EightBlack.

This is the start of something to be sure. News today in The Australian that Gmail has just won the tender to supply the entire NSW Department of Education with 1.5 million student email accounts.

Apparently, its one of the single largest Gmail deployments ever, and the work is being done by local integrator, SMS.

Email storage increases 170 fold (from 35MB to over 6 Gigabytes). Which is enough for even the most perverted of students.

What is silly though is that students wont be given access to the chat function (GTalk) and teachers wont be ported to Gmail because some IT drone was worried about bandwith costs between the US and Australia.

If they were worried about, why not ask Google to pony up for the money. You can be sure they’d listen, especially if it meant ousting Microsoft from every other state based education department.

The deal is going to save the NSW Government around $24 million.

According to TechCrunch;

The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008.

It will be interesting to see how the students react to contextual based advertising within email, how many continue to use their Hotmail or Yahoo accounts or simply how many kids just don’t give a stuff.

I’m convinced Google will be very keen on the data that they will be able to pull from the deployment.

Perry outlines 10 critical steps.

And obviously, we agree - especially given the fact that TaguchiMail helps even further with this process.

Any marketer who is emailing and doesn’t know what his or her sender reputation is, doesn’t have a suite of reporting and delivery tools and cant dynamically optimise the content of their email broadcast, falls even further behind.

Perry’s one of the smartest online marketers I know. And for good reason. His clarity of thinking is way above the majority of the market.

It still staggers me that people don’t get this.

Take this example. I received this today from my insurance brokers. If I offend them with this, then too bad. They need to be told. They’re cheap arse bastards.

I’ve been a client of theirs for 8+ years. I think they know who I am - that is, they know my name and obviously have my email address.

So this is what they sent. This is a pure extract.

“We  hope you enjoy reading our second newsletter for 2008, where we have covered the following interesting topics –
* The importance of insurance for women - only 20% of women are insured!
* Cash Offsetting – how it can work for you.
* Self Managed Super Funds – new rules.
* Wills and Superannuation – who inherits your nest egg?
Please click  http://www.lakesideconsultants.com.au/news/no16.pdf <blocked::http://www.lakesideconsultants.com.au/news/no16.pdf>   to download this quarter’s newsletter from our website.
For any queries or financial assistance please don’t hesitate to call our office on 0510 0788.
Kind regards,
GARY KENNEDY”

First mistake. It was all text.

Second, it was sent from someone called Ros Walsh. Never heard of the woman. But it was signed Gary Kennedy. Again, don’t know the man.

More importantly, the fools at Lakeside then wanted me to visit their website and download their freakin’ newsletter. As if. Why the hell should I?

To add insult to injury, they then admit that email marketing is way too hard because this is only the 2nd newsletter sent out this year. The first one I never received. It probably asked you to drive to their office and pick up a copy of it from reception. Or something like that.

They even made a mistake with their own phone number. Idiots.

My advice is simple. If you haven’t got the skills to do this - pay someone to do it for you. If you only email every 3 months or so and have a customer facing business with hundreds of clients (like Lakeside does) - then don’t do it all. Sending email once every 3 months is SPAM. What possible relationship could you have with such little frequency?

Get the basics right. Like spelling, grammar, accuracy of information presented. Make the content relevant to the recipient. And above all, make it easy for your clients to consume your content. Making someone go to your website to download the newsletter is rubbish. People won’t do it. Lakeside probably dont run analytics on their site so its no use probably asking them what their bounce rate is from this email. (they don’t - I just checked).

And to make matters worse, if I was a real narky prick, I could ping them hard for not adhering to the SPAM Act. In their actual newsletter (on the last page), the MD rambles on how Lakeside is in total compliance with the SPAM Act of 2004. Except for the fact that they aren’t.

You see, the email they sent (the text based one), needed to have the functional unsubscribe link in it (not the actual PDF).

There’s no excuse for lousy marketing. Companies like Lakeside are going to get blown into oblivion if they don’t embrace change. Companies like this are already turning the industry upside-down.

Hooray is all I say.

Oh crap.

I received this email from Perry Marshall tonite. Now the damn content of it is going to keep me awake for days. See what you think.

Simon,

Have you heard the rage, the shrieking and the cries of terror?
Have you signed the petition yet?
Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Yup, Yahoo and AOL plan to start charging ? cent to 1 cent per email, to guarantee your messages get through the SPAM filters. The political activists are having a panic attack.

