In some ways, sending email ads is like owning a dog. Email advertising is all about winning over a new audience, and Simon is certainly good at that. So I thought I’d share some of the tips I learned from Simon to succeed with stand-alone email ads (and as a pet owner).

1. Being cute is helpful for both dogs and email  . . .

   For a dog, being cute definitely helps in making new friends. In the same way, you’re going to see more success with your email ad if it looks good.

   Double check the creative to ensure that you have no broken code, no missing images, and no grammatical or spelling errors. You should also check that your email renders correctly in different email clients (and for mobile, of course). In short, take that puppy to the groomers before you send it out to make new friends for your company.

2.  . . . But being cute isn’t enough.
   Even for a dog as adorable as Simon, there are other factors at play when meeting a new person. You’ve also got to get the right introduction. In my case, it usually just takes letting new people know that it’s ok to pet or play with Simon.

   For email ads, it means that your brand should be introduced by the list owner. Their name should be included in the From fields of the email, and they should have a header before the email to remind the subscriber of why they’re receiving this email. Though it may be tempting to keep all of the branding your own, you will see lower ROI and a big hit to your brand’s reputation if you don’t get the right introduction to a new audience.

3. You’ve got to play to your audience.
   As impossible as it seems to me, some people just aren’t dog people—or even pet people. Simon is pretty small, so he’s not very threatening. Even so, letting him rush up to someone who isn’t big on animals can be a bad experience for him as well as for that person.

   When you send email ads, you may not know the audience directly, but the list owner or the ad exchange (like ividence) should. They should be able to tell you about the consumers receiving your ad and explain to you what the process is for targeting your ad to only records likely to be interested in your company.

4. You have to pay attention to a lot of different data.
   Just like a dog, an email ad can’t tell you if something is wrong—let alone what. At any given time, you need to notice your dog’s health, behavior, and mood, in addition to watching for recalls on his food and toys.

   In an email ad program, you pay attention to response levels on the open, click, and conversion levels in order to understand the efficiency and effectiveness of the campaign. It’s important to get data in a clear, actionable format and to send in a controlled manner so that you have time to react (rather than sending batch and blast emails).

5.  Last point… don’t be deceptive…
   You build a long-term relationship with your dog , and you have to build one with your audience too. Tell (sell) them the truth, the reality of your features or product. If you fool them, they won’t like you (your brand) anymore

So, do you have any pet owner tricks for improving your email marketing strategy?

Related articles
How California’s Recent Ruling Affects Stand-Alone Email Advertising
3 Cool Things That Happen When You Send Email Ads to Your List
Hitting a Home Run in Acquisition Email

Mary Byrne

Mary Byrne leads ividence’s sales and marketing team in the U.S. as SVP, Americas. She has nearly 15 years of experience in the technology sector, with special emphasis on advertising technology and email deliverability. Previously, Mary led the sales, marketing, and client services efforts at DoubleClick, Microsoft and Level 3 Communications. She can be reached at mb@ividence.com.

I had a ton of questions about the case law and what it meant, so I decided to add more geekiness to the general email and legal geekery by interviewing myself on the topic. So without further ado, here are the questions I had and the answers I found to them:

I had a ton of questions about the case law and what it meant, so I decided to add more geekiness to the general email and legal geekery by interviewing myself on the topic. So without further ado, here are the questions I had and the answers I found to them:
 

1. What law was the court ruling on?
   Dan Balsam, who received emails that he alleged were false and deceptive, sued Trancos, Inc. under California’s Business & Professional Code § 17529.5.

 

2. Can a person who receives “spam” emails actually sue the company that sent them?
   Under California’s Business & Professional Code § 17529.5, yes, they can (this was part of what was ruled on in the case).

 

3. Wait, I thought CAN-SPAM pre-empted states’ anti-spam laws.
   Not actually a question, but, yes, CAN-SPAM explicitly stated that it overrode state laws concerning spam. However, it made an exception “to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto.” (Emphasis is mine.)
    
   That enabled the California law to stand, meaning that Balsam’s case against Transco Inc. could go forward, according to a California Court of Appeal.

 

4. Could you perhaps add just a touch more geek to this post by including a timeline of events as they relate to this case?
   Certainly. (Click to enlarge.)



5. So what does this change for my email marketing and in particular my email ads?
   Hopefully nothing. This case boils down to one basic statement: Don’t be false or deceptive!
    
