DoubleClick Consumer Email Study - PDF Link

Here is the link to the actual PDF for DoubleClick's Sixth Annual Consumer Email Study. Enjoy!

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

DoubleClick’s Sixth Annual Consumer Email Study

DoubleClick released the results of their Sixth Annual Consumer Email Study. Here are some of the results they found:

• 55% view work emails from home in the evening.
• 54% view work emails from home on the weekends.
• 48% check their personal emails at least occasionally at work during the day
• The average consumer has maintained the same email address for 4 to 6 years.
• 2/3 of respondents have never changed their email address.
• 78% of respondents have made a purchase as a result of an email.
• 59% have redeemed an email coupon in a store.

E-mail Dayparts Lose Impact, Clickz.com

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Developing Your Strategic Email Roadmap

metaLogic Consulting, Inc. released a whitepaper, “Developing Your Strategic Email Roadmap”. This whitepaper helps you create a strategic email roadmap that focuses your efforts on what is important, and helps you build out the capabilities that will make your messaging infrastructure responsive, secure, integral, and cost-effective.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Preview Pain

eMarketer released a new article, ”Preview Pane”, that cites the EmailLabs study on the use of preview panes. I commented on this study back on November 1.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Choosing an ESP

VerticalResponse released a whitepaper,”Eight Things To Consider when Choosing An ESP” on dmnews.com. The whitepaper lists several factors that you should consider before choosing an Email Service Provider (ESP).

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Gmail Serves Spam Recipes

Gmail now serves spam recipes in the spam folder view. They have several to choose from!


eINFO - a collection of articles and stuides about email marketing.

How To Engage New And Reactivate Old Subscribers

EmailLabs’ latest newsletter points to an article, Combat List Inactivity by Older Opt-Ins, that provides several tips to help engage your new email subscribers as well as reactivating your old email subscribers.

• Send a welcome message right away to your new subscribers.
• After mailing out your first or second newsletter, consider sending a quick survey to see if the newsletter met the recipient’s needs and expectations.
• Capture demographic information and interests during the sign up process and then develop and send personalized messages based on that information.
• Survey all list members, asking them to rate your content, design, offers, etc.
• Determine which subject lines, articles and offers drive the highest open and click-trough-rates and then align your future message content accordingly.
• Segment out readers who have not opened or clicked in several months to a year and send them a special reactivation offer, along with an invitation to unsubscribe.
• Add dynamic content that reflects past buying behavior or content interests.
• Streamline your unsubscribe process.
• Invite anyone who has been on the list for a year or more to opt-in again, and include an unsubscribe link for those who want out but just haven’t gotten around to it.

Additonal Resource Article: 12 Tip for Targeting Inactive Subscribers

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

The Longer… The Lower

For subscribers that have been on your email list for two months, marketers should expect a decline in open rates by 20-25%. Subscribers that have been on your list after two years, marketers should expect open rates to decline between 35-45%. These figures are based on MarketingSherpa and EmailLabs’ Intevation Report data.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar – Reputation and How it Affects Email Delivery

ReturnPath is hosting a webinar, Reputation and How it Affects Email Deliverability, on Wednesday, December 7 at 1pm EST. The webinar will look at what factors are affecting your email deliverability. You will also learn what programs are available that could help correct and prevent potential deliverability roadblocks.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar – Email Metrics: Top Trends for 2006

SilverPop is hosting a webinar with MarketingSherpa on Tuesday, December 2 at 2pm EST to present some findings from “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006”. The webinar will show:

• How to grow your email list
• Average open, click and conversion rates
• How to get better campaign results
• Business-to-Consumer vs. Business-to-Business email stats
• How your peers are budgeting for email
• Eyetracking lab test results on email newsletter design

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

3 in 5 Companies Are Planning To Spend More On Email

A new report, 2005 Executive Report: Target Marketing Priorities Analysis, was released by CSO Insights. Here are some of the findings:

• 3 in 5 companies are planning to spend more on email
• 41% of respondents described email marketing as “mission critical”
• 53% believe their own customer data are at least 75% accurate.
• 40% believe that less than half their prospect data are correct.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Bronto Releases Real-Time Industry Email Stats

Bronto Software has a pretty cool email stat site that…

“…provides weekly updates to our most current email marketing statistics (based on trailing three-month data). Compare your email marketing results with this evolving benchmark data to evaluate your performance and identify emerging industry trends.”

