Thanks StartupDigest for the nod last week when you included us in your Email Mafia as “The Upstart” -http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/07/28/email-mafia-paypal-mafia-email/.

We like the scrappy nature of the name that conjures up an image of a fighter in the ring with new moves and something to prove. We are that company, and as part of those new moves look for more blog posts, collateral, and market coverage on how our Horizon solution is changing the game of email from quantity to quality.

What isn’t included in this choice piece of media meat is that we are also serious technologists, entrepreneurs, marketeers, and business developers. We have created, bought, sold, marketed, developed strategy for, and implemented some amazing technological solutions. We have also brought on a cadre of experienced technology and media investors to compliment our growth in premium online content, community, and marketplace clients.

What does all this mean for you? First, stay in contact with our blog, newsletter, twitter, or smoke signals to hear what the “The Upstart” does next. Second, we promise to beat any existing contract you have with an email service provider to deliver your mass and transactional emails to your community.

Yep, you read that right. We will provide you an email solution which will match or exceed your current technology at a better price. If we can’t, we’ll post on our blog who beat us and why. We’re that confident.

What’s the catch? Zilch. We know our solution will outperform what you have. We just ask you to speak with us, try it out, and come on board without all the flashy marketing promotions and collateral. As a savvy business person yourself, we suspect you’ll prefer performance, reliability, and reducing that ESP line item much more than a video, animal mascot, or folders of collateral on your shelf.

Now we believe we’ll always compete well with any email provider out there, but we can’t guarantee this forever (our investors might start asking questions). So take a break from your vacation quarter and give us a call to find out more and try out the system. There’s nothing like starting off Q4 with a cost reduction of up to 50% and a performance increase to boot.

Cheers,
The Upstart

Now try and say “test send text only” five times fast.

In addition to the change, you can also select the time interval to display.  Select from “daily”, “weekly” or “monthly” from the duration drop-down menu, depress the refresh button, et voila! a powerful new chart is displayed.  Finally, in the view drop down menu you are also able to select to calculate the growth report against the total number of email addresses in your list (including optouts and hardbounces) or against valids only.  Yep, it’s pretty cool.

Stay tuned as we bring many powerful new features online over the coming weeks.

Clicking the banner takes donors directly to the Red Cross donation site where they can choose between the Haiti Relief and Development and the International Response Fund.  Including the banner costs nothing but may help to ease the suffering of a people in need.  We hope that you will consider including one of these banners in your outgoing emails and we’d love to hear ideas you have about helping out.

So that’s it.  Problem solved, right?

I wish.  Whether from the unscrupulous selling of emails, to the hijacking of address books, etc., there are still many slices of spam slipping under the door to the inbox.  Enough in fact that we’ve become quick on the draw when it comes to flagging messages.  And it’s evident that users fatigued from dealing with an ever increasing volume of email have taken to flagging many legitimate messages merely because they seem spammy, are annoying or because they’re seeking vengeance against senders that abuse our patience.  And therein lies the trouble.  It’s helpful and necessary to identify true spam, but when a sender’s legitimate messages get flagged it hurts the brand, the delivery rate of the IP address (and anyone sharing that address) and may even cause loss of whitelisting.

Here at Sailthru we’re constantly advising our clients that spam is in the eye of the beholder.  Just because you obtained a user email though sound practices doesn’t mean you can take that interest for granted.  Behavioral studies are showing that people react to what’s happening on their computer screen the same way they do in life.  Which is to say, if you wouldn’t do it out there, don’t do it in here.  Would you leave five voice mails with a friend during the day just to say “hi”?  (note: if you said yes…you might need a hobby.)  And which would be more annoying, the frequency of the calls, or the fact that they were devoid of content?  Answer: it doesn’t matter.

