•  Build up excitement early: Highlight Memorial Day sales, specials and items at least three weeks prior to the holiday. (Note: that means now)
• Use holiday-appropriate imagery: When planning your creative, think of bar-b-ques, outdoor gatherings and parties.
• Create urgency in the subject line: This is a ‘must do,’ especially for the emails that go out on Memorial Day itself. Words such as ‘final,’ ‘last’ and ‘today only’ can be your best tools.

But as you’ll discover in the 2011 edition, one of the oldest internet marketing channels on the Internet, email, continues to experience substantial grow in both volume and revenue. Readers can expect to discover data on what subject lines drive open rates and click-through activity, as well as an extensive analysis of email marketing through major gift-giving holidays.

While I won’t reveal the specific insights of that section of our upcoming report (you’ll have to register to get that data later this month), I thought I’d apply our Experian Hitwise data to answer the question of what sectors are the greatest benefactors of traffic from email services.   (Hint: if you’re in the financial sector, run, don’t walk to the registration link at the bottom of this page – you need this report).

The table below shows the top industries beyond social, search and portals, receiving traffic from our email services category, or web-based email.

While we might jump to the conclusion that retail websites have the most to gain from email marketing, financial institutions receive over twice the traffic than the first retail category: #6 department stores.  The other categories that rely heavily on email traffic are dating sites and the entertainment category (television, multimedia and games).

We give a lot of attention to the latest social networking or mobile marketing acquisition channels, but given the fact that at the writing of this post, traffic to email services accounted for over 6.5% of all Internet traffic. What this translates to: if you’re not focusing on email, you’re leaving a lot of traffic on the table.

Want to learn more about digital marketing in 2011? Click here to request a copy of Experian Marketing Services highly-anticipated 2011 Digital Marketer Report, launching in late March. The report features an editorial by Bill Tancer as well as unreleased data spanning email, social, mobile, search and more.

We asked three of our expert designers to share their theories on why horizontal layouts work, and what other best practices and tricks of the trade they incorporate into their creatives to bolster their performance.

Senior Graphic Designer Roald Ansano recounts his inspiration for the unique layout:

“The first time I realized the potential of horizontal designs I was reviewing a retail client’s summer campaign. It was designed like a wide postcard, with products you could scroll left to right to look at. If the same products had been laid out in a normal template, I would’ve just scrolled up and down, out of habit. But I was already doing something different from the norm, so it kept me interested.”

What’s the tactical approach in designing these emails?

“As with traditional vertical emails, you must concentrate on the 420 pixel “above the fold” area. But for horizontals, you stress the total viewable width of 720 pixels. This is the average measurement we use to determine when the user needs to start scrolling horizontally to view more content. The important information must appear there, but there can’t be too much to take in, or it becomes overwhelming. The most important thing is to use cues that get the viewer’s attention and indicate that there’s more to the right. You must encourage interaction with the viewer.”

Graphic Designer Riko Austria explains the process further:

“To entice the viewer to scroll to the right, we incorporate graphical elements that provide a horizontal “visual flow” to the email, such as a long header image, a call-to-action, a product description, or a lifestyle shot that is intentionally cut off until you move right. It’s like a visual ‘teaser.’ That convinces the viewer to scroll to see more.”

Riko enjoys the challenge horizontal emails represent.

“It’s something new to bring to the table; it’s something new to master and test. There are different methods to use when designing. And, it’s the perfect time for this to come out, now that most monitors are wide screen. It’s a perfect technological fit.”

Graphic Designer Kathy Jankovic has been busy redesigning vertical emails into horizontal versions for the last couple of months:

“We like to give the client both options, and we’re doing testing to see what performs better. I’m looking forward to seeing the testing data and working more with horizontal designs.”

With each project, Kathy feels she comes closer to perfecting the art of these designs.

“I’m always thinking about ways to make the initial presentation, and user interaction more engaging, such as using a continuous image, and making sure content doesn’t end before the 720 pixel mark. One of the challenges for me, as a designer, is that the horizontal plane can go up to 2000 pixels (standard total width measurement used by several email clients), so I have to know when to end the design. With horizontals, too much right-left movement isn’t good. Viewers lose focus and then interest. It’s very much about using your instincts, while letting the design define the horizontal end.”

Time and testing will tell if the horizontal approach is a surefire hit, but so far, all signs point to yes.

