If you aren’t a subscriber to Expresso, than you sure missed out yesterday!

But lucky for you, I’m feeling the holiday spirit and would like to share our Season’s greetings email.

Get your share of holiday cheer!

A very bright idea I found from a BlueHornet Communications email, at the bottom of the email was a line that read:

You were added to our database on May 24, 2006. Find out how.

So I clicked the link, and it brought me to a page that looks like this, which told me exactly how and when I opted in:

A great idea if you ask me!

I will be on holidays next week, so I wanted to get this off my chest before I go! Since testing, measuring and refining is so important in email.. I thought I’d go over some of the most talked about email trends this year (that I noticed at least)

1. Spam: I think would always top a list like this one – I mean as email marketers, our job heavily revolves around NOT being perceived as spam. And with the rules always changing, it’s always going to be a hot discussion topic.

   Tips for avoiding being spam in the new year:

   • Have an explicit opt-in: The best way to not be perceived as spam is to not be spam! Make sure all your recipients have explicitly opted-in to receive your emails (no pre-checked boxes) And even better – have a double opt-in.
   • Avoid common spam triggers: ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation!! W3!rd $ymb@ls, etc.
   • Code your links with caution: if you want to have a link text as “www.mywebsite.com make sure you turn off the tracking code on that link: or you could not make it to inboxes.
   • Don’t send image-only campaigns – It’s a popular tactic with spammers!

2. Relevancy: Sending emails that are relevant to your recipients will always pay off: higher response rates and less annoyed subscribers. The trick to relevancy is of to find out what your subscribers want – either via survey or testing.

   Relevancy – What to test:

• Subject lines – try different types of subject lines and do some A/B testing to find out which works best with your subscriber. Your subject line is an important determinate for whether or not the email will be opened!
• Content – Do your subscribers like the content they receive? Do they click through? Test your content and call to actions and see what works best!
• Frequency – Maybe your subscribers love your content, but feel they receive the emails too often? Or perhaps you wait too long between emails and they forget about you in between? Try a quick poll in your email to find out how often your subscribers like to be contacted. (If you want to get sophisticated, build it into the preference centre and send emails of different frequencies depending on the subscribers chosen preference!)

3. Deliverability: Because really, what good is your email if it doesn’t get delivered? Always a hot topic, deliverability is extremely important – and not just knowing your email got through to the address, but knowing it landed safely in the recipients inbox. While you can never know for sure if it’s landing in inboxes, there are services that will seed your emails in many major ISPs to test whether it did or not.

Getting your emails Delivered:

• The best way to ensure you are getting delivered is to ask recipients to add your email address to their safe sender list or address book. There’s no guarantee they will or not, but if you don’t ask they probably wont! Tip: provide a page that gives instructions to do this, like this.
• Scrub, scrub, scrub – keep your list clean! Clean out hard bounces after every email, and soft bounces after repeating a few times. The lower your bounce rate, the less likely ISPs will block you (turning into more bounces) thinking you’re a spammer! Remember, a list cluttered with bad addresses only costs you more!
• Like above, avoid spam trigger words, and practices used by spammers. HINT: Go into your spam folder, look at the spam emails, and DON’T do what they are doing!!

Hope these will help with your email program for 2007. Have a safe and happy holiday, and here’s to a new year, filled with legitimate, relevant email marketing landing in the inbox!

Ok I’ve been suffering from “blogger’s block” for the past week… I just can’t think of anything to blog about.

So for your enjoyment, I thought I would compile a list of other great blogs (only a very small sampling of the ones I love):

• art2blog – e-Marketing and new media. It’s relatively new, but updated often and alway interesting!
• Email marketing hall of shame - also relatively new, but a great concept, and so far, quality posts
• No man is an iland – Mark Brownlow collects all the greatest email info and posts it up here. Plus you can subscribe to the feed via RSS or sign up for the enewsletter – which is an update of all the posts every two weeks.
• Profectio – great source of internet marketing news
• My name is Kate – Another great blog from a well-established Canadian marketer.

Don’t stop reading this blog though! I promise I will have some new stuff up soon!

Is by far Copyblogger. It is always chalked full of great writing advice. And what I especially love about it, is Brian, the author, always uses the technique he writes about in each post.

For example this post about writing subheads is so compelling, I was just scanning my RSS reader like I usually do, and the subheads caught my eye so I read the whole article. If you haven’t already, check it out!