Gotta tell you, I had fun reading about this.  Hundreds of columnists emoting about the Very End Of Free Speech Itself. Apparently, today “free speech” not only means speaking your mind without going to jail, it also means having big corporations distribute your thoughts to millions of people for you, for free.

Friends and neighbors, if your “free speech” is riding on some big company’s generosity, you don’t have free speech.

You have sponsored content.

If you’re not willing to make any sacrifices to get your message out, why should anyone else do it for you?  This is a case study in mushy thinking from people who have no idea how expensive Free Speech really is.

I’m actually surprised Pay Per Email didn’t already kick in a year or two ago.  Basic economic fact: Email, being something that’s inordinately valuable - instantaneous access to someone’s inner sanctum - is something that shouldn’t be free.  The very fact that it is violates nature.

It is fundamentally impossible for email to remain totally free forever.  Something has to give.

Now if MoveOn.org wants to send 3 million emails a week, can they afford to pay $7,500 to $30,000 for the privilege?

That depends.  Certainly non-profits with huge email lists will be hit the hardest by this.  But before the Internet they would have had to pay half a buck to send a letter.   In my humble opinion, a quarter of a cent is quite a bit more attractive than half a buck.

Plus there’s a big upside to this that few people seem to have thought of.

If sending an email suddenly cost a fraction of a cent, most of the garbage in your customers’ email boxes would disappear overnight. Your ability to cut through the clutter would multiply dramatically.

Not only would your emails get through in the first place, they would have less competition.  Your customers would have more time to read them. It would double, triple or quadruple the response to your emails.

Would you be willing to pay for that?

You should.

Coming up: What’s really going to happen with pay per email and how it will effect your business…until then…

Perry Marshall

There’s no excuse for this sort of thing.

But first a little context.

As most of you know, I spend a lot of time in the US. Last year, I passed through customs 9 separate times. And the last time I went, I was embroiled in an argument with a United States Immigration & Customs Officer. Although it wasn’t really an argument when one of us has a 9mm strapped to their hip and one of us doesn’t.

It started innocently enough.

The customs officer asked why I came to the US so often. Fair enough I suppose. This is when it pays not to act on any thought that this might be a good time to practice a stand up comedy routine.

The next question was “where is your plane ticket, where are you staying, how long will you be here, why don’t Australians like George W? (ok, I made the last bit up).

It started to go down hill from this point. For me. Not for him.

I thought in this day and age that my answer would have been perfectly logical. It was for me anyway. I politely advised the man with the gun and who looked like he had just shoved his parents through a wood chipper, that because I was still able to stand up right, and because I knew how to use a pc, all of my flight, hotel and car details were tucked safely away inside various computer systems.

It didn’t wash.

So, after 90 agonising minutes in a small room off to the side of the arrivals lounge, where another very officious senior US Immigration Officer (who also wore a gun made me wait and then gave me the sort of lecture any boarding house master would have been proud of), I managed to grovel my way out of the fact that I didn’t have any paperwork with me. I was also given a stern talking to about why, if I was married to an American, did I not have a green card. Anyway.

So back to the whole point of this post in the first place.

In anticipation of my travel to the land of the free this coming Saturday, I decided to actually print off the various confirmations I had online, because I am convinced that the nice customs folk would actually crawl up my bum with a very large toilet brush if I gave them any lip this time.

I logon on to Hilton.com.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t print off the reservation confirmation. So I fill out the contact form on the website. And wait. At least 1 full day. Due to the fact that I have A.D.D (or so people tell me), I call the toll free number. So far so good. Nice lady says sure she she’ll email me the reservation details. Which she did. No drama’s.

Then today, I actually get the response from my initial web enquiry.

I have re-printed it below.

Dear Diamond,

The Hilton Internet Contact Center has recently received your email. We are pleased that you took the time to write us! Please note that when you have a reservation with 2 or more rooms under the same confirmation # you will not be able to pull it up online. Please keep the email we sent you as confirmation.

***DOMESTIC***

If you require further assistance, please dial 1-800-774-1500 and choose one of the following options when prompted by the Voice Response Unit:

* Select option “1″ for help with reservations, cancellations and hotel information.
* Select option “2″ for help with technical issues or questions about one of our Brand websites.