   Presumably, not being false and deceptive was a cornerstone of your email strategy to begin with. However, just to be on the safe side, here are the two particular areas that the case touched on.

 

• Always make it clear who the email is from – In this case, the primary issue was that the only identifying information of who sent the email wasn’t clear. The mail from friendly field, mail from field (including the domain name), and the email itself mentioned a fictitious business name which wasn’t registered and a URL that was privately registered. All making it difficult to find out who sent the email.
   
  In the case of email ads, there are two companies that should be identified, the list owner and the advertiser. At ividence, we put both company names in the “mail from friendly” field. We include the publisher in the “from field,” which indicates the email address sent from. In addition, we include the publisher’s name in the header and footer (with unsubscribe links). The advertiser’s logo is included in the email and is also mentioned in the footer (also with an unsubscribe link). Providing the publisher name is not mandatory, according to the CAN-SPAM Act; it’s just very respectful of the end-user.

 

• Only send when you have permission – Another point at issue was that the opt-in information that Transco had for Balsam was incorrect, so the court found that they did not have direct permission to send to Balsam. To stay on the safe side, all emails to a list should come from the owner of that list. That’s the company that a subscriber opted in with, and that’s the company they expect to receive emails from. You should do this because it keeps you on the right side of the law, because it’s the right thing to do, and because it’s most effective from a marketing standpoint.

Just following the two above points is the minimum standard you should follow in order to respect subscribers. For more information on how email ads should be sent to avoid being misleading, feel free to shoot us an email. We’re always happy to discuss how to ensure that you respect subscribers while acquiring new customers.

(Disclosure: This post represents a personal opinion; ividence is not a law firm.)

Related articles
3 Cool Things That Happen When You Send Email Ads to Your List
Why Buying (or Selling!) Email Lists Doesn’t Work
A Checklist for Monetizing Your Email List the Right Way

Photo courtesy of MrBill.

Lynn Dalsing
Lynn Dalsing develops marketing strategy and content within the U.S. market for ividence. She has several years of experience in marketing for both B2B and B2C audiences. While working at high-end maternity clothing manufacturer, Ingrid & Isabel, she oversaw the development and evolution of branding for the company’s highly successful launch into Target stores.

 Lynn has a passion for combining outstanding messaging with reach and engagement statistics, once describing an ESP’s reporting dashboard as the “best toy a marketer could get.” She can be reached at ldalsing@ividence.com. 

By having regular email ads going out to their list, our publisher clients see some interesting benefits that go beyond generating revenue, and I thought we’d share a few of those:

1. Clear out hard bounces regularly.
   Perhaps most importantly, sending email helps with your list hygiene. People’s email addresses change. They close out accounts or stop checking them. More often than not, they won’t think to update their subscriptions (though it can be helpful to remind them periodically that they can log in to your preference center and change their account details). The point is, your list will occasionally include hard bounces as the email addresses on it age.

   Obviously, the more frequently you send emails, the more quickly you get hard bounces out of your list, which decreases the overall percentage of hard bounces you send to with each mailing. A healthy list with a minimal number of hard bounces looks better to the ISPs who ultimately decide if your email gets the inbox or the spam folder.

   Email offers going out to your list on a regular basis can clear out hard bounces (and unsubscribes) on a regular basis so that your list is as up-to-date as possible at all times. If you use a third-party vendor for email ads, make sure that they are notifying you of any hard bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes as they come in.

2. Remind your subscribers who you are.
   Your subscribers joined your email list to get your content and offers. Ideally, you kept them interested after sign up with a welcome series, and your regular content keeps them hooked by being relevant to their interests.

   But consider this: The average email user gets 147 emails per day. Of those, they delete 71. (Stats from Boomerang). With that volume of email, it can be easy for a subscriber to forget your company and why they subscribed if they only see your name in their inbox once a month. Even though you send great content.

   Done right, email ads uses both the publisher and advertiser name in the sender information, reminding your subscribers of your company and that they are subscribed to your email list. This decreases the rate of spam complaints for your own list because people remember why they’re getting email from you. It might even remind them that they haven’t been on your site to check out new content in some time!

   At ividence, we take this one step further and allow our publishers to customize an HTML header that is included in the body of every email that goes out to a publisher’s list.

