Another analogy which would seem completely natural delivered in Swiss Tony’s smooth southern drawl, but let’s look into this in more depth.

Every car owner has their own priorities and preferences when it comes to what car they drive. For some it’s a simple means to get from A to B while others require the fastest, sexiest car on the market.

Things are much the same in the world of email marketing. For example; some companies will prioritise ease of use, while others place huge value in having every possible added function, whether it’s likely to see use or not.

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But how do you know which is best for your business? Let the analogy continue…

Cars are categorised into different classes including sports cars or 4×4s – the same is true of email marketing platforms.

At one end you have your cheap providers; little or no license fee, straight forward template construction and a polished, easy to use interface.

These are your ‘super minis’ or Smart cars. They look nice enough, get you to where you need to go and are certainly economical – but there are big sacrifices in power.

Start your engines

Super minis are perfect to get you around the local town but not ideal for taking you anywhere especially interesting or doing it in style. Any endeavor of a more ambitious journey will find you struggling along the motorway being overtaken by every other car on the road.

This is down to them having very little real power under the bonnet- the same being true of many email marketing platforms. Functionality like segmentation, split testing and survey tools are essential to make sure you’re living life in the fast lane.

They also rarely follow best practice standards. For example, allowing users to type in their own email from address, potentially sending from unauthenticated and killing deliverability.

This, coupled with the inevitable piece of branding at the foot of each email and virtually no support or advice to help standards improve, means that although they’re a great place to start with email marketing, their lifespan is limited for organisations hoping to go places.

Going Places

At the other end of the scale you have huge, well established enterprise solutions that have been around for years and offer a wealth of features with all the support you could ask for.

All they ask in return is massive license fees and often hefty ongoing support fees. Costs for sends can seem to be good value but only if you are sending huge volumes- at least in the hundreds of thousands.

For a large organisation looking for the ultimate solution these platforms would seem the logical choice, but unfortunately many of the providers in this part of the marketplace are not quite what they appear.

Consider these your top-end sports cars and executive cruisers, an Aston Martin or Rolls Royce. Great if you can afford it? Possibly, but only if you are buying a brand new model; not such a safe investment once they are a few years old.

Coded many years ago in ’old fashioned’ languages, they struggle to keep up to date with the latest functionality. Some of the most established brand names in the industry can be out performed by more modern solutions with more advanced technology at the core.

The compromise

This leaves us with the rest i.e. the middle ground cruisers where many different options are available. They are the popular choice like a Ford or BMW, offering far better returns on your original investment.

Which is best is down to your preferences and what suits your business but there are a few golden rules that may help you end up with the right partner:

1. Take a trial – it should be free.

2. Get a demonstration – it will help you make a decision.

3. Don’t base your decision purely on lowest price – you get what you pay for.

4. Do your research – this is a big decision.

Unlike when buying a car, it is rarely just one individual who chooses an email marketing platform. There are all sorts of considerations such as ease of use, functionality, costs, support/account management etc

All you can do is pick the provider that offers the best overall package to suit your business needs, now and in the future.

Every Friday, we tweet a question from the @dotmailer twitter account with the hashtag #dotFoolery, picking a random winner from all the successful answers the following week.

This week, we’ve got a question for you, the answer to which should be crystal clear:

Which dotDigital sponsored footballer made his Crystal Palace debut this week?

To be in for a chance to win, Tweet your answer at @dotMailer with the #dotfoolery hashtag and who knows, it might be your lucky day.

This week, the prize is a mystery gift but trust us, it’s a good one. All will be revealed next Wednesday when we announce the winner.

So, get tweeting and tell your friends- one clue we can give you about the prize is that you’ll need a chum to make the most of it.  It’s time to team up- perhaps get the whole office involved?

Anyway, without further ado, we big you Happy Friday dotFoolery!

P.S. Clue: Look down…

People often ask me, “When’s the best time to send out email to make sure it gets opened?” Obviously no question which gets asked with such frequency can have a simple answer, but we’re happy to give it a shot.

Traditionally, it has been suggested that Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon are the sweetspot to ensure that your email is opened.  At the very least, others suggest hitting targets just after the morning rush or soon after lunch.

