Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

A "News" Kind of Convergence

Back in the 1990's at the dawn of the Web, the word "convergence" was on everyone's lips. It meant that people were looking forward to a time when all content could be digitized and available all the time on any electronic device -- a computer, a phone etc. That halcyon notion is appearing before our eyes today, and it's fascinating to watch.

AmericaThere's another kind of convergence going on which I find equally interesting. It's the one happening in the newspaper industry. I was spurred to write this post today after reading an eMarketer study which said "92% of America's top 100 newspapers now have online video." That number is up from 61% in 2006. 

So where does this leave television news? If newspapers are providing content that is more like television news, what will make television news different? And, goodness knows newspapers (for all their faults) often command more respect than local TV stations. So will news in general converge and both newspapers and television deliver equal amounts of video news content online? And, if so, which one will win out?

And what about reporters? Will all reporters need to be video savvy? How about reviews for arts events? Will the age of print reviews give way to video reviews? What does that mean for the role of press and PR in the arts? 

Of course there are no answers to these questions, but I think it's interesting to start thinking along these lines, and preparing our organizations for a future in which not only will they produce their own video, but others will want to produce video material about them.

Spam Gets Literary Notice

As a public service for all you Spam-a-holics, I am calling your attention here to a terrific article in The New Yorker about Spam. And, I'm not talking about the food.

True to the style and quality of that publication, the article is smart, well-written and beautifully documented. If you want to know the whole story about Spam, I recommend it highly. You can read it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/06/070806fa_fact_specter

If you're not that interested, permit me to quote a few facts from the article - which may surprise you.

* Spammers send 1 million e-mail messages to get 15 positive responses.

* Hotmail processes 4 billion pieces of e-mail every day, and delivers just 600 million. The rest are filtered out as Spam.

* Microsoft maintains 130,000 special Hotmail accounts specifically for the purpose of trapping and examining suspicious e-mail.

These numbers are staggering by any standard. This article makes the case better than I could ever hope to, as to why e-mail marketing has now become an area of technology that is best managed by people who really know what they are doing.

Summer Project Numero Uno: E-List Building

I'm guessing that many of you are finding time this summer to do things that you've been putting off. Me too.

I had promised many of you who attended my seminars this spring that I'd be revising my book Sign-Up for Culture: The Arts Marketer's Guide to Building an Effective E-mail List with some new case studies and updated research. I've been working on it for months, but you know how that goes. The good news is that with the summer in full swing we're actually getting it done, and it should be ready to ship in about two weeks.

Since it's the summer, perhaps the timing is good for you to think about how you'll be building your own e-mail list next season. In the book, I note that the average growth rate for e-mail mailing lists for all of our clients in the last year was 50%. That's a pretty decent number - how does that stack up with your experience? 

If you're feeling that you need some inspiration, I've added a case study from the Alvin American Dance Theater who followed an approach I outline in the book to build their e-mail lists during their performances. Here's a quick summary: 

.... the first year we did this [collecting e-mail addresses at our annual run in New York], we collected 20,426 new addresses in just those five weeks. This year the total was 18,626 - and 95% of those names were new!

Since beginning this list-building campaign two years ago, Ailey has grown its list from 12,000 names to 67,000, a whopping 458% increase!

I offer 21 ideas for building your e-mail lists in the book, and if you'd like, you can pre-order the new version of the book by clicking  here and you'll have it very soon.

And if you're interested in one-on-one training and guidance, we are working with clients in in a consulting capacity to help them build their lists, and we'd be glad to speak with you about that as well.

All in all, if you’re putting your plans in place for next season, add "Build my e-mail list" to your to-do list. In my view, there are few things as important. 

Spam Quantified

I'm not necessarily proud of the fact that I have a lot of facts and figures in my head about SPAM, but I'm a junkie for facts that help explain how our business really works, and particularly why e-mail delivery is so complex and difficult.

An article last week about a spammer that got arrested, included some pretty revealing information. I think these numbers are worth remembering, and could perhaps even be useful at your next party, marketing meeting or Board meeting. And when your boss questions you on why you're spending money to outsource your e-mail to a company that can assure that your mail gets delivered and not filtered by ISP spam filters, bear this in mind:

Consider, email security company IronPort told the Associated Press that 70 billion spam messages were sent Thursday, the day after Soloway's arrest. That figure was unchanged from two weeks prior. It's also almost double last May's 36 billion spam emails per  day.

The NY Times Does SPAM Well

I want to call your attention to an article in today's edition of The New York Times which describes the complexity of getting your legitimate e-mail delivered properly and not inadvertently marked as spam.

You'll need an account to read the article which is called When They Say You Are a Spammer.

The article talks about the importance of vetting your e-mail vendor to make sure that they take e-mail delivery seriously. We've taken e-mail delivery seriously for years and have done extremely well in this regard. Our delivery is typically at least 10% higher than the industry benchmarks, due in large part to the fact that we monitor our e-mail delivery constantly, take immediate action to resolve delivery issues (as is so colorfully described in the article) and are part of the "Sender Score Certified" program mentioned at the end.

E-mail Marketing Wins again

I'm loving E-marketer these days, because it seems they are making my case better than I could ever do.

Take a look at this chart. It shows the results of a recent study of promotion-oriented marketers and shows the relative importance these folks are placing on e-mail marketing.

I feel like we in the arts are a little bit too much "flavor of the month," and this month it seems that it's all about myspace, youtube, and podcasts. That's what's passing as the sexy stuff these days.

But, you know what? I've been saying that E-mail is the the real thing for years.

And every day I have more and more proof.