If you want an engaged, responsive user base that looks forward to your messages and keeps you in the inbox, then be sure to follow these five C’s:

-be CONSIDERATE.  There are real people, real busy people just like you receiving those emails who deserve to be treated like friends.
-be CONTENT driven.  We all want real content–a reason to open and spend time with messages.
-be CONCISE.  There’s no prize for longest or most busy email.
-be CREATIVE in design, branding and delivery.  Think about, test and get feedback on the user experience to your messages.
-be CONSISTENT.  More isn’t necessarily better, but if you’re weekly BE weekly, if you’re daily BE daily.

Because ultimately spam is whatever you say it is.

I’m sometimes called upon to come up with subject lines and copy for campaigns, a task I enjoy and at which fancy myself pretty darn good.  But for one campaign we ran an A/B split test with the competing subject headings of, “Half-off for the Holidays” versus my “Everything half-off (even the partridge in the pear tree)”.  I was pretty confident I had the winner, but in comparing the results we noted that while the open rate was higher for mine, the more bland heading held a slight, but definitive advantage in clicks. Worse yet, the more bland heading had clearly resulted in more conversions to sales.

So what had happened?  There are many ways to interpret the data, but here are just a couple:

1.) People preferred the bland subject heading (I don’t believe it, but it is the simplest interpretation and we like to shave with Occam’s razor here at Sailthru.)

2.) People on that particular list are the type that like more simple subject lines (i.e. I didn’t know my audience.  It’s quite possible, but given the hip nature of the company sending the email I still don’t believe it.)

3.) Perhaps the clever subject heading had gotten some responders who wouldn’t have otherwise to open the email.  Ah!  Now we’re on to something.  (I’m not just saying this because it makes me sound better, I swear.)

Another way of phrasing this third interpretation is that those who clicked through and purchased were among the most engaged users of the site and were not heavily influenced by the cleverness of the subject line (or lack thereof).  If that’s so, then why had the simpler version resulted in more sales?  That’s not clear, though it is possible that given the list size results were skewed by one or two heavy buyers.

However, since our goal for that particular email was conversion to sales my rationalizations couldn’t hold sway and we went with the more simple heading.  But if our focus had been to build the size of our active list perhaps we would have run the other campaign; it had shown a small but decisive advantage in getting people to open the email.  Of course none of this takes into account the monumental importance that relevant and interesting content have on behavior once the email has been opened.  But that’s a topic for another posting.  Just remember, when running an A/B test take a close look at your analytics, they may reveal some interesting and unexpected behavior.  Even if it’s your own.

For detailed instructions on how to perform an A/B split visit:  http://docs.sailthru.com/ab_split

First a definition of terms: in it’s basic form an A/B split test is the competing of two versions of an email within a given campaign, each on a small percentage of a list.  Having monitored responses to each, the more effective of the two test emails is then sent to the remainder of the list.  It is important to remember that the two competing versions are run on exclusive segments of the list, that is, test recipients receive either version [A] or version [B], but not both.  The purpose and great power of an A/B split test lies in the ability to determine how your users are likely to respond to an email before having sent it to the vast majority of them.  Of course, coming up with two versions of a single campaign also puts to the test your basic assumptions about who your users are and how they will respond to a given message, thus making it a teaching tool as well.

Our system has a default setting of 10% for each of the A/B segments, which means that 80% of the list is withheld.  So, under the default settings, the winning email can be sent to 90% (10% test + 80% final) of the list (unless the final version of the email is a hybridized third version… So many options!).  You can specify any number of recipients for your tests, just remember that you want it to be a large enough proportion for the test to be meaningful, and a small enough proportion that the vast majority of the list receive the most effective version of your email.

A 50:50 A/B test is not really an A/B test
We sometimes get requests to run A/B tests on a different proportion of a given list.  The system lets you choose any fraction of your list that you specify.  But quite often we are requested to run a split of 50% and 50%.  As I said before, the system will let you do this, but just know that to do so defeats a central purpose of the A/B test.  After-all, once you’ve run your test on 100% of the list it’s too late to use any of the knowledge gained!  And even if you were to send the same email a second time you’d be in new conditions and sending to users who, at least half of which, had received the ad already.

For detailed instructions on how to perform an A/B split  visit:  http://docs.sailthru.com/ab_split