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

WebMail Blog Added to My Email Marketing Blog Roll

Webmail.us company blog has been added to my email marketing blog roll. Buried in one of Pat Mathews' posts is a link to Bill Boebel, CTO of Webmail.us.

Check out my email marketing blog roll.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

WhatCounts Blog Added to Email Marketing Blog Roll

WhatCounts company blog. Features four blogs.
• David Gellar – CEO & President
• Brian Ratzliff – VP of Business Development
• Simon Mutlu – Director of Sales
• Justin Foster – Employee

Check out my email marketing blog roll.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Four Key Email Marketing Alerts From MarketingSherpa

MarketingSherpa released an executive summary, 4 Key Email Marketing Alerts for 2006. This a breif snapsnot from their Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006.

Alert 1 - Marketers using advanced tactics (A/B offer test, segmentation, ...) have higher open and response rates versus those marketers that do not.

Alert2 - The presence of an image can have a hugh impact in how much time people's eyes spend reading the copy of the ad.

Alert 3 - New contacts respond more often in the first 30 days. After 60 days, response seems to level off.

Alert 4 - A great deal of emails ar estill being blocked by filters.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Design, Deliverability, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Email Marketing Blog Roll

• Best Practices in B2B Email Marketing


• BeTuitive


• Campaign Monitor Blog


• Chris Baggott's Email Best Practices


• Chris Price


• David Daniels - JupiterResearch


• Drainage Link Tank


• Email News Today


• Email Universe


• eROI - The Email Wars


• eROI - Email Days


• eROI - Return on Subscriber


• Eugenio La Mesa's Blog on Email Marketing


• Fixing Email Weblog


• flyte


• Jordan Ayan, Subscribermail


• Loop's eNewsletter Marketing Spot


• MindComet - Email Marketing Voodoo Blog


• No Man Is An Iland


• OnlyOnce


• Return Path


• SubscriberMail Email Marketing News


• The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing


• VerticalResponse


• WhatCounts

Study:2005 Retail Email Marketing Study Phase II

Silverpop released the second installment of their 2005 Retail Email Marketing Study, Phase II: Message Content and Creative Design. The second installment examines the marketing messages sent and reviews various aspects such as message design, frequency, and personalization.

Here is Phase I: Registration Practices if you missed it.

Phase III: Opt-Out Practices will be released in January.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Design, Frequency, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Preference Prove Profitable for Email Marketers

SilverPop released an article, Preference Prove Profitable for Email Marketers. The article goes over some dos and don’ts when creating a preference page.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Relevance, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006

MarketingSherpa released their latest Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. Check it out!

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Stats, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Six Tips to Make HTML Email Look Right

Wendy Roth, Lyris, released an article, Six Tips to Make HTML Email Look Right, on iMedia Connection. Here are Wendy’s six tips:

• Use inline styles or HTML tags
• Keep background colors light and text dark
• Validate your HTML
• Put scripts, forms or flash on your website, not in your email
• Put critical information in text, not images
• If using a postcard for single message, put it in an image (Not so sure about this one?)

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Design, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Group To Develop Best Practices for Opt-In Lists

MediaPost Publications (free subscription required) released an article that talks about the new trade group, Online Lead Generation Assocation, Inc.. This trade group is trying to develop best practices for gathering the opt-in email lists that are sold to third parties.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: List, Management, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

MindComet - Email Marketing Voodoo Blog

MindComet maintains a blog on email marketing that is worth checking out.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

JupiterResearch - David Daniels Blog

David Daniels, Research Director at JupiterResearch, maintains a blog on email marketing. Read David Daniels bio.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

The ROI of Email Relevance

Responsys is providing a free copy of the JupiterResearch report, The ROI of Email Relevance. Here is the executive summary from JupiterResearch.

Few marketers rank relevance as a top-three e-mail marketing goal, even though it drives 60 percent of consumers who make immediate e-mail purchases. Tactics that improve relevance (e.g., life cycle marketing, behavioral targeting, triggering) deliver substantially higher improvements in revenue and net profits than do broadcast mailings.

