…trying not to get eaten by a bear

So, our team at work generally sends each other outlook calendar appointment/meeting requests to track when people are out of office (with time blocked as free). When you're talking about 10 or more people on the team it's pretty handy without being intrusive.

My boss sends the following title in her vacation calendar request, "OOF trying not to get eaten by a bear." I'm working at home today, but I can imagine the roars of laughter eminating from various offices in the marketing hall. You see my boss occasionally goes camping, but has a fear of bears (and rightfully so!). The irony, if you will, is last year she almost got eaten by a bear. Perhaps more accurately, the bear poked it's not so little snout in her tent window. A pleasant way to wake up? Not so much…

I'm pretty much with Stephen Colbert on the subject of bears:

"' 'Dear Stephen, why aren’t you nicer to bears? I like them a lot! They make me laugh my head off. Love, Joshua.' Like a lot of kids, Joshua has been misled about bears. They won’t make you laugh your head off, they'll tear your head off." —Stephen Colbert, reading a fan letter on his show, The Colbert Report

“Render” is the new open

I was reading an article in Email Insider the other day from Loren McDonald proposing we re-brand the much maligned “open rate” metric in favor of an “email render rate.” As much as those at my company and in the industry want to ignore the open rate, there are others who pay attention to it in the same way that advertisers gravitate to impressions. The render concept does more accurate reflect what happens to an image when it’s loaded in an email client reading pane.

I like the idea of devaluing the open rate in favor of stronger and more relevant metrics: click, unsubscribe or spam rate, transaction rate, gross profit, contribution or revenue… just to name a few.

Now if we can all just agree on what’s the new black.

Email HTML standardization?

 A new grassroots effort among the email client developer and design communities has sprung up in hopes of bringing some standards and consistency to how HTML emails render across email platforms, in the same way that HTML coding for webpages has some compliance or standardization recommendation, notably the Web Standards Project and the W3C. Email marketers struggle with this issue as email production resources are generally finite and few, and creating different versions of the same email content in order to render elegantly across a variety of email platforms is often reserved for the most popular of the clients.

“Our mission is to drive the use and support of web standards in email, working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for designers and readers, and we’d love your help.”

You can learn more by going to their website. Be sure to check out their acid test results.

Can you imagine a world in which you could build forms in hotmail or use the same CSS metadata– one that would work regardless or email webclient?

Public speaking and dealing with stage fright

Stephanie Miller wrote up a summary of the Expedia presentation at the Email Insider Summit on Saturday. Her words were more eloquent than my own and distilled our discussion down to a core message that Carey and I feel passionate about… “less is more” and creating compelling subscriber experiences. 

Generally speaking, I’m always nervous before giving a presentation and this weekend was no different. How do I handle the inevitable stage fright that comes with being on stage?

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2007 (Day 1)

Day 1, Morning General Sessions
March 5, 2007

MarketingSherpa speaker’s showed that email is “extremely significant” to company’s marketing programs. (Yes, this should be obvious)

Here are some key takeaways…
25% of marketers surveyed have no mention of newsletter or email sign up on their home pages
55% of companies send a Welcome email message within 72 hours

• Roughly 1/3 send content beyond welcome
• Automated email triggers offer a great opportunity to show examples of previous newsletters or cross-sell or up-sell offers
• Strike while the iron is hot and reach out to subscribers when they are most excited about hearing from you.

Transactional email has become more accepted over the past 3 years

• Fewer people are hugely negative or positive towards transactional email as long as there isn’t a lot of heavy, “hard sell” or marketing speak in them

MarketingShepa Email Summit 2007 (Day 0)

Day 0, Boot Camp
March 4, 2007

Here are some highlights from the email boot camp session…

Interesting Statistic: On average, 22% of emails in your customer list bounce per year.
MarketingSherpa speakers suggested that some of the best segments for testing include:

Customer vs. prospects
New opt-in (30 days)
Actives vs. inactives
Recent partners (offer, response)
Triggered (b-day, behavior, etc)

The concept of “Reputation” is based on a combination of the following:

Complaints
permission type
IP address
Frequency w/o relevancy
Authentication
Blacklists
List hygiene

Sadly, the ISP’s don’t give out their “secret sauce,” which makes it difficult for marketer’s to gather and define benchmarks around sender reputation.