If you are currently outside of the US, please visit http:/www.hilton.com/en/hifeedback/hrwfone.jhtml http://www.hilton.com/en/hi/feedback/hrwfone.jhtml for a list of our Worldwide Reservation Offices and their telephone numbers. Or you may place a toll call to us directly at 972-770-6136.

Best Regards,

Amos
Internet Coordinator
Hilton Internet Contact Center
Hilton Reservations and customer Care
www.hiltonfamily.com

Hilton travel should take you places with more than 3,000 hotels and 500,000
rooms worldwide to serve your travel needs.

I don’t even know why you would write such a silly email. I’m not complaining because as a supposed VIP, I didn’t get the treatment I perhaps should have. Not at all.

This is just lazy. Plain and simple.

Hilton’s CRM systems, their legacy reservations systems, and the loyalty program all know my name. The formatting looked like Russian hackers cobbled the email together. No HTML. No branding. No correlation to Hilton at all. And why on earth can’t I pull up the reservation if it I’ve booked 2 rooms?

If you’re going to make in investment into loyalty systems then do it properly. And don’t forget to give your Customer Service people permission to use their intelligence. After all, a human sort of wrote this email to me.

Might sound silly but one crappy online experience and one email has made me think twice about whether I should continue to use Hilton.

The tone of the conversation with a few of our TaguchiMail clients is changing rapidly.

Let me point out that these folks are not new to email marketing. They’ve all got significant sized lists, they broadcast often and they understand email marketing well.

I think new words like “trigger-based email” and “push email” will start to become common-place with serious marketers. Maybe not new words as such, but a much higher level of importance.

The challenge with broadcast emails (where you simply send the same message to your whole database) is that conversion rates are slowly but surely on the decline. Assume that a marketer has a “call to action” offer within the email - then he/she will be happy with a conversion metric of anything north of 2%. And thats being generous.

We were recently in a conversation with a company who said that database growth wasn’t the priority - but database interactivity and engagement was. Which was interesting. It’s the first time I’ve actually heard someone want a higher focus on interactivity than raw database growth.

Being in the music industry, their database is fickle. Young. And changes tastes and their mood often. They want to be able to have the user decide what content they want. And when the want it. (Trigger based email, where based on certain “trigger-points”, content is pushed to them).

It makes perfect sense. But it is extremly difficult to pull off. Most companies either don’t have the technology or the resources to make it happen.

A lot of people we talk to simply roll their eyes when the conversation moves to “list segmentation” But this is where all the gold is.

If you have a large list - you simply have no choice but to break it down. Pull it apart. Analyse the hell out if it. I would also stop this nonsense of referring to your list by total size.

The only important metric is the active portion of your list.

For example, we have another client who has a list of around 70,000. But the active number is more like 10,000. The other 60,000 don’t count. They don’t respond. They don’t interract. In fact, what I’d do is simply write to them and let them know that their name is being removed unless they choose to stay. The inactive people on your list simply cloud the numbers too much and make it harder for segmentation to occur.

I’ve only seen one marketer do this - and do it well.

I’m convined “trigger based” email and “push email” is the way of the future. Broadcast email will become too ineffective. The spam filters are getting smarter, corporate firewalls are wound up tighter than a fishes bum and there’s a lot happening in the sender reputation and delivery efficiency areas. Email is far from dead - especially in the business market. But it is far from good. And change needs to happen.

Segmentation, throttle rate, and dynamic optimisation are some of the key reasons we went out and built TaguchiMail. It handles push based and trigger email easily.

My question is this though - if you have a list, are you courageous enough to remove the 90% who don’t do anything? Or do you still believe that there’s value in getting the “brand” out there with mass email marketing? (that noise in the background is me vomiting…)

Over to you.

There’s an often used saying in the online world that “content is king”. Especially when it relates to search. And even more so perhaps when you you talk email marketing.

I don’t know if you are like me - but my inbox is somewhat out of control. It’s the culmination of being online for a while, for being on far too many email lists and for some sort of delusional fear that I have that if I “opt-out” of something, I may miss out.

So, my inbox keeps swelling. And I never get to digest the content.

About a week ago, I received an email from a marketer I respect. This guy is an exceptional copywriter. He’s also got very solid credentials in the internet marketing space, save for a couple of “unresolved issues”, of which I won’t bore you with now.

Well, ok, I will.