3. Learn more about your subscribers.
   In order to get behavioral data based on email behavior, you have to send emails. The catch is that you have to send emails with content that is new and relevant to the subscriber to keep their interest. One way to do that is to send very targeted email ads.

   Sending email ads can tell you more about what demographic groups within your email list are most actively engaging with your list. That can help you adjust your content mix to engage different parts of the list or can help you paint a picture of the most engaged members of your audience for advertisers on your website.

What has been your experience with monetizing your list? What benefits have you seen beyond generating revenue?

Related articles

Hitting a Home Run in Acquisition Email
A Checklist for Monetizing Your Email List the Right Way
What We Think We Know But May Not
 

Image courtesy of Ramburg Media
 

Kevin Deseuste

Kevin Deseuste joined the ividence team at the beginning of 2011 and directs the implementation and evaluation of advertiser campaigns and publisher lists for the U.S. market. He brings to the team an expertise in monitoring and enhancing deliverability and response rates from both the publisher and advertiser perspective. Prior to joining ividence, Kevin worked in Business Development at technology solutions provider SCC.

He can be reached at kd@ividence.com.

Thanks to the EEC for letting ividence share a little of our knowledge! And a special thanks for the continued great work for spreading excellence in email marketing!

Can Email Work as a Customer Acquisition Channel?
A lot of savvy email marketers ask the question of whether email can work as an acquisition channel. Because the power of email marketing is based on permission (which can’t be transferred), the assumption is that email can’t be used to acquire new customers.

In reality, email can be a tremendously powerful customer acquisition channel when it’s handled right. I am, of course, biased, since ividence is an ad exchange for acquisition email. Still the numbers bear me out. Read the rest of the post on the EEC’s blog.

A lot of these publishers have a very sophisticated retention email program with great content and engaged subscribers. They just don’t know how to get started in acquisition email or they’ve had a bad experience in the past that generated a lot of complaints and deliverability headaches.

We walk them through the process of what goes into monetizing an email list the right way. Since we discuss this often, we thought it would be helpful to share more information on the blog. I put together this handy checklist that explains what you should know before you monetize your email list.

How do I know if my email list is ready to be monetized?

Know the answers to these questions before you even start the process of generating revenue through acquisition email:

• Do I have permission to send third-party emails to my subscribers?
  The ideal situation is that subscribers specifically opt in to third-party offers when they sign up for your list. You should also check your privacy policy to ensure that you haven’t guaranteed subscribers that you will never send email ads.
• Do my subscribers know what to expect?
  If your subscribers don’t expect to receive email ads from you, you can run into trouble even if you have permission to send. If you’ve never sent third-party offers in the past, consider a campaign to inform subscribers of what you’ll be sending.
• Do I send high value content to my list?
  Remember that people subscribed in order to get value from your content, whether that’s information, entertainment, or coupons. Make sure that you’re delivering on that value before you monetize.

If you answered yes to all of these questions, you’re ready to go. If not and you’d still like to monetize your list, make sure you know your strategy for getting all of these answers to yes before you move forward.

How should acquisition emails be sent?

When you’re ready to plan your strategy, make sure that you can answer yes to all the following questions:

• Will I retain control of the list?
  Any strategy that involves handing your list over to an advertiser or not having visibility into (and control over) what is sent to your list should be a no go.
• Will subscribers understand why they are getting these emails?
  The only company with permission to send to your list is yours. Subscribers should see your company’s name in the mailfrom and mailfrom friendly fields of the email before they open, and they should see your name in the header once they open the email.
  
  A friendly reminder here: It’s natural to be concerned about including your branding on an advertising email to your list. However, clarity and honesty are non-negotiable when monetizing your email list. Not being upfront about who emails are from can confuse subscribers, ultimately harming your brand’s reputation.
• Is there a way to tightly target the ads?
  The days of batch and blast email campaigns are (or should be) over. Because the inbox is a highly personal space where people interact with friends, family, and brands that they trust, it’s critical that you only send relevant, welcome emails. Make sure you know how you’ll use targeting to minimize unwanted emails.
• Can subscribers easily opt out of both my list and the advertiser’s list?
  Make this process as easy as possible to prevent any spam complaints.
• Do I have a plan in place for reporting results to my advertisers?
  Advertisers expect to see how their ads performed in terms of opens, clicks, and conversions.
• Do I have a team in place that can handle this process from end to end?
  Monetizing your list the right way means ensuring that you have the resources necessary to sell email ad space, send emails (and more importantly deliver them to the inbox), report results, and handle billing. Some of these processes may be easy to fold into existing processes at your company. Others can be challenging and time-consuming. You can manage this process through a trusted vendor or in-house, but just make sure you know how you’ll manage it.

