Having a subscriber who would like to participate in your offer is great, but if they open your message a day too late they may see the offer and click through only to find that the product is sold out, or the event is full. This can have a very negative effect on your subscribers, and lessen the trustworthiness of your brand in their eyes.

If you send out time sensitive emails, offers that expire, or marketing messages centered on items with limited quantities, it is important to keep these messages working even after the deadline has passed. I’ve compiled a few simple tips to help keep your messages fresh and relevant.

Tip #1: The old Switch-a-Roo

Here is a quick way to make sure that your subscribers are seeing the most up to date information on time or inventory sensitive messages. If you are using an image to show your product or offer, consider creating two versions of the image. One with the image of the product and another that shows the product as sold out and calls them to click for other great deals.

This is simple to do, and will let subscribers that are late to opening your messages know right away that the product is no longer available. All that is required is replacing the original image with the new one, as long as they have the same file name, new openers will see the new image.

Unfortunately, this will probably not be a good indicator of availability to clients who have already opened the message and waited to purchase, as most email clients store these images in a local cache so they do not have to be downloaded again. These subscribers will see the image that was there when the message was opened initially.

Tip #2: Change up your landing page

If the call to action in your message leads to a landing page or direct purchase page, it is a good idea to keep these relevant as well. Instead of sending your subscribers to a purchase page with only a sold out item, send them to a page that gives them suggestions on other items or offers that they may be interested in.

While your subscribers may be disappointed to see the offer they wanted has expired or sold out, providing them with other options will keep them engaged and wanting to see what comes next.

Tip #3: Keep them in the loop

Let your subscribers know what is coming, keep them informed of upcoming specials and offers that are of interest to them. This is one of the easiest and most effective ways of keeping time sensitive messages fresh – let people know they are coming before they come. This will encourage your subscribers to watch for your upcoming emails and keep them ready to jump on the offers that you are sending.

So there you have it, a few simple, very effective tips for keeping your time-limited messages fresh, relevant and effective. If you have any other tips and tricks that you’ve successfully implemented, please share them in the comments.

Lucas Weber
Support Associate at Bronto

• A Good E-mail Marketing Program Costs Money
  "marketing organizations can no longer afford not to invest in efforts to improve the relevance of their e-mail programs"
  (tags: strategy budget)
• Time to learn about email marketing | The Scrappy Email Marketer
  "I spend 30-60 minutes a day on average reading about this industry to really understand it and learn new things about it. Education is an ongoing thing in my opinion. Never rest on what you know and always have an open mind."
  (tags: industry getting_started)
• Five ways to repeat yourself effectively
  "We've all had emails that worked particularly well, drawing an unusually high response. Pity, then, we can't use that same email again and again. Except we can...sort of." Mark Brownlow offers five ideas.
  (tags: tactics)
• How We Improved Our Newsletter Subscription Process
  "Hoping to inspire you to review your own subscription processes, here are the improvements that we made"
  (tags: cases opt-in)
• CSS support for MobileMe
  "Last month Apple replaced .Mac with a new service called MobileMe and while it is certainly slicker visually and nicer to use, in terms of CSS support the results were mixed."
  (tags: mobileme css coding)
• Embedding images revisited - Campaign Monitor Blog
  "The increased initial download size, and hence slower speed, the failure to show for increasingly popular webmail clients and the hassle of attachments still seem to indicate that embedded images are not the way to go in most cases."
  (tags: coding)
• Cracking the FTC Code: What You Can and Can't Do With Transactional E-mail
  "the topic of what is and isn't allowed under CAN-SPAM almost always comes up during any discussion about using transactional e-mail for marketing purposes. While it's always a good idea to verify that you're in compliance with CAN-SPAM laws, the good news is that when done properly, this potentially lucrative and brand-building practice is allowed. The key comes down to knowing the law and acting accordingly."
  (tags: transactional_emails canspam)             
• 2009 Email Benchmark Guide Survey
  A final request: Please take 5 to 10 minutes to answer MarketingSherpa's annual Email Questionnaire
  (tags: survey)

• The new definition of spam                
  recipients "define spam by the quality of the email itself -- not by the overall reputation of the company emailing them." So what are you to do? Spencer Kollas share some tips. 
  (tags: spam relevancy testing frequency targeting)
• Really Simple E-mail Segmentation: Getting Openers to Click - ClickZ
  "The good news about those who open but don't click is that they're able to see your images. The bad news is you don't know whether they're fully reviewing your e-mail and not finding anything engaging enough to click on, or whether your e-mail was opened in the preview pane a for a second as they scrolled past it, without looking, to get to another message."
  (tags: segmentation)
• Broken Graphics and the 40/40/20 Rule
  "This isn't to say e-mail creative is unimportant, but e-mailers really do need to assess how much energy they're spending on creative relative to crafting the offer and hitting the right target. I'd bet an evening's worth of cigars and vodka martinis that most are spending 80% of their time focused on the part of their effort that affects 20% of their chances of success."
  (tags: rendering design segmentation relevancy offer)
• Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season
  This guide includes benchmarks and advice on when to begin your campaign, how much to increase your email volume, which days to send on, and how to stand out in the inbox during the holidays.
  (tags: study)
• B2C problems for B2B email marketers
  Combined with their portability (the email address isn't zapped when you move jobs), it's no surprise to find business folk using them to get commercial email from informational websites and vendors.
  (tags: b2b rendering deliverability)

In this article, Stefan Pollard lists a couple of ways to collect more information from your email subscribers that can be used to create segments and relevant messages:

1. Invite readers to fill out or update their profiles
2. Use the search engine optimization terms that drive the most traffic to your site
3. Target messages based on subscribers' past behavior
4. Interview the people who talk directly with your customers
5. See where people click in your email messages
6. Choice vs. behavior: which yields stronger segments?

