendor are not always accurate because they often don’t report all soft bounces or the actual reason for the bounce. When comparing email vendors, you should ask to see a sample bounce report so you can see what data is offered. If the vendor can‚Äôt produce a sample report, inquire about how they handle soft bounces.

Save Money By Sanitizing Your Email List

Sanitizing your email marketing list is a very important component of running an email marketing campaign because it can save you money. Most email vendors charge you per email address you send to, and sending emails to invalid addresses is wasteful spending.

The first tip is simple—you should remove hard bounces immediately after every campaign. Some email vendors will do this for you automatically without your attention, while some others require you manually remove the names. It depends on how sophisticated your email marketing campaign is, but you should remove hard bounces every time you send an email newsletter.

Soft bounces are tricky. You should monitor soft bounces, and if your email vendor allows you to read the messages that come back, you can monitor reasons for soft bounces. Typically, I do not remove soft bounces from my email marketing lists unless I notice that a particular address bounces multiple times over the course of a few months.

Most of the campaigns I deploy are small in nature (under 25,000 names) so I have all replies/bounces sent directly to an email address I’ve set up to collect these. When I send a mailing, I monitor the mailbox. Using this method, I can find out why messages are bouncing back.

Unsubscribes

While this one goes without saying, you should remove all people who unsubscribe from your mailings immediately after the campaign is sent. If you don’t remove the person, you’re breaking the law. Most email vendors automatically unsubscribe email addresses for you, but if you’re running your own campaign, you may need to do this manually.

Email marketing can be a very profitable tool in your marketing arsenal. Make sure you keep your mailing lists clean, and you’ll save money.

The Federal Trade Commission is arguing (and rightly, I might add), that legitimate marketers, not dishonest marketers, will be harmed if Congress enacts legislation that would require ‘ADV’ to precede the email subject line in your email marketing communications.

The argument is that legit marketers will comply with the legislation and thus be blocked by email SPAM filters, while spammers would not comply. Simply put, requiring ‘ADV’ in front of any email subject line would not reduce SPAM.

A study released yesterday looked at the e-mail marketing practices of 250 online retailers, including many large national brands. Here are some of the findings:

• 68% are running e-mail marketing programs
• Retailers that send e-mail personalize it 25% of the time
• 23% of retailers don’t offer an e-mail signup on their homepage

If you’re selling online, it’s imperative that you have an e-mail marketing campaign, and it’s less costly than you might think. Let me offer up a recent example to show you how well e-mail performs and how high the ROI is.

I sent an e-mail marketing campaign to customers of an e-commerce site that I manage on the 18th of May. People sign up to receive e-mail in two ways‚Äîthey can register from the homepage or they can opt in when they place an order. The database is what I would call “mature”‚Äîmuch of the list contains loyal customers who have shopped with this web site for over a year.

Over a three-day period, the e-mail brought in one-fifth of May sales thus far. As you can see, it’s alarming to me that only 68% of online retailers are running e-mail marketing programs. The mailing cost $0.01 per e-mail sent, and the return on investment was over 450%. It took two days to set up the mailing and design the text and HTML versions.

If you’re in the ecommerce business, you need an e-mail marketing program. There are many issues to consider to ensure success, so you’ll need to consult a professional. Contact me and I can help you set up an e-mail marketing program that you can run and manage.

A few new pieces of information regarding e-mail marketing were released in the last day or two.

One hot topic in e-mail marketing recently has been the best day of the week to send e-mail communications to customers. A recent report suggests that there is no longer a favorable day to send e-mail, which is a change from the last report. Of course, Saturday and Sunday are still not popular days to send commercial e-mail for obvious reasons.

DoubleClick released some figures yesterday that suggest a rising trend in orders per e-mail. During the fourth quarter of 2004, orders per email delivered were 0.35 percent, contrasted with 0.30 percent in 2003. I’ve typically seen that 0.5 percent of e-mails delivered generate orders.

Finally, a presentation at the Annual Catalog Conference in Florida yesterday revealed that large ISP’s that filter out images from e-mail messages are having a negative impact on commercial e-mail marketing. As you may know, HTML e-mail generally generates higher conversion rates than plain text messages, but e-mail clients such as Gmail and Hotmail do not display images in e-mail without the viewer’s permission. When you send an e-mail communication, it is probably best to include a message to your subscribers asking them to “display images.”