Key Questions

• What spurs consumers to purchase from e-mail?
• How will the adoption of increasingly relevant targeting tactics impact the e-mail marketing industry?
• Which types of targeting tactics and e-mail campaigns drive the greatest improvements in revenue and net profit?
• Has the ability to efficiently use Web site clickstream data as a targeting attribute finally arrived?
• Which lessons can be learned from early adopters of advanced targeting tactics?

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Relevance, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Study: Industry Specific Open and Click Rates

MailerMailer released a supplemental report, Industry-Specific Open and Click Rates per Day. This report is a supplement to their previously released Email Marketing Metrics Report: H1 2005. The report looks at the unique open and click rates of six different industries: Consumer, Entertainment, Media, Nonprofit, Retail, and Small Business.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Trends, Click, Open, Rate, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Study: eROI Q3 2005 Email Statistics

eROI released a new study, Q3 2005 Email Statistics By List Size, that takes a look at read/click trend data by list size. The paper breaks the list sizes into micro-mailers (<5000), small mailers (5000-24999), midsize mailers (25000-49999), and large mailers (>200000).

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: Deliverability, Email, Marketing, Blog, eINFO

Lyris Q3 2005 ISP Deliverability Report Card

Lyris released their latest ISP Dleivery Report Card. The report found that US and European ISPs and ESPs gross email deliverability fell slightly from Q2 rate of 90% to 87% in Q3. The report also notes that the overall (combined) rates of false positive spam filtering continued to drop froma Q2 average of 1.4% to just 1.2% in Q3.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: deliverability, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

Re-Opting In An Old Email List

Loren McDonald, EmailLabs, looks at the question of "How Do I Re-Opt In My Email List?". Loren provides some basic guidelines on how best to handle on old permission-based opt-in email list. Good insight.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: list management, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

How To Get Whitelisted

Loren McDonald, EmailLabs, released an article, "How to Get on a Whitelist". Loren provides some guidance on how to get whitelisted on Yahoo! Mail and AOL. He also provides some tips on how to get your recipient's to whitelist.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: isp relations, whitelists, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

Three Factors That Affect Email Open Rates

Pete Lustig, Loop Consulting Group, provides three factors that affect your email open rates. Read his blog post on this topic.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: email open rates, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

Three Email Subscriber Acquistion Tips

Chief Marketer released an article, "Three Subscriber Acquisition Tips". Here are the tips that they provided.

• Encourage to forward your newsletter to friends.
• Every email and every subscriber form should cross-promote all other email newsletters you publish.
• Ask for subscriptions in non-marketing emails.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: acquisition, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

How To Maximizing Email Welcome Message

Cardcommunications released an article, "The Power of the Welcome Message". The article provides eight tips to maximize your email welcome message.

• Maintain an email archive and direct new subscribers to it via the welcome email.
• Offer coupons via the welcome message.
• If your audience wnats to be the first to know about new trends, offer special reports or whitepaper downloads via the welcome message.
• Reinforce the importance of adding your email to the new subscriber's address book.
• Include a link to your privacy policy.
• Encourage new subscribers to forward the email on.
• Include your contact info.
• Develop a special welcome series of emails.

eINFO - a collection of article and studies about email marketing.

Categories: tips, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

Standardizing the Email Feedback Loop

Kirill Popov, EmaiLabs, points to a new standard to enable all ISPs to provide feedback loops without having to design a mechanism from scratch. The best thing that the Extensible Format for Email Feeback Report is that it will allow ISPs to include an "Unsubscribe" button next to their "Report Spam" button.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: deliverability, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

Make Your Email More Preview Pane/Disabled Image Friendly

EmailLabs released its findings from their latest surevy. The survey looked at how B2B used their preview panes to view email messages. The biggest finding was that the most valuable real estate in a newsletter has shrunk to just the top left 2 to 4 inches (the only area visible in both horizontal and vertical preview panes. This article goes over some actionable steps to mak eyour email mor epreview pane/diabled images friendly.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: design, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

More Email Marketing Resources Than Google!

Just updated my blog to reflect the single largest repository of email marketing related websites ever! Ok maybe not. Any ways check out my home page for a list of my email marketing resources.

eINFO - a collection of the single largest repositories of email marketing related websites.

