On November 12, 2008 they sent out this email flyer with the subject “Welcome to our Open House”:

As you can see, the email is very well formatted with a big call to action at the top and two specific product focuses. One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating email marketing campaigns is that they cram in as many products as possible, which ultimately just dilutes the amount of attention each item can get.

This email proved to be incredibly effective because the day the sale started (Friday) people were lined up at 3:00am at some stores (Note: The stores only open at 7:00am). The television sold out of their Vaughan location in a matter of minutes. This obviously left a bunch of angry consumers, but that’s an issue to discuss a different day.

This just goes to show you that sending out an email with a lucrative offer can have consumers jumping off the couch and racing to your store…even at an ungodly hour of the morning!

The promotion was “Future Shop 10 Days of Amazing Deals”. The idea is that the customer (in this case me) is supposed to check the same email every day and it will automatically update to show the new deals of the day. I’ll be the first to admit this does sound cool and is an interesting promotional idea. From a technical standpoint it’s actually pretty basic since they just change the image on their server that is being downloaded, but to the average end-user it’s entirely ‘different’ and ‘neat’. I suspect the marketing staff at Future Shop are relying on people flagging the message in their inbox and coming back to it. I sort of question whether that is a good strategy, but that is a question for another day.

The big blunder, that in my opinion ruined an otherwise cool idea, was the fact that when the email first landed in my inbox on “Deal Day 1″, none of the links worked. No matter what link I clicked on in the email, it only led me to a ‘page not found’ error. How on earth do you launch a campaign like this with that kind of problem? I mean, this not only looks so bad to each and every recipient (and I’ve got to imagine that’s a ton!), but it must kill their conversion ratio.

I can only imagine the look on the marketing manager’s face when he got the slick new promotional email in his inbox and found out it didn’t actually connect to the Future Shop website.

[I should mention that I had several people check the links from various locations to make sure it wasn’t just me that got unlucky with broken links.]

Like we always tell our customers, if the goal of your email is to drive traffic to your website, then a good rule of thumb is to make sure the link you’re putting in front of people actually works.

For every “deal day” since day 1, Future Shop did get things sorted out and the links have been working. But, the fact that on day 1 the link reading “If you are having problems viewing this email, please try the web edition” didn’t work…well, that’s a big time blunder.

And, we all know the dreaded season that creeps up on us in August… the back to school season!

Starting last week ‘back to school’ themed emails were flying. The first wave started almost two weeks ago as many retailers were eager to start spreading the news about their back-to-school savings, but last week the number spiked dramatically.

Everyone gets on the back-to-school bandwagon trying to vie for those lucrative dollars (especially in a struggling economy). The most dominant business type that send out back-to-school related emails are clothing stores. From casual to upscale to school uniforms, these retailers were pumping out emails to their targeted audience as fast as possible. Many retailers adopted a ‘daily back-to-school email special’ that they would send out each and every day in order to entice customers to make a purchase.

Email marketing is proving to be very effective for these retailers since their target market is actively engaged on the Internet and checks their email regularly. Also, since retailers are generally contacting ‘past customers’, they already have a bond or relationship with that customer, which helps further drive future repeat purchases.

This year many of the email marketing campaigns are tied to social marketing components with outlets having a MySpace or Facebook page that they are urging people to become ‘friends’ with. This twp prong approach is gaining in popularity since sites like Facebook and MySpace have exploded in popularity.

Many organizations have not yet adopted email marketing because it is something new and that might make it a bit scary. But, armed with the right industry knowledge, many organizations would be more apt to take the plunge.

That’s why the Email Experience Council launched the new “Speakers Bureau” last month.

This new speakers bureau was created as a way to spread this industry knowledge and welcome new practitioners into the community, which is ready to help them reap the full benefits of permission-based email marketing and stay clear of pitfalls.

If people have questions about email marketing, everyone involved in the industry wants them to have answers, and this is a big step towards achieving that goal.

The specific email marketing topics covered by the speakers bureau are:

Email in the Marketing Mix

• Why use email marketing?
• Email’s ROI and other statistics 
• How email fits with a multichannel marketing approach

CAN-SPAM and Other Laws

• CAN-SPAM 
• COPPA 
• State laws

Permission Practices

• The different types of permission
• How to obtain permission
• Re-permissioning old addresses

Deliverability

• Sender Reputation
• Bounce management
• Feedback loops 
• ISP relationships
• What is email authentication?