If you have more questions about making sure you’re ready for email list monetization or how the process works, email us at contact.us@ividence.com or request that a rep contact you.
 
 
Related articles
Hitting a Home Run in Acquisition Email
The 3 Worst Mistakes to Make for the Health of Your Email List
 
Image courtesy of Alan Cleaver.
 
 

Eric Didier
CEO & Co-Founder
Eric Didier is a successful serial entrepreneur with a broad background in enterprise software sales management, complex software development and product management for web technologies. He was the founder and CEO of Soamai in 2000, a metadata applications company which was acquired by Allen Systems Group in April 2004. He can be reached at ed@ividence.com. 

As baseball season starts up, we’re already anticipating a Yankees vs. Giants World Series. The Yankees have now pulled slightly ahead in the standings with a record of 6-5, the San Francisco office insists that I point out that a 5-6 start to the season doesn’t look radically different from the 2010 Giants team who won the World Series.

Fresh off of wins for both the Yankees and the Giants, I wanted to see what acquisition email marketers and list owners could take from baseball to improve their game.

Look at the Right Metrics for Your Program

The popularity of Moneyball makes this one obvious to include. You’ve got to look at the right statistics. To do that, you need to know what constitutes a win for your program and what influences that. In baseball, a win could be a winning season or great revenue from ticket sales. Factors that influence a winning season might be runners on base over the season, whereas revenue is affected by the number of fans in seats.

Each email program is different so you will need to decide what constitutes a win for your program and find out what factors influence that to look at the right stats. There are some basic stats we would recommend looking at for all programs though:

1. Open Rate – This is the percentage of emails that are opened of the total number sent. It’s a rough measure of the interest and engagement levels of subscribers. Acquisition email campaigns have been quoted as having an average open rate as low as 0.01-0.1%, and our research data suggests an overall open rate of 0.7%. ividence’s open rate for acquisition email is 13%. That higher open rate can make all the difference for an advertiser in getting more customers and for a publisher who wants to make sure their subscribers are getting offers they want.
2. Click Through Rate – The CTR for a campaign is the percentage of clicks out of the total number of emails sent.  Like the open rate, it gives an idea of interest and engagement, but it also drives traffic to another platform where consumers can learn more about a company or product that’s new to them.
3. ROI/Revenue – This is a way to measure if an acquisition campaign is a win. For advertisers, this might mean generating leads, making sales, or acquiring new customers. For publishers monetizing their email assets, this might mean looking at the revenue generated against the time spent in selling the ad space. One reason publishers may look at using a third-party to monetize their email assets is to reduce or eliminate the time spent in selling inventory.

Winning is all about long-term strategy

In the first few games of the season (during which both teams were off to challenging starts), ividence’s San Francisco and New York contingents would have been the first to tell you that baseball season lasts for several months, not a couple of weeks. Acquisition email is the same: your strategy has to pay off over the long term, and you shouldn’t rush the process.

For advertisers, this means batch and blast tactics that play email like a numbers game aren’t your best bet. Sending more and more and more may equal larger returns in the short run. Over time, though, that damages your brand in the eyes of consumers and ISPs, making it harder to get new customers and get in the inbox (even with your retention campaigns). Sending slowly and in a targeted way over a longer period of time will generate better results for the campaign and for your brand.

For publishers, this approach is even more critical. An email list is among one of the most valuable assets a company owns (a fact illustrated by the liquidation of Borders’ assets late last year). Any approach to monetizing that asset should be focused on the long term goal of maintaining the value of the list.

The Right Audience Can Be a Game-Changer

A home field advantage comes not just from knowing the stadium. Fans cheering the team on can make all the difference in a close game. At least, that’s what fans like to believe.

The right audience for acquisition email is absolutely critical to see success with a campaign. There are two main factors that go into finding the right audience:

1. Permission – Acquisition email should only be sent to lists that allow sending third-party emails and should clearly note the list that the user is subscribed to.
2. Targeting – Send to an audience that’s likely to be interested in your product or service. That may mean targeting on demographic factors or, even better, on behavioral data that gives a sense of how a subscriber is likely to respond.