Web Analytics Improve Results From Targeted Email Campaigns

InternetRetailer.com has a brief article on JupiterResearch's findings that analytics can play a key role in personalized email campaigns. Here are some of their findings on targeted email campaigns:

• Produced 33% open rate compared to average of 20% for mass mailing
• Produced 14% click-through rates compared to average of 9.5% for mass mailing
• Produced 3.9% conversion rate compared to average of 1.1% for mass mailing

This article also notes that when factoring in the labor costs involved in using web analytics in email campaigns, the average cost per message totals $4.50!

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: web analytics, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

Why RSS Is Poised To Trump Email...

SilverPop commissioned JupiterResearch to write a research paper on why we should be heading towards RSS in the email marketing age. The paper goes on to outline several factors that are affecting emails ability to market to consumers. The paper states the typical barriers that email is facing and what RSS can overcome. This study comes with SilverPops marketing ad for their new product RSSDirect.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: rss, email, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

Unlock Hidden Value In Transactional Email

David Kearney, Boomerang, released an article on DMNews.com titled, “DM News Essential Guide to Email Marketing: Unlock Hidden Value in Transactional Email”. The article outlines the process on how to include a promotional offer in your transactional emails.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: transactional marketing, email, email marketing, email marekting blog, eINFO,

Don’t Panic! Blocks Happen.

Wendy Roth, Lyris, wrote an article on IMedia Connection titled “Six Steps for Email Optimization”. Wendy provides six steps to help you get your email delivered again after getting blocked.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: deliverability, email, email_marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

JupiterResearch: Email Marketing Buyer’s Guide, 2005

JupiterResearch released its latest guide to email service providers.

“The JupiterResearch e-mail service provider (ESP) evaluation details the offerings of 30 vendors. JupiterResearch bases their overall value, suitability, and breadth on the distinct needs of six types of marketers—small-business, service-oriented, low-volume promotional, low-volume newsletter, high-volume promotional, and high-volume newsletter.”

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: email marketing guide, email, email marketing, eINFO

Are You Sure Your HTML Email Renders Correctly?

SliverPop found that big companies are not always on the cutting edge of email marketing. MarketingSherpa reported on this study and notes how HTML emails will break in various email applications (open access to article until Oct 23, 2005). MarketingSherpa gives three quick tips to help solve your HTML email rendering issues.

• Add a link at the top of your email to a online version of your newsletter.
• Remind recipients to “Add” your email address to their address book or safe sender list. (Also do not forget to provide instructions on how to add your from address to their address book or safe sender list when your recipient signs up.)
• Get several sample email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL,..) so you can see how your HTML email renders in each of the top email applications.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Categories: email design, email marketing, email marketing blog, eINFO

21% of Permission Emails Not Delivered

eMarketer released an article, Many Permission E-mails Still Don’t Get Through (open access until Oct 25, 2005), that takes a look at the recent ReturnPath study on permission email delivery.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

DM News Interview with JupiterResearch, David Daniels

DM News released an interview with JupiterResearch’s, David Daniels on the topics of email marketing issues and best practices. David gives a great statement in one of his responses…

“…we focus too much on the 5 percent that may be responding and not enough time looking at the 95 percent that are not.”

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

SpamAssassin Checks Habeas Safelist

Habeas announced that the latest version of Apache’s SpamAssassin now checks the Habeas Safelist. If the message originated from a Habeas-certified sender; it subtracts points from the overall spam score.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Choosing an Email Vendor Based on Deliverability Performance

Justin Foster, WhatCounts, provides some insightful ranting and raving about how to sift through those marketing messages from Email Service Providers who proclaim that their email deliverability rates are the highest.


Also check out Matt Blumberg's (ReturnPath) "Response to a Deliverability Rant" reply about this.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Report: Lyris Quarterly Email Deliverability

DM News received exclusive access to Lyris' latest Email Deliverability report. Here are some of the findings noted in the article:

• Hotmail's false positive rate rose from 5.6 % to 9.4% in the third quarter.
• Gmail's false positive rate rose from 4.1% to 7.17% in the third quarter.

Hotmail's increase may be attributed to their Sender ID implementation. Gmail's increase may be due to the fact that the Google engineers are still tweaking the filters. My personal experience I have 1 out of 100 legitament emails a week get labeled as SPAM.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Report: Email Blocking and Filtering First Half of 2005

ReturnPath released a new report, Email Blocking and Filtering Report First Half of 2005. The report notes:

• 21% of permission-based email did not get delivered to the Inbox as intended during the first half of 2005.
• Gmail and Excite blocked the most permission-based email, at 39% each.