But actually, this is a bit of a myth.  If there really was a single best time to hit audiences, everyone would be sending out mail, inundating inboxes and making this the worst possible time. In fact spammers, who you could argue pay attention to the stats at least as much as ‘proper’ marketers, would also take advantage of this and the spam would further put readers off. These stand out as average highs, not indicators of human behaviour.

Having said all this, there are factors worth bearing in mind when considering when to distribute your email.

Things to Bear in Mind

First up, concentrate on your demographic – who are you distributing to and what are the patterns of their behaviour? Without a doubt, this is key as occupation can be the biggest influence on opening habits and expectations.

The next consideration to be addressed is the nature of your promotion. Ultimately, the call to action, perhaps referenced in your subject line, will play a big part in the likelihood of opening and the hit rate of the message.

Let’s look at some examples.

For Example?

First up, one client of ours is in the business of hair and beauty products.  In this case, they often found a burst of activity on Monday mornings.  This immediately stood out as an oddity so the account manager quickly investigated the logic.

The answer was simple! Those ordering on Monday mornings were people who had split up with the boyfriend or had a terrible weekend and were preparing for the next Friday

For contrast, if the email had been from FHM, reading it on a Monday morning would likely get you disciplined if you were caught by your employer.  On the other hand, opening it on a Friday after you’ve been to the pub with the boss may be a more likely and acceptable possibility.

Above all, content is important.  For the hair and beauty business, weekends presented a quiet time for sales. With this in mind, they’d hit customers with promotions offering buy one get one free if the order was placed that Saturday.  Again this is an example of how content can dictate the best opening time.

Segments

The biggest mistake can be to stick with a distribution time even though you know you aren’t getting many positive hits. It’s always worth experimenting with different options and segmenting your audience in line with their engagement levels.  In this way, the different opening habits become another way of understanding your audience better if harnessed correctly.

Anyone who has been using email marketing for a while also has access to a great reservoir of information which they may not be considering. Namely the historical reports provided by their Email Service Provider.

Often these will reveal discrepancies and other factors to bear in mind. We’ve all had a plan to distribute something Tuesday morning only to have it slip to Wednesday. Has this had an impact on the pickup?

All these considerations can come together and help you work out the perfect time to send email marketing. Not because it’s when they open everyone else’s or because it’s most common in the law of averages but based on the specific habits of your audience.

As with many marketing efforts, it comes down to a little patience, a willingness to experiment and an understanding of who you’re trying to reach.

We run a vast array of different email auditing services for our clients, so that they can quickly work out where they should be investing more time to get the most out of their email sends.

I thought I’d run through each of the audits we recommend and explain a little bit more about what they mean.

Some of these can be carried out yourself internally, but if you want some assistance, let us know if you are interested in any of the audits for your company and we’d be happy to help!

1. Segmentation – segmentation allows you to group your recipients by certain factors so that you can send different, targeted messages to certain segments and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.

2. Triggered campaigns – triggered emails enable your company to automatically send an email to a customer or prospect based on certain actions they take – for example, if they download a whitepaper, or a certain time after they have purchased.

3. Dynamic content – you can use dynamic content in your emails to change the information a recipient is sent based on their segmentation profiles. For example, you might want to send an email pulling in product information based on a recipient’s last purchase. The content in the email would be different for each recipient.

4. Email health check – there are around 25 different criteria that can be used to check whether your emails are up to scratch and healthy.  This will give you a broad effectiveness rating for your campaigns and allow you to identify areas for improvement.

5. Testing – this allows you to look at certain aspects of your email campaign and see if there are areas that could be performing better. By sending different messages to different segments, you can see which is performing best.

6. Eyetracking – ever wondered which parts of your email a recipient actually looks at? If so, eyetracking could help.  Eyetracking provides a picture of how your recipients actually read and interact with your emails.

7. Data collection strategy – by analysing your customer journey, you can make sure you have appropriate and effective data collection opportunities at each touchpoint. This will help you grow your data list.

