Zak Barron knows EVERYTHING about email marketing. Alright I could be exaggerating a tiny bit but he is the local email marketing expert for Constant Contact in the New England area and he definitely knows his stuff. He runs frequent seminars on email marketing, interactive training workshops, and industry specific programs. I have had the pleasure of doing a few combined seminars with Zak talking about combining online video and email marketing. I asked Zak if he would be interested in taking the hot seat for one of my 5 Question Interviews and without further ado, here are his answers:

Eric Guerin: I’ve heard Constant Contact’s deliverability to ISP’s (Internet Service Providers – i.e. Comcast, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) is one of the highest among ESP’s (Email Service Providers like Constant Contact)…how are you able to maintain such a high level of deliverability?

Zak Barron: Good question Eric. Constant Contact currently has a deliverability rate above 97%. This is a key metric for ESP’s that anyone looking for an email marketing service should look at when making their decision. It’s very easy for a company to say, “We have 97% deliverability” so make sure you ask if that is the ESP’s number or a 3rd party number. Constant Contact uses an outside unbiased 3rd party called Return Path to evaluate our delivery rate. The reason that we are able to maintain this high deliverability rate is because we require all of our customers to use permission based email lists. We have built personal relationships with postmasters at many ISP’s, and they know that we share the same contempt for SPAM email, this also greatly impacts how the ISP’s view Constant Contact as a large sender of email messages.

EG: You mentioned permission based email lists, can you briefly explain what the importance of an “opt-in email list” is and why you would NEVER want to buy an email address list from another company?

ZB: It is critical to a business that it only use email to communicate with those whom have given their permission to receive emails from that business. Given that statement there are 2 levels of permission; implicit, and explicit. Implicit covers anyone that you have a prior business relationship with, but you might not have told them that you are going to begin sending them email campaigns. Explicit permission means that you are actually setting the expectation when you collect the contact information of a customer, or prospect, that they will be getting email campaigns. The main reason that a business needs to build it’s list in this manner is the issue of SPAM. Over the years consumers have become very weary of who they provide their contact information to, and how they react to messages that they have not asked for in their inboxes. With many email clients allowing their users to report unwanted email as SPAM, the ISP’s are able to track the reputation of senders and penalize them if they get to many SPAM reports/complaints by not allowing them access to their(ISP’s) customers inbox. The point is that a purchased or rented list will get tons of SPAM complaints, certainly enough to be noticed by the ISP’s. A business that insists on this practice will find themselves on industry wide “blocklists, or blacklists” which will directly affect the businesses ability to get email marketing campaigns out the door.

EG: That relationship with your contacts is really the key to a successful email marketing plan. Speaking of relationships, how does Constant Contact engage online and build community for their users?

ZB: At Constant Contact we are all about community, and to that end there are 2 ways that we do that, one is with the Constant Contact Connect Up! user community, and the 2nd is the Constant Contact Cares4Kids program.

Constant Contact’s ConnectUp! user community was designed as a forum to share the entrepreneurial energy and passion that drives small businesses and organizations. The community provides a host of tools and technologies that enable you to connect with your peers, exchange ideas and find answers to your questions about email marketing, online surveys and small business issues in general.

As a paying Constant Contact customer, you can bring email marketing and online survey tools to your favorite eligible community organization-at no cost to you! Through Cares4Kids you can help an organization reach new donors, publicize their good works, plan events-and use their precious funding to carry out their mission. It all starts with one quick application.. More than 900 worthy organizations have received free accounts on behalf of Constant Contact’s Cares4Kids program.

EG: Where does Constant Contact see the future of email marketing headed particularly with more and more people using mobile devices to open and access their email?

ZB: If you would have asked me this a year ago, I would have told you that it was going to affect open rates in a major way. The tracking mechanism that CTCT uses is a small image in the body of the HTML email. So this means that all text based email clients are tough to track. With the release of the iPhone, and many other mobile devices that can read HTML, I see open rates actually improving and becoming more accurate, as most smart phones will be switching to the HTML platform.

EG: What is the one hint or tip you could share that most people doing email marketing fail to realize or include in their email marketing campaign?

ZB: I think one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of email marketers make is that they fail to set the proper expectations at the outset of their email relationship with their customers and prospects. Being clear as to the content and frequency of the messages you will be sending is vital. Instead of saying “sign up for me email newsletter” say “sign up for my monthly newsletter.” Half of the battle in email marketing is validating your place in your recipient’s inbox, and setting/managing expectations is key to that validation.

EG: Thanks Zak!

Eric Guerin, Adelie Studios

Customer since: 2007
List size: 342
Open rate: 48.6%
Favorite feature: Statistic Tracking
Website: www.AdelieStudios.com

Adelie Studios owner and producer Eric Guerin creates online marketing and advertising content with a specific focus in online video animation. Additional services include web site design, e-newsletter content management, distribution plans and techniques, training and services. Their customers are forward-thinking companies looking to leverage the power of engagement offered by online video — from two-person operations to Fortune 500 companies.