The report also provides 10 keys to help improve better email deliverability.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

RSS Eclipsing Email?

The Alex Barnett Blog posted a link to the whitepaper, “RSS – Crossing into the Mainstream” (authored by Ipsos Insight and Yahoo!).

In the study they found that “very few users (4%) knowingly uses RSS, over one quarter of Internet users (27%) enjoy the benefits of RSS without knowing it. These ‘Unaware RSS Users’ are similar demographically to the average Internet user, suggesting that RSS is not just for the tech-savvy few.”

Alex points out that this study found that 31% of Internet users are RSS users. This represents 72.8 million in the US and UK and 275.4 million in the World!

Rok Hrastnik, MarketingStudies.net, cites from the latest Pheedo study that RSS feed click-through rates range from 7-11%. Compare this to DoubleClick’s statement that the average email CTR is only 8.3%.

Rok also mentions that the site Lockergnome.com is seeing a ratio of 5:1 of RSS subscribers against email subscribers. Rok goes on to state that this site is seeing a 500% better CTR with RSS than with email.

To add a little more fuel to the fire, The New York Times has seen page views stemming from RSS feeds increase 342% from March 2004 to March 2005, with no special effort to market RSS (link).

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Ignore This Post

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:616b37b4a7565c8acdfb2dba27930f1a

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Guidelines For Your Text Email Template

Matt Blumberg, Michael Mayor, Tami Monahan & Stephanie A. Miller released an article, “Why Text-Only E-Zines are Hot”. They provide some guidelines for creating your text template.

• Use the “from” address and subject line to identify yourself clearly.
• Use short URLs. Even look at using shorter redirecting URLs to your landing page.
• Do not put URLs in mid-copy
• Do not waste space at the top of the email with copy that never changes.
• Make sure your place visual breaks between and around blocks of copy.
• Try to limit line length to 60 characters.
• Limit paragraph length to four or fewer.
• Do not use punctuation marks or symbols for emphasis.
• Use a fixed-space typeface (Courier or Courier New).

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Managing Email Bounces…How Hard Can It Be?

550 Sorry, no mailbox here by that name
550 Service unavailable
550 Administrative prohibition

Derek Harding released an article, “E-mail Bounce Management, Simplified”. Derek gives a simplified email bounce management practice.

“Try the address three times over at least 15 days. If your messages are refused every time, treat the address as dead.”

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Silverpop Looks At Branding In Their Latest Email Study

Silverpop released some of it findings from their “2005 Retail Email Marketing Study”. They noted:

• 8% of the emails showed an email address in the “from” field instead of text showing the company’s name.
• 9% of the emails did not position the company logo in a prominent, above-the-fold position.
• 43% of retailers used a postcard style format.
• 17% added columns or rows below a single pane of images
• 14% used a long column of product photos and text.
• Those companies that sent more than one email during the course of a month, 56% changed formats. Silverpop notes that consistent layout designs can reinforce branding.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

How Bad Do These Subject Line Suck?

The subject line is the second biggest motivator (behind “from” line) for recipients to open your email. Combine that with only having three seconds and six words to grab the attention of the recipient. This is recipe for your email to tank. Karon Thackson, Copywritingcourse.com, provides three types of subject lines that have been proven to be successful.

• Make a offer
• State a benefit
• Evoke curiosity.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

What Do I Put In My Email Footer?

Elaine O’Gorman, Silverpop, wrote an article in BtoB E-Mail Marketer Insight covering what to include in your enewsletter’s footer (besides the legally required physical address and opt-out information).

• Explain why your recipient is receiving this message. “This message was sent to you because you asked for new product announcements from Company X.”
• Customer service contact. Do not forget to include a local number as well as a toll-free number.
• Privacy statement
• Copyright statement
• Trademark

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

M:Metrics Benchmark Survey

The chart depicts the findings from M:Metrics’ August Benchmark Survey.


eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Whitepaper: The Strategic Checklist for Email Success

SubscriberMail released a new whitepaper, The Strategic Checklist for Email Success.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Report: Email Blocking and Filtering

ReturnPath has released a new report, Email Blocking and Filtering Report First Half of 2005. The report notes that 21% of permission-based email did not get delivered to the Inbox as intended during the first half of 2005. ReturnPath notes that this is the first time in threes years that delivery has improved. They attribute this to more companies focusing on email deliverability resolution and new authentication standards being followed.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Strategies To Cut Some Length Without Cutting Quality From Your Emails

MailerMailer released an article that provides nine strategies to shorten your e-newsletter without harming the content.

