Really, we were lucky.

In 2001, when we first met the 4 founders of ExactTarget at a dry cleaning conference, who could have guessed where our two businesses would be today? We could have partnered with any number of technology providers to help us drive our direct-to-fan vision… and these days there are dozens if not hundreds of database/email/voice/social/sms service providers out there that run the spectrum in quality and cost.

“Email marketing is a commodity,” is what one exec told me not long ago. Yeah, well sort of… The ability to send lots of messages to lots of people is a commodity, but the ability to accomplish great marketing is not. Permission marketing is not a commodity… it’s a premium. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time through the right medium is not a commodity… it is a premium.

So, yeah we were lucky. Out of all the partners we could have picked, we picked the one that understands that it isn’t about sending emails but about helping organizations connect with their customers in real and meaningful ways. Great technology is just the beginning, but real and true customer relationships are the glue that keeps it together.

This partnership has been incredibly valuable to FanMail and has allowed us to push some of the most sophisticated direct-to-fan marketing initiatives ever seen in the music and entertainment industry. The technology which ExactTarget has built allows us to ask “how” instead of “if” when it comes to complex direct, lights-out and lifecycle marketing programs. Almost anything we want to do is possible. In addition, their dedication to the FanMail Reseller Partnership and our vision and commitment to the music and entertainment vertical has permitted us to bring ExactTarget technology to our customers in a way that is accessible and cost effective for them.

So, we were not surprised to hear that ExactTarget has swept the field in the latest Forrester Wave report. Earning the title of “Leader of the Pack”, ExactTarget dominated the competition.

The Forrester report analyzed the products and services of 15 top-tier email service providers, using over 70 criteria and found ExactTarget dominated in nearly every category! In fact, ExactTarget earned perfect scores in 6 of the 14 categories – Product Roadmap, Vertical Strategy, Executive Vision, Strength of Management Team, Employees and, most importantly, ExactTarget was the only Email Service Provider to earn a perfect score in the Customers Category – a clear validation of realizing their core value of “Make clients look like heroes.”

The graphic above is a quick synopsis of the report. Notice ExactTarget’s placement in the upper right, making them a “Leader in the Industry.” It’s clear that it’s become a two-horse race between ExactTarget and Responsys. The data behind the graphic tells an even more compelling story. We beat or tied Responsys in 11 of the 14 categories, and ExactTarget beat them especially where it counts: current offering, technology platform, services and customer satisfaction! ExactTarget distanced themselves even further from the rest of the competitive pack, including e-Dialog, CheetahMail, Epsilon, Silverpop, Lyris and EmailVision. Even Forrester made mention in the report of ExactTarget’s acceleration and separation in the market. “ExactTarget has vastly expanded its organization to cater to marketers in any market segment. It offers a highly usable self-service application and has a growing services organization that offers the ability for its personnel to be deployed at the client location.”

Congratulations to the ExactTarget team. This show a tremendous amount of work and dedication to being the best of the best. As we enter 2010, FanMail is very proud to have such a prominent technology leader as our partner!

>> Download the complete Forrester report here

So, a good friend of mine in the HR industry emailed me the other day with a question about open rates. Yes, that’s right, even my non-work, non-marketing friends think about these things.  So my friend hits me up with the following scenario:  She is responsible for a regular newsletter that her company sends out to all associates, partners, clients and other industry professionals.  However, even though the content is very relevant and timely and the list is composed of people in the HR field, she was only seeing open rates of around 12-13%. Always looking to improve her performance, she asked if I had any thoughts or tips to offer.  Now anybody who knows me will tell you that I can’t say no to a friend in need–especially when they are need of marketing advice.

So, I took a look at one of her emails and talked with her about their audience and engagement process and came up with the following points that are relevant for all email marketers, even those of us concentrating in music media marketing.

Full disclosure: My friend and the company she works for are not FanMail clients and are not associated with FanMail or ExactTarget.

The first thing I did was look at the email for design and content best practices.  In terms of design, it was flawless: coherent and non-distracting themes, organized content areas, even bookmarks for easy navigation. As for the content, well, there is not a lot that can be done to jazz up new court interpretations of hiring standards or how federal workers’ compensation regulations have changed. I mean this is a human resources newsletter, not a concert promoters‘ show calendar or a record label’s new artist announcement.  The main thing that I pointed out here was to break up the copy with an image now and then to keep things interesting to the eye.

The second thing I looked at was the list. Who is on it? What kind of communication would this qualify as? While some of the subscribers are clients, the primary purpose of the newsletter is to keep HR industry professionals informed and up-to-date. This means that this would qualify as a B2B (business-to-business) send instead of a B2C (business-to-customer) send.  Typically, one would expect to get above average open rates on a B2B send, definitely not the 12-13% that she was seeing. That’s when I noticed that a large number of the subscribers were employees of the company–wait, I’ve seen something like this before! I asked her how many of her coworkers read their emails on their blackberry. Most, if not all, she surmised, because the company provides them with blackberries. Many people only read the text version of email on their smart phones, or don’t load the images at least. This means that they don’t get counted as an open because open tracking requires images to be loaded from the email server.  When we compared click-through rates to open rates, this point was further proved. According to their click-tracking one would expect an open rate of around 40-50%, which indicates that many more emails are being opened then the numbers show.

The final point I raised was the ESP being used. As I have noted before, sending emails on an ESP with a less than stellar sender reputation is like throwing emails away, or at least into the junk-mail folder which is basically the same thing.  With communication and effective engagement being the cornerstone of successful fan relationship management and fan marketing, our clients (whether they are festival and events promoters or small independent artists) would be losing money if we did not provide them with the absolute best in deliverability, even if the cost of services was less because the drop in revenue due to poor deliverability would far outweigh the savings. So my suggestion here was to get a deliverability report from their ESP and to also set up a bunch of test accounts across several domains (gmail, hotmail/live, yahoo, etc.) and test if the emails are making it to the inbox or the junk folder.

As with all metrics, open rates are only a small snap-shot, they do not tell the whole story. However, they do give a good first impression of the effectiveness of a send.  The three things to consider when trying to improve this number are design/content of the email itself, the quality and composition of the subscriber list, and the deliverability of the email which is based upon sender IP reputation.  By keeping an eye on these factors, it is possible to see open rates that many of us dream about. So keep working and improving and tuning your processes and let’s get as many people opening your emails as possible.