Read this excellent article here.

eROI uses this as an example of people who ruin their ROI by filling fake data into forms and ends their post by addressing Ken as follows:

I think that as someone that covers the industry and espouses the things that make us strong, tear us down, threaten our industry, and lift us up… you of all people should be helping us out and not hurting us.

I have known Ken for a while, and done a few interviews with him over the years. He has never pulled punches. Ever. It is not what he does. His job is pot-stirring. In this case he is stirring this pot by pointing out the poor subscription practices of the Obama campaign.

From my perspective, the problem is not that Ken gave the Obama campaign Stupid Poopypants as his name, the problem is that the Obama campaign is not doing any data verification. Ken did give the campaign a valid email address, but there was no reason he needed to do so. Anyone could have signed up Stupid Poopypants and put in Ken’s address.

Ken was pointing out the poor data collection process with this experiment and based on their post the point flew right over the heads of the folks at eROI. People are going to put fake data in forms online and there is not any way to stop them from doing this.

This process is much more a reflection on data collectors than on the individuals signing up. Senders and marketers online have spent a lot of time collecting information and sending marketing to people. At this point in time people do not want more marketing in their inbox, or on their phone, or in their postal box. they do not trust that a company will respect their opt-in preferences. So they provide false data. The subscriber does not trust the collector to respect the subscriber, and so the subscriber takes protective action against the collector.

If what eROI says is true, “data integrity is everything to our industry” then people collecting data should be prepared to actually spend a little effort to not let subscribers pollute their data. If eROI lets any moron on the internet put information in their form, and then expects the data to be good then I just have one question to ask eROI: Are you new to the Internet or something??

hat tip: Box of Meat

Over and over again people have tried to attack email in hopes of shifting people to the next “trend” in communications. Let me tell you this, email is not a trend, unless you consider the chart released from Social Media company ShareThis that only shows it as the leader in communication percentages. So if being a leader is a trend… sign me up to drink the punch. 

CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE THE FULL CHART LARGER

Read the whole study at the ShareThis Blog

When you do this do you realize how many hours a year the marketing and email marketing industry is spending to clean out crap like this? These data points go into our CRMs, our ecom sites, our lead capture systems and more. And to top this off data that is bogus can cause us deliverability issues as ISPs that we all try so hard to avoid. Do us a favor, if you want something, sign up for it with real info, if you want to streak the quad, do it on your own site. 

Now Ken you are a persona in our space, and sure you got a joke out of this. Hell I do some pretty odd things myself, but data integrity is everything to our industry and to me this is insulting to us and not funny. 

I think that as someone that covers the industry and espouses the things that make us strong, tear us down, threaten our industry, and lift us up… you of all people should be helping us out and not hurting us.

Here is the article from Frank the Tank Magill. Enjoy your weekend at Bed, Bath, Beyond.

So far it has performed well and as the list grows we will watch to see how it works out. Now this being said, we did make a standard back up email layout just in case it went the other way. Well luck was on our side. 

My thoughts are why not challenge the medium. Why not make something stand out that not only grabs the readers attention, makes them pause to look at it, and if it works see if the media picks it up. Well all three things happened. 

So what is next? We will see as the months go on. We are always up to try something different. Are you?

From DM News:

E-mail marketing has long been an important one-to-one communication channel, but marketers’ perspective of the medium is changing as brands begin to use it in new and innovative ways.

Zinio, an online publishing and distribution services firm, is also look ing at new approaches to e-mail, but from the design perspective. The firm recently debuted a new horizontal e-mail that lets readers scroll the e-mail to the right, the way one reads a book.

“It’s a completely different way of present ing the content that gives the reader a new e-mail experience,” says Stephanie Jackson, publisher, services manager at Zinio.

The Zinio e-mails are a key part of the brand’s communication, and this new design approach is a way to help try new options within the medium.

“E-mail has become such an integral part of consumers’ lives that now it’s an integral part of any relationship [they have] with someone. [Marketers] are recognizing that and [have started] taking it more seriously,” Jackson adds.

http://www.dmnews.com/E-mail-gaining-utility-among-marketers/article/113586/

What I found to be interesting is that Ad Age is covering email marketing. I guess in light of the purchase of Ideal Bite and Daily Candy it makes sense. But here is one we love that I think you should keep your eyes on, the BeThree Daily email.

Here is an audio podcast from Ad Age about the daily email and it’s success.