What other suggestions would you make for tips we can take from baseball season? Or just tell us what team you’re cheering for to make it to the World Series in the comments.

Related articles
Why Buying (or Selling!) Email Lists Doesn’t Work
Getting Red Carpet Ready: What Email Marketing Can Learn from the Movies
Boost Your Email Marketing ROI by Focusing on Three Key Areas (on MarketingProfs)

Photo courtesy of Hollingsworth

Mary Byrne

Mary Byrne leads ividence’s sales and marketing team in the U.S. as SVP, Americas. She has nearly 15 years of experience in the technology sector, with special emphasis on advertising technology and email deliverability. Previously, Mary led the sales, marketing, and client services efforts at DoubleClick, Microsoft and Level 3 Communications. She can be reached at mb@ividence.com.

However, San Francisco also played host this week to a few authors whose books are incredibly relevant to advertising and marketing. Two whose newest books are on my reading list are:

• Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (and this New York Times article about Target’s behavioral targeting), who led a session on behavioral targeting at ad:tech.
• Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, who was in town to speak at the City Arts & Lectures series on Wednesday.

Both of these authors take on subject matter that people think they know and understand from unique angles, enabling them to come to different and interesting conclusions. They got me thinking about one of the things we tend to think we know in business, but that we should really always be testing and learning more about: our customers.

In acquisition email, assumptions made about the customer can have an impact on both the advertiser and publisher side of the equation.

Advertiser: Hitting the Right Target

Traditional advertising always grouped customers by the media they consume. So The New York Times attracts higher income households; General Hospital has more female viewers; etc. Often times, as a result, advertisers speak about their consumers as being a part of a certain demographic slice of the population (25-34 year old female with income of $40-60K) instead of people (Sarah).

What the traditional model of targeting might miss about Sarah is that she buys gifts online for her 17-year-old male cousin, helps her family make decisions about medical care for her grandmother, and shops for clothes at both Target and high-end boutiques depending on what she’s looking for.

Narrowing too much by demographic target may cut out a large portion of people who would be interested in your products. With traditional media, that was a chance that sometimes had to be taken in the interest of keeping costs down and reducing waste.

Online advertising, particularly email, requires a change of that mindset, though. One-to-one marketing is very much possible. Advertisers can reduce waste by targeting people by action and interest rather than demographic information.

When talking to advertising customers, we actually encourage them to resist the urge to slice and dice audience segments too much. Using our platform’s automated targeting, we’ll reach the people most likely to respond. Advertisers can get a report of the demographics that responded best to the email, which sometimes yields surprises.

To make a long story short: It’s far more important to understand how people behave (which means buy) online rather than to collect descriptive data about who they really are.

Publishers: What Subscribers Want

On the flip side of the coin, publishers often believe they know exactly what content their subscribers want. They’re usually correct, at least in terms of what content subscribers want on their website, in the magazine, etc.

However, subscribers can act differently in their inbox than they do on a publisher’s website. For example, I occasionally see non-profit ads on some of the web comics I read. I notice them, but it would never occur to me to click on them there. However, if they end up in my inbox, I will almost always open them.  Conversely, I’ll click on clothing ads on Facebook, but rarely open emails from clothing stores that I signed up for.

Being able to tap into those differences in subscriber behavior means better campaign results for advertisers and better revenue. However, every consumer behaves a little differently in the inbox.

For this reason, it can be really beneficial for publishers to understand what types of offers subscribers are responding to in acquisition email as well as the types of offers they respond to on site and in retention newsletters. The two types of responses might not match up as seamlessly as you expect.

What do you think you know about your customers that you’d still like to test? Tell us in the comments.

If you’re curious about how you can find out more about your customers (and potential customers) through acquisition email, please feel free to email us at contact.us@ividence.com.

Related articles
The 3 Worst Mistakes to Make for the Health of Your Email List
Why Buying (or Selling!) Email Lists Doesn’t Work
Boost Your Email Marketing ROI by Focusing on Three Key Areas (on MarketingProfs)

Book cover image courtesy of Amazon.

Lynn Dalsing
Lynn Dalsing develops marketing strategy and content within the U.S. market for ividence. She has several years of experience in marketing for both B2B and B2C audiences. While working at high-end maternity clothing manufacturer, Ingrid & Isabel, she oversaw the development and evolution of branding for the company’s highly successful launch into Target stores.

