This just in: Yahoo has adopted the techniques used by Spamhaus to monitor their email deliverability. But what exactly does this mean to your company and its email campaigns? Depending on the practices used by your email service provider (ESP) along with your current email marketing guidelines, it can mean the difference between showing up in your recipients’ email boxes and being blacklisted.

Yahoo and other ISPs are allowed to filter email using their own individual methods. Usually this means relying on their internal lists and tools. However, with Yahoo’s adoption of Spamhaus blacklists, they have now added an “outsourced” filtering solution in addition to their internal mechanisms.

Spamhaus is one of several companies that tracks Internet spammers, spam gangs and spam services. In addition, it provides dependable, real-time anti-spam protection for Internet networks, and it works with law enforcement to identify and pursue spammers worldwide. Since Spamhaus employs some of the most stringent anti-spam techniques in use today, emailers have to be very careful not to land their IP address on its highly feared blacklists as this can be extremely detrimental to their business.

Yahoo’s decision to adopt Spamhaus’ blacklists shouldn’t be looked at negatively. It simply means that ESPs can no longer buy their way into recipients’ mailboxes. Instead, deliverability will depend more on a company’s email reputation, which is obviously more advantageous to Yahoo’s subscribers.

Since Yahoo is one of the largest email providers on the planet, this is pretty big news in the email marketing industry. Businesses will have to work harder to make sure that they comply with Spamhaus’ strict regulations, some of which encourage double opt-in registration and list cleanliness. Part of the focus now is on how each company’s IP address is perceived, which means reputable companies that adhere to email marketing best practice guidelines have a much better chance to increase their yahoo.com and yahoo.biz deliverability.

Active Web Group rigorously adheres to all CAN-SPAM laws and has been utilizing double opt-in registration for quite some time. In addition to having a no-tolerance anti-spam policy, Active Web Group’s customer support team actively monitors large import lists and emails going to a large number of subscribers. We make certain that information in headers is not misleading, and that all email includes an opt-out link. Plus, we immediately and zealously honor opt-out and unsubscribe requests for our clients.

In the days of spam-riddled inboxes, everyone has an opinion on how to raise the average conversion, the average sale, average open rate, or the average click-thru. Years of data from some of the best, and worst, companies who specialize in online marketing have been analyzed and published to help construct “best practices” for email marketers. For that, I say “Congratulations!” You’re on course to bring email marketing, a gateway of infinite marketing possibilities and unlimited ROI potential, to an “average” level.

Email marketing is a channel, a unique marketing avenue unlike any other, for you to showcase your product or service to the world. Whether your company is B2B or B2C, it can help propel you to levels unattainable 10 years ago. But how do you get there? What do you do to get your email to stand out? What type of campaign is going to impact your customer…giving them no other choice but to click on your email and purchase your product?

The answers we’ve seen include “segment your email lists”, or “A/B test your email designs” and even “make sure your offer lies above the fold”. These are all very good answers, and key ways in helping create a successful email campaign. But something is missing. Something that will ultimately make the difference between maximizing your profit or resulting in another “average” email.

That something is creativity. It seems simple really. After all, marketing is creativity. Without creativity, we’d never know about the caveman’s struggle to adapt to human society or about a duck that can provide supplemental insurance. It’s you and your company’s belief that your product is better than any other in your market. Why would you settle for “average” results? It’s so easy to fall back on your averages to gage whether or not a particular campaign is successful, but how creative was it? How was it different than any other email you’ve sent in the past? Were your customers so enthralled that they felt inclined to forward it to their peers so that THEY can see what you had to offer?

I ask you, the email marketing guru, to come up with a different type of strategy. Break free from the standard email you send week in and week out, and come up with something unique. You know your product and market better than anyone, so these are merely just suggestions that might help start the brainstorming process:

• Promote Online Shopping Security - If your email is product heavy, create an email promoting your “shopping cart safety” or “customer purchasing experience” and how you take care of your customer throughout the entire process.
• Create Buzz - If you only offer 10% or free shipping with every email, offer a special time-restricted sale off large margin or clearance products to create “buzz” throughout your contact list.
• Increase Repeat Customers - If your goal is to increase repeat customers, offer an additional 10% off a customers 2nd order.
• Obtain New Customers - If you provide a service, maybe an SEO or hosting service, offer 3 months’ free hosting and optimization for referring another company.
• Promote Corporate Responsibility – A company like Neiman Marcus sends an inbox cluttering 10 emails or more a week. To show their company is focused on today’s issues, they could offer a special 2-week promotion where 10% of every order is donated to the charity of their choice.