One of the most important issues for email marketers is making sure the message makes it to the “inbox” of the intended recipient. An often overlooked key aspect of mailing delivery — in addition to IP reputation — is the actual subject line of the email. Not only does the subject line play an important role in getting delivered, it is imperative to accomplish the main objective of getting your marketing message opened and read by the user and keeping your list active. As such, here are some subject line best practices to follow to ensure your legitimate email is not filtered as spam.

• A subject line should be as short and descriptive as possible. The subject line should be informative and true. If your from name and address are not branded, the subject line should also provide assurance that the email comes from a trusted source. A general rule of thumb is to keep subject lines between 30-50 characters.
• A strong offer can be put right in the subject line. Evaluate your content to understand the likelihood of your message hitting spam filters, particularly if a high percentage of your list is at corporate domains. Corporate domains rely more on phrases or words that have been “tainted” by the spamming community. The major web-based email clients focus on your reputation more than your content.
• The from name and address can be as important as the subject line. A strong offer can be put right in the subject line, but it is important to use punctuation and grammar carefully to ensure that you are not perceived to be a spammer by the receiving ISP.
• The ‘from’ name and subject line should work in tandem. The ‘from’ line should communicate who you are as the sender. Do your best to not change this entry frequently and make it recognizable so that recipients understand that the email was sent by a reliable source.
• If you are cross promoting a sister brand, use the subject line to introduce the sister brand and do not change the ‘from’ address of the originally subscribed-to brand. Any other ‘from’ address is likely to increase complaints. For more information on cross promoting sister brands, please see our recent post on promoting sister brands.

That said, spammers use various tactics to fool people into opening their emails. Spammers often use words that announce a big incentive or urgency. We suggest testing certain keywords or alternative words to optimize your subject lines.

• Some key words and phrases such as “act now,” “trial,” “quote,” and “guarantee” can be tested against “complimentary,” “estimate,” “be our guest,” and “giveaway.”
• While “Free” performs well in subject lines (see Experian CheetahMail’s Free Shipping Report) you might try using “our treat” or “on the house” to see what works best for your brand.
• Avoid excessive punctuation — exclamation points, multiple periods (…), dollar signs ($$), etc.
• In the past putting full words in ALL CAPS was considered equivalent to shouting. Using all caps is a practice used by spammers. Test the use of all caps and monitor any drops in open rates potentially due to filtering.
• Using ‘Re:’ at the beginning of a subject line falsely leads the recipient to think the email is a reply to a previous email. This is a misleading tactic. This tactic is not CAN-SPAM compliant and creates a poor customer experience. If the recipient feels duped into opening an email, you might see an increase in abuse rates or unsubscribe requests.

Just a few little words/phrases in your subject line can make or break the success of your email marketing campaign, not just by impacting open rates but affecting deliverability too. To learn what works best, test. Following these subject line best practices can save your client from losing both excellent reputation and good subscribers.

According to a new report from Experian Marketing Services that explores loyalty-based consumer trends, loyalty points and rewards programs are proven tools to help retain customers in a time when consumers are increasingly likely to stray from some of their favorite brands. When planning a rewards program, consider the fact that the most popular types of credit card affiliation among U.S. adults are those offering points. In fact, 18% of all card-holders today participate in a points program. Cash-back rewards are also popular with 16% of card-holders participating in at least one such program. Airline and hotel rewards affiliations are considerably less prevalent with just 6% and 2% of card-holders, respectively, participating in each reward program.

When planning a rewards program, consider the fact that the most popular types of credit card affiliation among U.S. adults are those offering points.

Once you determine the right program, email can play an important role in optimizing customer loyalty. By leveraging email to communicate with loyalty members, your business can benefit from extensive opportunities for enhanced customer relations and generate increased revenue.

Loyalty-focused campaigns can span the entire customer life cycle, from the initial entry to program renewal notifications and reminder messages. They also tend to perform better than standard promotional mailings in terms of customer response and revenue. In fact, compared to bulk campaigns, emails targeted to loyalty program members have 40% higher open rates, 22% higher click rates, and transaction rates and revenue per email that are 29% and 11% higher, respectively. Even mailings targeting prospects with an invitation to join a loyalty program tend to outperform the promotional mailings for the same businesses with a 28% lift in transaction rates and 25% higher revenue per email.