Standing out in a Crowded Landscape

The ability to tell a compelling business story in three minutes or less is critical to an online campaign’s success. And with so many free tools available online and the explosion of user-generated content, differentiating their services and showing the value of professionally produced video can be a real challenge. Also, Adelie Studios faces a long sales cycle — their potential customers frequently make buying decisions over the course of months. So company CEO and Executive Producer Eric Guerin went searching for an efficient way to stay top-of-mind with potential clients until they were ready to begin a project.

Eric considered many e-mail marketing companies, including Exact Target and iContact, but decided to go with Constant Contact in 2007 because of “the statistic tracking, easy to manage contact list features, customizable templates and the simple user interface,” he explains. “It was very easy and simple to set up. It took us just a few hours spread over several days. The interface made it a breeze.”

To increase brand recognition and showcase their expertise, Adelie Studios sends a “video of the month” newsletter with a mix of their entertaining online marketing videos, links to relevant blog posts, and useful information about online and viral marketing. They also promote seminars and webinars where they are presenting, including their participation in local Constant Contact events. “Whoever the client or highlighted content is helps us come up with a theme for the newsletter, and sometimes we tie it to the season, such as Halloween in October. The newsletter definitely helps shorten our sales cycle,” says Eric.

Riding the Wave to Increased Visibility

“Around the time we signed on with Constant Contact, I was selected by the Worcester Business Journal as one of their “Forty Under 40″ — businesspeople under the age of 40 from Central Massachusetts notable for their business accomplishments and ongoing community service,” says Eric. “To celebrate, we created a funny video poking fun at me. We set very clear goals to generate buzz, increase our contacts, increase our brand recognition within the region served by the Journal, and to open a discussion which would hopefully lead to a working relationship with the publication.”

Once they began sharing the video, it took on a life of its own, quickly making the rounds of Worcester Business Journal’s newsroom, leading the editor to ask permission to show it at the awards banquet with over 500 community leaders in attendance. This exposure lead to further distribution to the subscriber lists of the Journal as well as other regional business newspapers.

This one opportunity created benefits both immediate and long-lasting. “Before the event we had less than 100 subscribers — two weeks after, it had more than doubled, ” Eric shares. “Several of the subscribers we met at the event have hired us to create web-based marketing videos for them. One contacted us six months later, proof that regular contact kept us at the top of his list. We also developed working relationships with three local business journals to produce videos for them and to resell our online marketing video product.”

A Long-Term Relationship

With a current list of 342 subscribers, Eric says “I love when people email us after receiving the newsletter. It makes me smile because I know the newsletter was engaging enough that they took the time, not only to read it, but to reply,” clearly evident in the newsletter’s 48.6% open rate.

With such outstanding results, Adelie Studios took their relationship with Constant Contact to the next level. Eric explains, “We chose to partner with Constant Contact because they have integrity and look out for us as small business owners. As I tell my clients, the best way to launch an online video campaign is with your existing customer base and using Constant Contact as the first distribution channel makes perfect sense. And since we’re business partners with them, this assures our customers that we’re recommending a high-quality, reliable service — one we trust enough to use to distribute our own work.”

As many of my blog readers and customers know, I am a big proponent of utilizing email marketing as part of your mix to distribute an online video created to market or promote your business, service or product. It is a great tool to touch base with your existing customer base and if that video is done creatively, is a simple and easy way for your customers to pass your message on to friends.

I have been giving regular seminars with Zak Barron of Constant Contact about how best to integrate email marketing with online video. One of the statistics I use is one I got from the Email Standards Project where their research showed that a “…screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link.” Of course being a video production company I latched onto these stats and used them to my benefit. I’ve seen these statistics used as part of Email Marketing Reports and also in a discussion I had on the Constant Contact User Community Forum…but then I wondered…what would my own research find? We already knew from our own monthly newsletters that we were getting really high click-throughs compared to industry standards and most were going to the new video that we sent out every month. Most of those click-throughs on our e-newsletters were also clicking on the screen-grab JPEG image (see “screen-grab sample image above) which “looks” like it will play but actually links to the video on our website rather than using the text link to that same video. Here were our cumulative statistics for our open rate and for our click through rates for 12 e-newsletters which amounts to several thousand emails going out:

Cumulative Open Rate: 48%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 44%

So then on two occasions we decided NOT to include a video with a screen-grab link in our e-newsletter and instead sent out informative articles, upcoming events or blog posts. All good content…just no video. Our statistics for these two e-newsletters were:

Cumulative Open Rate: 47%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 16%

It wasn’t a full 5x as often but including video in our campaigns was a very significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included. Another really interesting fact is that our open rate remained virtually the same which basically means there is a 64% decrease in the number of click-throughs on our e-newsletter when we do not include video.

I hope you find these statistics as interesting and useful as I did. Now my head hurts from all that math so I’m going to have to get back to doing something creative but with these statistics in mind…have you included video in your email marketing campaign? What have your results been? Please share your own results by commenting below or pinging this blog post.