List Growth Tactics

• Organic growth and retention 
• Acquisition and prospecting tactics
• How to safely rent lists 
• Potential brand damage

What to Send

• Create meaningful, relevant subscriber experiences
• Understanding and utilizing Reach and Frequency for building brand awareness
• Basic segmentation tactics
• Examples from great email marketing programs

At the moment there are speakers available in many different states.

Currently, I am the only available speaker north of the border in Canada

I’m sure this list will expand rapidly as other experts in the industry get on-board this great initiative.

View the whole list of EEC speakers.

This past week the Social Marketing Division at EliteAnswers.com helped launch a Canada-wide campaign for Sauza Tequila that harnesses the power of two of the most popular social networks: MySpace and Facebook.

The premise of the campaign is that Sauza Tequila (which recently introduced new mango and acai berry flavored tequilas) is looking for Canada’s best DJ in a contest dubbed “Sauza Tequila DJ Mix Off Challenge”.

The contest calls upon DJs across the country to put together their best mix and submit it to a regional and, upon advancement, national judging panel. The semi-finalists will really get to shine when they are invited to perform live at a club in front of a national judge.

The promotion taps into the amazing social marketing power of MySpace, where the DJs are invited to post their submission on the Sauza Tequila wall for all to see. You can view the MySpace page here: http://www.myspace.com/sauzatequila (The French version can be seen here: http://www.myspace.com/sauzatequilaqc)

Sauza already has a booming group of loyal enthusiasts on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2365913470) and those people have not been left out of the mix. Exclusive messages and contest updates have been sent to all members of the group, which further engages them in the conversation with the brand they like.

Sauza really understands how to harness the power of social marketing to engage their customers in an exciting and interactive way that sets them apart from those brands that are stuck to traditional marketing platforms.

One thing email marketers tend to overlook is that the ‘morning’ actually occurs at different times depending on the time zone of your recipient.

I have seen it happen time and time again where someone in California schedules an email marketing campaign for 10:00am local time to blast out to all of their customers. Of course, they don’t realize that 10:00am in California is actually 1:00pm in New York. So, their objective of sending a morning email campaign doesn’t exactly hold true.

If the timing of your email marketing campaigns is important than you should segment your mailing list based on geography so that you can factor in timezones.

Once you know the location of your recipient, it’s pretty easy to schedule an email to the East coast folks at one time and the West coast folks at another.

If you know that you get better results when your email arrives in the morning, then a little extra legwork can go a long way towards boosting your metrics.

This trend creates an interesting (and somewhat daunting task) for web designers.

On the one hand, the standard for desktop and notebook monitors is now widescreen, which leaves the designer with more screen space than they had on traditional monitors. While, on the other hand, more people are browsing on the small screens of their mobile device.

The task of making your website or web application both big and small at the same time while loading fast and still providing the level of usability and interactivity users’ expect is hardly an easy one to conquer.

Google just recently released a new more unified logo set, which is noteworthy because they hadn’t changed their favicon (the little icon that appears at the top of your browser) in 8.5 years. The reason for the change was so that it would scale better to the new platforms, such as the iPhone.

So, it’s clear that Google is embracing the change and gearing up to be ready no matter how their users access the site.

But, how should you be treating these new platforms for your own site?

Chances are that if you neglect these new masses of mobile platforms, you’ll see find yourself scrambling to catch up.

The Can-Spam Act is the law that governs email marketing and largely establishes the base framework by which companies can send mass email. While email marketing best practices may differ from simply meeting these guidelines, it is important for every marketer to follow these rules at the bare minimum.

For marketers that had adopted ‘best practices’ before the update, it really won’t change much at all.

The most important ruling from the recent update related to the opt-out period. Back in 2005 the FTC proposed changing the law so that companies had 3 business days to process an opt-out request. Many in the email community challenged this proposal for various reasons and, I am happy to report, were victorious in their efforts. The FTC preserved that the rule will stay at 10 business days. Obviously all marketers should strive for the fastest opt-out time possible, but at this least way there is no additional added pressure, especially for larger organizations that may have several departments attempting to coordinate.

While the FTC has taken step to refine and clarify the law, most email marketers (including those using Elite Email) will not really have to adjust their practices since they are already meeting, if not exceeding, the requirements.