These types of offers may help your email stand out from the many others that are sent every day, and can help increase brand awareness. They’re elementary in their premise, but they give your customer a reason to click.

An offer is only as good as the company that provides it. To consistently offer the same promotion week in and week out is an easy way to ruin your email marketing efforts. Include creativity with every campaign. Be the first in your market to provide something different each time you send an email. Create a campaign that incites a purchasing frenzy, instead of an “average” experience.

Most of us are aware that in order to generate effective email campaigns, they must contain offers that are relevant to our customers. However, innovative teen eretailer Karmaloop recently took that knowledge a step further by giving their finicky consumers even greater control over the merchandise offers they get. By allowing their subscribers to select specific product categories and brands they are interested in, Karmaloop’s email-generated revenue jumped 318%.

The wants of today’s consumers change regularly, especially those of teens and tweens. In the midst of opening your email, a teen might also be talking on their cell phone, downloading songs to their iPod, and watching MTV. Realizing this, Karmaloop, an online retailer of urban, streetwear, rave and boutique clothing, sought to do a better job of offering products of importance in their email marketing initiatives.

With its primary demographic being teen shoppers, Karmaloop’s marketers knew it was imperative to spark the interest of recipients with highly relevant content. With a mailing list of 300,000, the folks at Karmaloop had previously been sending email offers based on their customers’ past purchases, but felt they could do more. So they enhanced their email program by adding an automated system that gives customers control over what merchandise they want to hear about, creating a more targeted email.

To accomplish this, Karmaloop surveyed a large portion of their customer base to determine how many brands to include in the new program. The results confirmed their suspicions – that they had a handful of wildly popular brands — but they were surprised to see that there was also a great deal of interest in dozens of lesser-known brands. They used this information to refine their email offerings and develop an automated program that delivered more customized emails.

Karmaloop achieved the relevancy they were looking for. In fact, they were ecstatic with the bottom-line numbers: email-generated revenue skyrocketed 318%, while conversions-to-sale increased from 3% to 4.6%. The automated system has also helped overall onsite sales, which have been growing incrementally by 3%.

You too can capitalize on the wealth of information that can be obtained from conducting your own customer survey. Then, based on the information you gather from the survey, follow this 5-step system developed by Karmaloop to create your own automated email program.

Step 1 - Pinpoint categories & brands

After sorting through your survey data, compile an alphabetical checklist of your most popular brands. As long as the list is relevant to your audience, an extensive length should not be a problem. If the list starts to underperform, you can easily shorten it.

In addition, you can also incorporate your standard product categories into the checklist. Design your system so that it can recognize IP addresses, so when a customer comes back to modify his or her list, the categories and brands they have selected will be checkmarked to remind them of what they are signed up for.

Step 2 – Include signup buttons on landing pages

Capture more search-engine-generated leads by placing prominent signup buttons on the landing pages for your brand keyword buys. It is also a good idea to add signup buttons on brand and category pages throughout your site.

Step 3 – Target certain behaviors

Next, program your system to take into account behavior information, such as abandoned shopping cart products and recent repeatedly viewed items, and combine them with both the pre-selects and past purchases. In terms of purchases, similar products or cross-sell items can become part of your equation. Hold weekly meetings to discuss the data and decide whether or not to tweak the algorithms.

Step 4 – Carefully plan message timing

Determine how many emails to send customers and prospects based on current sales and new products being driven with the brands they have selected. For instance, you might send two emails one week but none the next week. Be careful not to bombard your subscribers with constant emails. You may even want to set up your program to limit it to no more than two messages a week about sales/new arrivals related to the customer’s selected brands.

Step 5 - Target non-responders four months later with a new offer

If emails do not convert after four months without unsubscribes, design your automated system to rotate merchandise to the next group of items on the team’s set behavioral scale. (Items abandoned in a shopping cart get one of the top weights, while products viewed three times are weighted higher than ones viewed once.)

For example, if a female Karmaloop customer hadn’t made a purchase, the Luxirie by LRG jeans offers she was getting were replaced by Soundgirl jeans or another jeans line she had repeatedly clicked on.

With the right combination of creativity and dedication, Karmaloop’s 5-step program can help you to empower your customers, thereby improving email relevancy and ultimately increasing your open, clickthrough, and conversion rates.