You see, this guy IS an authority - there’s no disputing that. But the problem is that HE thinks not enough people give him credit for being the pioneer. And this comes out in virtually everything he says and does - both verbally and in writing.

Anyway, that’s not my point.

My point is this. In an email he sent last week, he suggested to his followers that they opt-out of virtually every list they are on and just stay with the sources of information they truly value. Which I thought was solid advice. So last week, I started unsubscribing to everything that was of little value (or simply a pitch fest).

More importantly, through this guy above I met Perry Marshall. That was way back at the end of 2003. Now, those of you who have anything to do with Google AdWords, will know of Perry Marshall. He needs no introduction. Here he is.

If someone said to me - “ok, you can only listen/subscribe/engage with just ONE marketer, choose carefully”, then I would probably choose Perry.

This morning, he sent this email. I think it resonates perfectly with the work we are doing at the moment with our clients and it struck me that what Perry outlines is 100% spot on. That “context” rather than “content” is way more important.

I’ve copied the email word for word below. I thought it was a great story.

Simon,

Earlier this year a fascinating experiment was
conducted in Washington D.C.: World-
renowned violinist Joshua Bell, who wows
thousands at venues like Boston’s Symphony
Hall and performs with the world’s top orchestras;
shows up in the Washington D.C. subway in blue
jeans and a baseball cap … toting a violin case.

Stradivarius in hand (1713 vintage, original finish,
$3.5 million purchase price), Bell plays Bach’s
Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor. One
of the most difficult violin pieces ever composed.

Object of experiment: To find out: would anybody
stop and listen? Would anyone toss money in his
violin case? Would anybody take note that one of
the world’s most prodigiously talented musicians
was performing the world’s greatest music on one
of history’s finest instruments… if it didn’t happen in
the familiar surroundings of a concert hall?

They asked Leonard Slatkin, director of the National
Symphony Orchestra, what he thought would happen.
He estimated that if 1000 people walked by, at least 30
would take note. He figured Josh would collect $150.

The entire passionate 45-minute performance was
caught on hidden camera, and the results were carefully
recorded. Out of 1070 people who passed by:

-Seven people listened for more than one minute
-27 gave money, most without stopping to listen
-No crowd ever gathered at any time
-Bell collected 32 dollars and change

In reporting this story the Washington Post waxed long
and eloquent on why the commuters failed to recognize
the force of Bell’s talent. It quoted philosophers Kant,
Hume and Liebniz, contemplating the very meaning of
art itself.

But as a marketer I can’t imagine a more perfect setup
that proves the overriding priority of context. A whole host
of factors prove to be vastly more important than the skill of the musician, the difficulty of the composition or the quality of his instrument:

1) The time of day
2) The mental state of the listeners
3) How long people can listen
4) How much they paid to be there
5) What the violinist is wearing
6) Whether he’s in a symphony hall or not
7) The acoustics
8 Whether everyone is wearing tuxedos and evening gowns or not
9) Whether they know he’s world-famous or not
10) Whether they recognize the difficulty of the composition or not
11) Whether there’s a conductor or not
12) Whether the conductor is famous
13) Whether they know the violin is a $3.5 million Stradivarius or not
14) Whether the last violinist they saw was homeless or not
15) What’s announced on the PA
16) Whether there’s seating available or not
17) How quiet the hall was when the concert began
18) The amount of external noise and commotion

Bluntly, from an artistic point of view this experiment was a dismal failure. A man in a tux carrying a cello through an orchestra hall will look like a musician even if he’s never played a note in his life. And he’ll command vastly more respect than any virtuoso in a baseball cap on a subway.

Just goes to show ya: the packaging, context and positioning of everything you do takes on the profoundest
importance. The chief factor that allows Starbucks to charge $4 for a latte is the cup and the atmosphere of the store. NOT the coffee.

The core virtues of the coffee matter only after you have created a context in which they can be fully appreciated.

Finally, this is another means to recognize that when you spend money on a promotion and it flops, two-thirds - or maybe nineteen-twentieths - of its success hinges on the state of mind of the prospects at the time they received your communication. Including, literally, what was going on in the room at the time your communication showed up.

Context is everything.

Perry Marshall

P.S. I’m inviting you to come visit me in just a few weeks, at my home office right here in Chicago and spend a couple of days with me. You and I will roll up our sleeves and work together. Before you go home, your website, your sales process, your Google Ad campaigns and your marketing strategy are going to be measurably, demonstrably superior.