For more information about email loyalty marketing, check out The Loyalist: Leveraging Relationships With Existing Customers to Increase ROI.

According to Experian Marketing Services’ new white paper, Spreading the word through friends-and-family emails, there are a few things that email marketers should keep in mind when deploying their friends and family programs this year, including:

• Friends-and-family campaigns are a good choice all year long.
  Friends-and-family emails should become part of your overall promotional playbook. They connect with subscribers and generate more revenue directly, while also providing referrals to potential new email subscribers and customers. These campaigns perform all year long — even during the fiercely competitive and discount-heavy holiday season.
• The words “friends and family” are important.
  Using the words “Friends and Family” will enhance the performance of email campaigns deployed by the same brand offering identical discount values. Ensure that the three words “Friends and Family” appear in the subject line and that the messaging is clearly promoted in the body of the email.
• Enable sharing.
  To increase the potential of reaching new and existing customers who might not have received the initial email campaign, maintain sharing features in their usual location (i.e., forward to a friend, share) while also adding larger call-outs that enable sharing within the body of the email, near the offer. Consumers are very accustomed to sharing friends-and-family offers, so it’s important to make it easy for them to do so.

Keep these tips in mind and spread the word this holiday season – the payoff can translate into a very happy New Year!

To read the new white paper Spreading the word through friends-and-family emails, click here.

Why is lifecycle email marketing such a hot topic these days? For one, it has proven out time and time again that lifecycle email communications can significantly boost subscriber engagement and retention. After all, messaging based on factors that change over time increases relevancy and speaks to customers at much more personal levels.

One example of lifecycle messaging done right is a recently launched campaign from Healthy Pet Magazine. HealthyPet, a veterinary communications and analytics company offering pet owner reminders and education via a comprehensive suite of print and digital communications, leverages dynamic content and offers relevant cross-sell promotions to significantly increase email opens and click rates while deepening customer engagement.

HealthyPet’s program consists of a series of dynamic content-filled emails triggered at each life state of a cat or dog, from 0 to 16 years of age.

HealthyPet’s program consists of a series of dynamic content-filled emails triggered at each life state of a cat or dog, from 0 to 16 years of age. Dynamic customer data is leveraged to achieve deep and relevant content personalization.

• Customer name
• Pet name
• Species specific content
• Age/life stage specific content
• Breed name, image and link to breed profile
• Up to four breed-specific medical conditions and their associated links
• Breed-specific did-you-know factoid
• Life stage and animal hospital specific offer or cross-sell promotion
• Customer-specific login/registration codes embedded in all link URLs to personalize their click-through and Website experience

Dynamic elements also include each animal hospital’s name in the ‘from’ field of the email envelope. In addition, each animal hospital’s logo, phone number and physical address were inserted to customize the email communications to each animal hospital.

HealthyPet emails with personalized content had click rates three times higher than publishing industry benchmarks.

Great job, Healthy Pet! To learn more about the program, click here.

It is with this in mind that researchers at Experian Simmons developed the new Technology Adoption consumer segmentation system, now available to all NCS/NHCS clients. Through sophisticated statistical analysis of dozens of attitudes, behaviors and lifestyle drivers, we uncovered four distinct segments of technology consumers: Wizards, Journeymen, Apprentices and Novices. These segments are defined by their usage of and attitudes towards technology. This report will examine, in extensive detail, the attitudes, brand preferences, lifestyles and media behaviors of these four powerful segments.

If you would like to download a PDF of this entire report, please fill out the brief form on the following page.

Some of the new features that should have a positive impact on email deliverability include:

• Trusted Senders Icon — Hotmail will now help visually identify ‘trusted senders’ in your inbox, particularly banks and other senders most commonly impersonated in phishing scams, by putting safety logos next to those senders recognized as legitimate. While the exact details on this feature are limited right now, it will most likely be based on a combination of authentication and a consistently positive mailing reputation.
• Tabs — Organizational tools will appear at the top of the inbox that will allow the user to display messages received from specific contacts, certain social networks (such as Facebook notifications), pre-selected email groups, or all of their mail. In addition, “Quick Views” will be available that will automatically sort four types of emails into their respective folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs, and Shipping Updates. These tabs can benefit senders by addressing inbox overload issues.