8. Data quality – it is possible to benchmark the contents of your data by looking at, for example, its age and the last customer action. This will let you know whether you need to collect fresh data or at least trim your list.

9. Opt-in/Opt-out analysis – are you worried about the number of opt-outs you are receiving? It’s worth looking at the factors affecting opt-ins and opt-outs to see if there are improvements that can be made.

10. What metrics should you measure – email is fantastic because it is so measureable. But which metrics actually matter most for your business? Often, you don’t need to measure them all.

11. ROI calculation – you know you are getting some good results from your email marketing, but is it actually giving you a return on your investment? If you don’t know, it’s worth taking a look and finding out.

12. Value of an email address – what is the lifetime value of your email asset? Calculating this can help you make a case for more budget or investment in email marketing.

13. Deliverability– concerned about whether your emails are actually getting into the inbox? It is possible to investigate whether there are changes to need to make to improve deliverability.

With the frenzy of controversy around the iPhone 4 and its ‘Antennagate’ scandal, it seemed appropriate to have a look at some related email marketing activity that has hit the dotMailer inbox in the last week.

We picked out an email from Vodafone, sent to a business customer that had recently just purchased the new phone.

Read the full email here

Here’s what we thought:

We liked… the content itself. The tips offered are relevant, thorough and useful. For example, the shortcut to reveal your iPhone’s IMEI number (*#06#) and links to an ‘iPhone ready’ checklist are great resources for a new user.

We didn’t like… how the amateurish design undermines the quality of this content by not luring the reader in and, in the worst case, even making the recipient question the email’s authenticity.  The simplistic formatting makes it feel as though it has been put together with basic tools, perhaps even Microsoft Word. For a brand associated with Jensen Button and now Apple, the ‘cool factor’ should surely be much higher.

We liked… the short punchy subject line. However, it may have been more effective to lead with the word iPhone so that the recipient would get an immediate idea of the email’s contents and encourage them to open. Vodafone might like to read our latest blog post looking at how to write the perfect subject line!

We didn’t like… the diffused call to action. Throughout the email, there are links to the iPhone help site – it’s clearly where they are trying to send the reader. But instead of making this the clear focus throughout and a key point above the fold, it’s a sidenote to each bullet.

We liked… the legal footer at the end. Clearly handled by someone with a grip of the requirements. However, it’s let down by a poor and convoluted Unsubscribe description alongside a link to the software provider’s website. Not what you might expect from an organisation like Vodafone and again creates doubt in the reader’s mind as to the authenticity of the email.

All in all, this email strikes us as a missed opportunity. The idea of sending a triggered email to new iPhone 4 customers is astute and could have been a really great way to build a relationship with customers and demonstrate an interest in their needs. However, instead it ends up being a somewhat confused and simplistic message, the point of which is lost under the amateurish first impressions.

Feel free to send us emails you receive that you think are good or bad and we’ll feature them on the blog!

By Tink Taylor

After the closure of Lycos it seems that Tiscali may be following suit. Reading the news over the past few days it seems the recession has hit the purchase talks between Tiscali and BSkyB and put the future of the company in doubt.

As with Lycos, Tiscali’s 1.7 million customers will need to update their details within your email databases if indeed they do go under.

Thankfully with dotMailer’s sophisticated segmentation tools this is an easy process to identify Tiscali addresses within your database and request your recipients to update with an alternative email address.

We’ll keep you updated with the latest on Tiscali, so watch this space.

By Tink Taylor

Just a quick shout about the latest Email Benchmarking Report published by the Direct Marketing Association.

The Email Benchmarking Reports are an excellent source of information and statistics to help you assess your own campaign performance against the combined statistics across the majority of emails sent via the major Email Service Providers.

The report for Q2 2008 shows that email is still bucking the trend for reducing marketing spend as a result of the recession. An increase in the use of email for retention campaigns shows that marketeers are understanding the importance of relationship building as well as using their client base and organically collected data to continue to drive sales and retain business.

The Email Benchmarking Report can be downloaded from the DMA website where you can also find further information on the DMA and the Email Marketing Council, on which myself and Skip Fidura – dotMailer’s Digital Director – both serve.