Success in Web 1.0 Simplicity

3 Minute Ad Age: August 11, 2008- Produced by Hoag Levins 

UrbanDaddy’s audience demographic is males with average incomes of $150,000

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — UrbanDaddy is an e-mail newsletter that’s surprising for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s only available by invitation. And yet it has signed up 300,000 young lawyers, bankers and brokers and now puts out editions in five cities. Its successful strategy is also noteworthy because of its Web 1.0 simplicity and a dogged determination to build a brand that speaks with a singular voice of journalistic authority. No blogs or UGC here. It’s also signed on a blue-chip list of advertisers including Sony, Samsung, American Express, Belvedere Vodka, Ralph Lauren and Hugo Boss. 

Listen to the podacast

The basic idea of an API is the ability to automate things that otherwise would be done by hand. The true power comes in when you extend this automation to include personalization and tie in other applications.

A tried and true application of an API is purchase confirmation receipts. Tie your eCommerce system into an email application in order to provide solid deliverability and best of breed reporting. You can take this to the next level by introducing related product recommendations or related coupons.

Another great idea is to provide an eCard application for your customers. You know the type, you select a card, provide some personalization details and before you know it your friend is greeted by an image of frolicking kittens. This again, can be implemented without much trouble via the API.

A little creativity, business need, and a web developer and you’ve got yourself some great new avenues to drive business.

Many people are accomplishing these goals solely through their eCommerce engine or website, and while this does accomplish one goal it misses out on a few others. First, you are assuming the effort of maintaining deliverability for these solutions, which can be quite a burden to bear. Secondly, you are often lacking in-depth reporting which comes along with most ESP based solutions.

But the last thing you aren’t getting is the flexibility for marketers to control the message. Often times these home grown solutions don’t provide an avenue for marketers to modify or update messaging as needed. It’s often up to a developer to go in and change a script in order to make changes. This method not only discourages good marketing, it often times makes it down-right impossible.

An example of editing an automated message

Good marketing requires constant refinement of all your message. Marketers need the ability to make changes on the fly as they consult message metrics. Complete API solutions, like ours here at Bronto, provide the tools to update, test, and report on your API messages.

So put the power of your automated email efforts into the hands of your marketers, it’s where they belong.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

Return Path recently released its  Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Here is George Bilbrey’s high level take on what they found:

Most of the servers sending email shouldn’t be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were legitimate, well-configured, static email servers. It’s important to point out that this doesn’t speak at all to the quality of the messages from those servers - lots of horrible spammers know how to configure a mail server. The other 80% of the mail is coming from servers that are either identifiably bad or unidentifiable and probably bad. No wonder ISPs and other large receivers feel besieged. 

Servers with good reputations get their messages delivered. Servers with bad reputations don’t. This might seem obvious to those of you reading this blog, and of course it is. But again, having that empirical data is gratifying. We found a direct linear relationship between an IP’s Sender Score and that IP’s average delivered rate. Of course I have to point out here that it is not the low Sender Score that is causing the delivery problems, a common misconception. The reputation issues that give an IP a low Sender Score are what also cause that IP to be blocked from inboxes. 

Specific best practices have a direct result on an IP’s delivery rates. We found a 20 point difference in delivery rates for IPs with just one spam trap hit. For servers with unknown user rates above 9% the difference was 23 points versus servers with cleaner data. 

Blacklists don’t cause blocking, they predict it. We found that servers listed on any one of nine public blacklists (the lists studied are noted in the report) had an average delivery rate of 35% versus 58% for servers not on these lists. But the reason is not that those blacklists are used by receivers. In fact, some of them are not used very much at all. Much like with the Sender Score, the behaviors that land a server on the blacklist also cause that server to be blocked by many receivers.

Read the full report now and check out Karen J. Bannan’s 5 tips on how to increase deliverability here.

When this creative was first passed by my desk I had to stop and think about it a little bit. How was it different from what was sent out prior? What would tell people what to do and would that effort beat that of ones prior? The whole idea of this campaign was to drive subscriptions and we did not want it to make people think of anything else besides the images and the value of having a print subscription. We loaded it up into an inbox to see how it displayed. Did it drive the eyes to the action. Did it convey value and on top of that did it make me want to get a subscription. Well it was close.

So what was the element that was missing? Well it was that the images of the magazines were taking my eye away from the action button. So what I suggested was to bring that button to life in a higher jewel tone color to make it POP but not steal from the magazines. We tested a few variations and then settled with the final image here. We loaded it back up and sent it to the inbox to see what we immediately saw, felt and understood. Done. We were happy that it would perform. Now tell you this might make you wonder how we knew it would work, as we had one shot at this test and we had only been given 3 days to make it happen. What a test, no pressure right? 

Well it went out and a few days later with the metrics came back we heard we had blown it away. Wow it felt good. There were high fives traded and a sense of accomplishment from the team that worked on it. 

What you can learn.

1. Working on the goal first can help you drive the creative approach in email. 

2. Loading the creative into a live inbox and seeing it in the environment it was meant for can tell you a lot in a short time prior to live testing. 

3. When you have been doing this as long as we have, trust your gut and go with what you know works. 

Look for the full case study to be released in a few weeks. It is the little changes that make the impact, not the sweeping changes in most cases.