One of the new features that should have a negative impact on senders and deliverability as a whole:

• Time Traveling Filters — Microsoft’s filters can retroactively remove messages that were placed in the inbox if the reputation of the sender later turns out to be poor and the recipient has not yet opened the message in their inbox. That means there’s no longer a guarantee that a message delivered to the inbox will actually stay there until the recipient acts on it.

In addition to these two deliverability enhancements, there are also some new user interface features and ‘behind the scenes’ developments that can have either positive or negative effects on senders. These include:

• Preference auto-learning/prompts — Subscribers that delete messages without opening them multiple times will be prompted if they want to unsubscribe from that sender (assuming the sender is populating a ‘list-unsubscribe’ setting in their transmission header). This will have positive and negative affects for senders; it will undoubtedly reduce list size by some amount, however, it removes recipients who are no longer engaged which should improve open and conversion rates.
• Sweep — This feature allows users to clean out their inbox in one ‘sweep’ effort. In a single-click, a user can select a single e-mail sender, or multiple senders, and automatically delete or move every message from that sender out of their inbox. A positive byproduct of this feature is that senders whose mail is swept should not suffer any impact to their reputation since the number of unsubscribes and spam complaints should decrease as more recipients use sweep rather than unsubscribing, deleting or complaining. However, it’s important to remember that just because a complaint rate is low doesn’t mean that the sender’s reputation and deliverability is good. Hotmail will still check email quality, engagement and other relevant statistics to further identify legitimate messaging. Additionally, the sweep function remembers user preferences, so if a user sweeps a sender’s mail once, Hotmail is likely to continue to sweep that sender’s mail to the designated folder until the user intervenes.
• Delete all of them? — Upon deleting a single email from a sender, users may be prompted to “Delete all of them?” with the ability to block all future messages from that particular sender. This action should have the same positive/negative effects as the Preference auto-learning/prompts.

These enhancements to Hotmail can have both positive and negative effects on senders. These changes are primarily designed so that fewer true spam messages will appear in your subscriber’s inbox, which will allow the subscriber greater time to interact with legitimate messages from legitimate senders.

As marketers increasingly create niche brands or become consolidated within ‘parent’ companies, it may seem like the ideal opportunity to cross-promote products and services across ‘sister’ brands to reach prospective customers, expand subscriber lists and increase revenue.

Unfortunately, sharing subscriber data across brands has the potential to negatively impact reputation, which can adversely influence inbox placement for all of the sending brands. This practice may not only generate increased complaints but, if executed improperly, could also result in lower engagement and higher unsubscribes due to subscriber frustration or irrelevancy of sister brand outreach.

Here are some tactics to positively introduce subscribers to ‘sister’ brands:

• Implement a branded welcome email series that familiarizes current subscribers with related brands. This serves to boost interest as well as brand recognition of the sister brand. Furthermore, this association will begin the process of persuading subscribers to click-through and check out other content. Be sure to include all brand logos in the footer or elsewhere in standard messaging or cross-promotional messages as that will further increase awareness and credibility for all of your affiliated brands.
• Place the unsubscribe link at the top of the cross-promoted marketing message to encourage subscribers to opt-out of co-branded promotions rather than complain to their ISP or unsubscribe from all emails from that ‘sender.’* Complaints are the most important consideration by ISPs in their filtering decisions, so providing subscribers a highly visible unsubscribe helps to maintain low complaint rates and a good reputation.
• Utilize clear and conspicuous language at the point of email consent so that subscribers have realistic expectations of potential cross-branded communications.
• Refrain from changing the ‘from’ address of the originally subscribed-to brand. Any other ‘from’ address will surprise recipients and increase complaints.
• Direct recipients to a preference center when they join or leave your program and utilize it to expose subscribers to other brands’ subscription options.
• Ensure that the cross-branded emails include a significant promotion that provides value and encourages future receipt of these types of emails. Alternatively, use some existing space within an email to solicit subscriptions to an affiliated brands email list.

As a proud ‘parent’ brand, the desire to showcase the attributes and advantages of an entire ‘family’ of brands is not only natural, but a recommended opportunity. Guiding this introduction through best practices is vital in maintaining a positive reputation amongst ISPs in addition to fostering high-quality experiences with consumers.

*In our next edition, we’ll address some of the privacy and legal issues with managing co-branded and affiliate email campaigns.