Quick and Easy vs Thoughtful and Efficient

E-mail marketing is maturing as a discipline and with that comes a dilemma. The chart to the right demonstrates what I've been saying (and a lot of people have been saying) for a long time: when you segment your list, target your mailings and test various approaches, you'll get better results.

This seems almost self-evident, since e-mail is nothing more than a form of direct mail, where targeting and segmenting and testing is a way of life.

The dilemma is how to get this message out to our industry in a way that marketers will swallow. What frustrates me is that just because the execution of e-mail marketing is quick and easy compared to print, most marketers seem to want the entire experience of e-mail marketing to be quick and easy.

"Heck I'll blast everyone with this e-mail" is a lot quicker and easier than "let me segment my list, write different copy for different segments and test some subject lines."

As it matures, e-mail marketing in the arts must move from a "quick and easy" mentality to a "thoughtful and efficient" mindset. E-mail marketing can't be thought of as great because it's fast and cheap. It needs to be great because you can get better ROI than any other marketing technique you can use.

The evidence is in. Can you help me spread the word? 

E-mail Delivery Case in Point

One of the most vexing aspects of e-mail marketing is the fact that a lot of legitimate e-mail gets blocked by ISPs by mistake in their effort to control Spam. As a result, we spend huge amounts of time and resources making sure all our clients' mail gets into the inbox and our delivery rate is typically 95% to 100%.  It's a process that involves 4 people on my staff, who work with our superb partners at Return Path, the industry leader in e-mail delivery and hygiene.

I thought I would offer a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes by quoting a blog posting from George Bilbrey today, who is the VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions at Return Path that I just read.

This story is particularly interesting because he's writing about two huge brands in our country, showing the e-mail delivery is a problem everyone has to focus on. Last week, I did a seminar in North Carolina, and someone raised her hand saying that she was determined to continue using Microsoft Outlook to send her e-mail. I think this post is really instructive, as it makes the case as to why you need to use an e-mail provider. IT also underscores the importance of selecting a company that has an excellent e-mail delivery track record, and one that can talk with you about what they do about it. If you're going to take e-mail marketing seriously, delivery is a big deal.

I'm quoting George here:

It's comforting to think of deliverability as a problem you can solve and be done with. And, in some cases, that can seem to be true. We have many clients that went from so-so inbox placement rates to nearly 100 percent across the board and, for the most part, stay there every campaign. But it takes work for that to happen.

The rules of the deliverability road can change without warning. Smart marketers must be prepared to react to those changing rules to ensure their delivery rates remain high.

Such was the case for one of our favorite clients, Overstock. We have been working with them for some time and brought their inbox placement rates up by 11 percent -- they are typically near 100 percent for every campaign. Then, in November, a sudden drop in their deliverability at Yahoo! raised alarm bells.

Yahoo! was having problems with large volumes of spam that caused it to slow down all email. As a result, some legitimate mail was getting inadvertently blocked. A change in sending strategy to Yahoo! was all it took to get them back to 100 percent. But, making those changes takes the dedication to watch for problems, and the willingness to fix them quickly.

We're hard at work dealing with problems like this one every day. It's good to know we're not alone.

1,000 Thanks

I'd like to take a moment to share some news that we're very proud of. Last Friday, our company reached a milestone, signing on our 1,000th PatronMail client. As you may know, we've been at this business for 5 years and started out as pioneers, spending our first few years convincing skeptics that e-mail marketing was worth their time and investment. The message has clearly worked and over the past two years, our growth has been dramatic. Today, our clients are now sending about 3 million messages per week through PatronMail.

To all of you who are PatronMail clients, I'd like to thank you for your support. Every day we try to innovate and to lead the arts field in the area of web marketing, and if we're not working with you yet, I hope you'll give us a call (or send us an e-mail!).

Back to the Future Again

Yesterday I went to a presentation and panel discussion about mobile technology, and more specifically the state of the mobile content business. I heard from several leading companies about what they were doing, and got some stats that confirmed my suspicions.

We're very much in the "not ready from prime time" stage of development. Sure, there are some (like me) who look at web sites on their cell phones or PDAs. But the experience is often far from pleasant or consistent.

It's the consistent part that caught my attention most. When Harry Kargman, the president of Kargo.com introduced his company as "the leading mobile distributor of branded content in the industry," his first comment sounded amazingly familiar to me.

He said that the biggest problem in mobile content is delivering a consistent user experience. Why? Because when you develop content for your Web site, you check it on Firefox and on the IE browser, and if it looks good, you're done.

But there are a zillion different cell phones out there, with another zillion different browsers, and a dozen carriers. Each one of them displays content from the Web slightly differently. So if you optimized your content for, say, Cingular's Treo offering, it might not look so good on a Samsung Blackjack. And so it goes.

If you had been sitting next to me you would have detected a faint smile, because this is exactly the same situation in the e-mail business. In our world, there are a zillion e-mail software systems out there (Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo, Earthlink, etc, as well as all the Mac flavors) and each one of them renders e-mail slightly differently.

This is one of the reasons why we've built a simple-to-use, but very flexible "design-wizard" based content development tool into PatronMail. We test all of our templates against all these browser variations before we launch them. Then, when our clients use our system, we can assure them of consistency.

As an aside, in a few weeks, we're going to be adding a "use your own HTML" option to PatronMail. And when we do, we're going to provide a lot of education to the clients that use it, telling them exactly how to test each of their e-mail designs on all the different e-mail systems out there.

In e-mail marketing, just like in the mobile world, you're not publishing on the two standard Web browsers. Therefore it gets really complicated to ensure your content gets seen in a consistent and professional manner unless you're using the right tools.