• by Bill McCloskey , May 17, 2006

Some are ranters. Some are doers. Jeanniey Mullen, who heads up e-mail marketing efforts at OgilvyOne, is definitely a doer. You may remember, back in November I delivered a rant about how trade associations were not getting the word out about the power of e-mail as a marketing tool. Jeanniey decided to do something about it.

In January she came up with an idea she proposed to members of the Inbox Insiders, a private list I run for stakeholders in the e-mail marketing space. Why not, as a group, try and do something about it. Let's not leave it to the associations. Let's do it ourselves. Soon afterward, armed with a concept supplied by another Mediapost E-mail Insider, Melinda Krueger, Jeanniey had a concept and a team of companies willing to sign on. As of this last Monday, a new organization was born: The E-mail Experience Council.

The Charter of the E-mail Experience Council is to "improve the image of, and celebrate the ROI value of, e-mail marketing by conducting a broad series of e-mail initiatives for a variety of organizations that highlight the positive impact and importance of e-mail as a viable marketing and advertising tool."

It was decided that the best way to start to achieve these goals would be for the participating companies to help a worthwhile nonprofit organization with an e-mail campaign, make it a year-long case study, and post the results. Those of us who write for various publications would cover the event and dedicate a number of articles over the next year to the project.

Consider this article No. 1.

Currently, phase one of the first project of the E-mail Experience Council is a multi-company, all volunteer effort designed to benefit a New Jersey nonprofit organization called RAKMF (Ryan Andrew Kaiser Memorial Foundation), an organization set up in memory of the founder's six-year-old son, which benefits families in need of financial help related to a child's medical needs.

The first case study to come out of the project (available on the Council's Web site) documents the efforts that went into developing an e-mail to promote the foundation's charity event, an annual 10K run.

The case study, presented by Pivotal Veracity, outlines the project's objectives:

1. To Build the Brand
2. Generate Awareness
3. Expand Membership Opt-in
4. Increase Registration for the annual Ryan's Run event
5. Drive Donations.

The first initiative is to redesign the RAKMF newsletter campaign and initiate a pre-event e-mail newsletter series.

The first task, which the case study goes into in depth, is to "ensure that the sending infrastructure is clean, properly configured and reputation intact," and to guarantee a 100 percent delivery rate on a baseline test.

Using a test e-mail with a zero spam filter score, the sample e-mail was sent out across the foundation's current shared IP address and received poor delivery scores across the major ISPs. The decision was made to transfer the send to a new, non-shared, dedicated IP address in order to test the baseline for future e-mail deliverability metrics. Please click here to download the case study.