 Lynn has a passion for combining outstanding messaging with reach and engagement statistics, once describing an ESP’s reporting dashboard as the “best toy a marketer could get.” She can be reached at ldalsing@ividence.com. 

ad:tech has posted some great pictures and video of the event, so be sure to check those out!

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the booth to say hello.

A couple of weeks ago, we ran across this great post from McSweeney’s, which exemplifies the absolute perfect unsubscribe page copy.

Frankly, we were inspired. It’s true, everyone wants to get your emails. It doesn’t matter if their needs have changed or if they are no longer interested in your company. They just want your emails.

So we’re throwing out all of our previous recommendations. Below are our top 10 tips on how to fail in email without really trying:

1. Make it as difficult as possible to unsubscribe. Use hidden links in your email. If somehow subscribers do make it to the unsubscribe page, make sure you ask them at least six times if they really want to unsubscribe. Be sure you ask them to re-type their email to confirm their unsubscribe. Your email content is really useful and relevant—do your subscribers a favor and keep them from unsubscribing by accident.
2. Don’t bother tweaking or testing subject lines. You know what you want to say, and your emails are clearly valuable. People will open. “Newsletter #2345” is perhaps the best one.
3. Why should you look at how your email renders on several different platforms? Surely all your customers are on Outlook and IE 5, right? Try flaks or java script in your email; it can be fun too!
4. Don’t offer customers a preference center. Everyone wants every last one of your emails.
5. Remember those inactives? People who haven’t opened or responded to one of your emails for the last year (or more). You may have suppressed them to improve your deliverability. They miss you. Try emailing them every day for the next month. They’ll be so glad to hear from you. ISPs will definitively love your brand. Spamassassin may love you too!
6. If you’ve ever considered surveying your subscribers to see what types of content they’re most interested in, forget it. You’ll tell them what they’re interested in: your company.
7. Considering monetizing your list? The best way to do it is to sell your email list directly to anyone who wants to email them. Wanting to acquire new customers through email? You should probably just buy a list. It will probably be a well-maintained list that has never been sold before. If your nephew is a computer geek who knows how to harvest addresses from the internet, try that too. People love that, and your acquisition target will be reached easily!
8. Along those same lines, if you do decide to keep control of your list when you monetize, don’t bother putting your own sender information on emails you send. Your subscribers don’t want to know who this email is coming from. They trust everyone they’ve ever given their email address to, and they welcome each email that comes into their inbox.
9. Don’t remove email addresses that complain about spam from your list. I’m sure they just made a mistake, and they would be devastated to stop getting your emails.
10. People are definitely interested in whichever products and services you are trying to sell this quarter. Don’t bother looking at their purchase history or any cues they might have given you about what they want. Just tell them what they’ll be ordering this month. And by the way, if you acquire new customers via email, don’t filter your customer list from the lists you rent. Your customers will get offers they are not allowed to use (“40% off on your first order”), and your support call center team will really appreciate all these new calls from your best customers asking for this discount they can’t get! It’s a great opportunity for a dialog with your customers.

The takeaway: Sometimes, as email marketers, we forget that subscribers have their own agenda for their relationship with our company, and we need to respect them while still sharing the right message for our brand.

Just a friendly reminder: One-to-one marketing was promoted by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in 1993 (nearly 20 years ago!) and 86% of companies still drop the same unique  email to everybody in their list.

Funny as it may be for April Fool’s Day to talk about email marketing worst practices, it’s important to avoid these mistakes year round.

So tell us, what are your tips for how to fail in email marketing without really trying?

Eric Didier
CEO & Co-Founder
Eric Didier is a successful serial entrepreneur with a broad background in enterprise software sales management, complex software development and product management for web technologies. He was the founder and CEO of Soamai in 2000, a metadata applications company which was acquired by Allen Systems Group in April 2004. He can be reached at ed@ividence.com. 

April 3 & 4: eM12 Conference
San Francisco, CA
As the West Coast edition of the eMarketing Association’s annual conference, eM12 San Francisco offers more than 35 expert speakers on a variety of topics. ividence CEO Eric Didier will speak on the Breakthrough Email Marketing Tools panel.

April 25-28: Email Insider Summit
Captiva Island, FL
The Email Insider Summit is a unique event where the biggest brands and brightest minds caucus for three-days on state of email marketing. The event is a mix of networking and educational content sessions.