Here is a quick “current” summary of some key elements of the Can-Spam Act:

CAN-SPAM Requires that:

1. Provide a fully-functioning method for the receiver to opt-out (ie. unsubscribe) of your mailings in each and every mailing, and that the act of opting out can only require a single action. This means that the recipient either can click a link that takes them to the opt-out page or reply to the email to opt-out. In either case it can require no further action, such as filling out a survey. You can ask people to provide feedback as to why they are opting-out, but you cannot make that a condition to the removal. In addition, you cannot require someone to enter a password or any other form of credentials, or to have to click through to a second page, in order to effect the opt-out.
2. All information in your email, including the email headers and body/content of the email, be true, accurate, and not misleading. Essentially you are not allowed to pretend to be someone you are not!
3. You must honor all opt-out/unsubscribe requests, and immediately remove the user from your mailing list. You also need to stop sharing the user’s address with anybody, including previously agreed-to partners. You may not “repurpose” a subscriber’s email address once they opt-out by adding it to a different mailing list, or sharing it with someone else. So, overall, if someone asks you to stop emailing them…stop!
4. For any email you send that contains the advertisements of someone other than yourself or your company, the entity that the email is “From” must also have their own advertisement in the email. This basically means that the “From” sender must match at least one advertisement within the email. Doing so makes the “From” sender the “designated sender” under CAN-SPAM, making them responsible for processing all opt-out requests. If you don’t have a designated sender then each and every entity advertised in the email becomes responsible for processing opt-out requests.
5. You include your physical mailing address in each and every mailing. This can be your actual street address, a post office box, or a private mail box (”PMB”). A “PMB” includes a mailbox you may have at a store like Mailboxes Etc.

CAN-SPAM Applies To:

1.  Any bulk/mass commercial email sent to a mailing lists of any size. For instance, if you send two or more pieces of nearly identical email to two or more different people, your email can be classified as bulk commercial email for the purposes of CAN-SPAM.
2. Email that has a primary purpose of featuring your goods, services, or content even if you do not send the email yourself. This means that if you partner with a company to send out emails promoting your products/services, you can’t point the finger at them and think you’re off the hook.
3. All email sent out by your affiliates on your behalf.

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In closing, I will say that the FTC listened closely to what members in the email community had to say on the various issues and I believe that has led to strong forward progress.

The second most popular day was Wednesday, followed by Monday in third place.

With regard to the time of the day, morning email marketing campaigns sending between 8:00am – 11:00am continue to dominate.

Email campaigns launched on the weekends remained on par with previous months, yet typically yielded a lower open rate.

As we head into the summer months, I expect that email marketing campaigns sent Friday afternoon will drop off just like they have in previous years. This is essentially based on the fact that many people leave work early on Friday in the summer months, which makes it an ineffective time to try to reach out to your audience.

It’s important that email marketers also keep a close eye on holidays in the summer to make sure they do not schedule a campaign on days where people are not working.

While there are a lot of different pieces to the search engine optimization puzzle, one of the first things you should do is submit your sitemap to the major search engines. This is like telling them “Hey guys, here is where you can find all the pages to my website””.

Basically, a sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for each page on your website, along with some additional data that can include things like the last time the page was updated, how often it typically changes, the relative importance to other URLs on your site, etc.

Don’t worry if words like XML sound intimidating, since there are a lot of programs (both free and commercial) that you can use to create the sitemap with just the click of a button. You may want to visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ as a free option, or if you have more advanced needs, you can download A1 Sitemap Generator.

Once you have created your sitemap and uploaded it to your server, it’s time to tell the search engines to look for your sitemap. This part of the process is particularly helpful because not only do you tell the search engines all about your website, but many of the search engines will give you detailed information about your website, such as errors and other potential problems.

To feed your sitemap to the search engines, use these URLS:

Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
MSN Live Search Webmaster Tools:  http://webmaster.live.com/
Yahoo! Site Explorer: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Ask: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the_URL_of_your_sitemap_here.xml

You can also make your sitemap easier to find by updating your robots.txt file (if you don’t have one of those on your site, you should!) with a line like this:
Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

For more on the sitemaps protocol you can visit http://www.sitemaps.org/

Submitting a sitemap to the search engines won’t get you amazing search engine optimization results right away, but it will take you another step in the right direction.