Only 2 seats remain for each of the 4-Man intensives I’m doing in April. Apply here:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/roundtable.htm

Do yourself a favour. If you aren’t on Perry’s list, opt-in now. You won’t regret it.

PS. No affiliate links used in the above.

I thought I had better keep true to my word (and recent post) about websites not needing to be perfect in order to launch. So be it.

Here it is. And it’s about 50% there.

But the good thing about “going public” is that we as a team are well focussed on ensuring the content will be written, the images sourced and the web analytics tracking code is installed right from the start.

If you see glaring deficiencies (or we have missed anything) I would love to know. You can email me here anytime.

This has taken some time to get off the ground. These things always do.

But I’m pleased to say we’ve done it. And now we’re happy to talk to people and to consider “beta” applications. Head over here to learn a little more.

Stay tuned.

This post is for hard-core email marketers.

I want to talk about “email deliverability”—specifically, just how many of your emails get through to their intended destination and how do you know if your email provider is doing a good job. I’m not talking about basic metrics like “open rates” or “click-thru rates”. Nothing so basic.

Let’s take an industry segment that we know a little about. Travel.

The figures below relate to 5 travel companies (3 domestic airlines, 1 US based airline and 2 online travel portals). I’ll tell you how we sourced the data at the bottom of the post.

(Disclosure - we have a client Webjet, who we could have put into this comparison, but chose not to given that it would have been highly unlikely they would have wanted this data made public, even though it is essentially readily available). I think that makes sense.

As a side note, I will reveal that Webjet are way ahead of their local competitors, on par with the local airlines and everyone on this list lags Spirit Air)

Anyway.

What the table above shows is the various email providers used by the companies listed, the software used, the “sender score”, and the “deliverability” of their email as a percentage.

With this post, I’m not going to get into which email provider is better. That’s irrelevent for this conversation. Every company above will have their reasons for using their chosen vendor.

I will tell you upfront that it is highly unlikely that you will beat AWeber out of the US on cost or efficiency. We have a private label agreement with AWeber and this platform powers many of our existing clients email requirements. However, they do have their limitations.

Let’s look at each airline.

Virgin Blue uses an internal application, meaning in all probability, they have their own application running off their own servers. This is unusual. Their sender score is very good, but their “deliverability” leaves a lot to be desired.

Qantas and Jetstar (the same parents) use a solution provided by eServices (which is a part of the Clemenger Group). Qantas has a very good sender score and deliverability number. And you’d expect this, given the size of their frequent flyer databases and the sheer volume of email they send. On the other hand, Jetstar has a woeful sender score but good deliverability.

Let’s come back to Spirit Air (US based) in a minute.

On to Flight Centre and Travel.com.au. Both these providers use external email providers; Flight Centre uses the well-regarded Accucast, and Travel.com.au the aging DARTmail (formerly part of online ad group DoubleClick, now absorbed into Epsilon). The relative performance of these two solutions demonstrates why you should research prospective email platforms thoroughly: Travel.com.au’s online marketing efforts are severely hampered by DARTmail’s extremely poor reputation and deliverability.

Let’s drill into just what “Sender Score” is and how we define “Deliverability”.

Sender Score is a proprietary ranking system developed by ReturnPath, the leader in email deliverability intelligence. Essentially it combines all ReturnPath’s deliverability and reputation data into a single index, thus providing a simple way to compare server performance.

“Deliverability” is simply the proportion of emails sent by a server that make it through to their destination. A low deliverability score means a server is sending messages to lots of invalid email addresses, is being blacklisted by ISPs and email providers, or is sending messages with a high spam score.

Thus, while deliverability is the more immediate measure of your email performance, your Sender Score will impact your future results, as a Sender Score of 60 or below means your reputation is so bad, many ISPs will block or defer your messages. This is a problem, because once you’re on a blacklist, it’s very, very hard to get off it, and often your only option is to start sending from a different IP (hopefully after cleaning your list of invalid addresses, and in extreme cases even performing a full list verification).

If you’d like a detailed analysis of your email marketing platform, simply send me a note. The contact details are all over the blog.

If you’d like to check your email provider’s Sender Score, use this resource. And if you need help with any of this, simply drop me a note.