• Provide digests in the newsletter, post complete articles at the site.
• Never choose a four-word phrase when a single word will do.
• Display information visually.
• Re-think your layout. The layout maybe creating wasted space.
• When soliciting for newsletter content, give the contributors a word limit.
• Learn which area of your content gets the most clicks, then eliminate the under performing content areas.
• Divide a long issue into Part 1and Part 2.
• Split your newsletter into two publications.
• Reduce or eliminate images.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Six Steps to Ensure Your Email Reaches the InBox

iMedia Connection released an article by Wendy Roth, Lyris Technologies, that provides six steps that will help you ensure your permission-based email gets in the inbox.

• Before sending an email message to your permission-based list, consider carefully if it’s the kind of message your recipients gave you permission to send.
• Slow down your mailing speed in general, or slow it down for the particular domains that are using send limitations to combat spam.
• Get whitelisted
• Make sure you have the right DNS entries for your domain, and that you have SPF and Sender Id records as well.
• Avoid using the CC or BCC to send the same message to multiple recipients.
• Don’t try to trick the spam filters by disguising spammy words with numbers, misspellings or spaces.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Best Day to Send Emails Re-Hashed

eMarketer released a new article (open accessing until October 5, 2005) that cites a couple of studies recently on the best day to send your commercial emails. The article notes that 97% of campaigns are sent Monday through Friday. Bottom line on the best day to send…TEST, TEST, TEST.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Market Share Remains Stagnant

MarketingSherpa released a new report that looks at the market share of the top email domains. In this study they noted that “although consumers change their personal email addresses at a rate of roughly 20% per year (MarketingSherpa estimate) year over year market share between the big guys remains fairly stagnant.” This article is accessible for free until October 3, 2005.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

MailerMailer Email Marketing Metrics Report: H1 2005

MailerMailer released their Email Marketing Metrics Report: H1 2005. Here are some of the high level findings.

• Open and click rates remained steady.
• Unique open rates increased for many industries. Government, computer, and real estate companies experienced the largest gains.
• Several industries, such as computing, government, and religious organizations received higher click rates.
• Subscribers were more likely o open and click on emails sent on weekends and early in the week.
• Personalized emails continued to receive higher open and click rates.
• Emails with 20 or more hyperlinks received far more clicks than average.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Preview Stats for SilverPop’s Retail Email Marketing Study

Clickz.com released an article. with some preview stats from the upcoming Phase II of SilverPop’s “2005 Retail Email Marketing Study”.

• Fewer than 5% of emails contained personalization
• A specific call to action was missing from 27% of messages
• 25% of messages included some kind of discount offer
• Fewer than 20% of messages tried to entice people to buy an item for an event or holiday.

SilverPop should be releasing Phase II real soon. I will post a link as soon as I get notification.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Wisdom

Here is a quick flash cartoon that provides some email wisdom.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

How Long Should You Keep Your Email Newsletter Archives?

Christopher Knight, EmailUniverse.com, answers the question on “How long should I keep my email newsletter archives up?”. Chris responds with a fanatical, “Forever”.

Chris also points out some helpful tips on archiving your email newsletters.

• You should create one web page of content per article in your email newsletter.
• Your personal intros should be left for blog fodder or not archived at all on a public website.
• Attaching dates to the archives can have some people thinking your information is invalid or less valuable.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

How Can You Increase the Effectiveness Of Your Email Campaign?

In the latest BtoB Email Marketer Insight newsletter the question, “How can I increase the bottom line effectiveness of my email campaigns?”, was asked.

Answer: Build better relationships with your subscribers.

You may ask yourself how you are supposed to do this. The expert stated that you need to ask questions.

• Why are they subscribed?
• Why do they buy from you?
• Why do they bother to keep reading your email?

Take the answers to these questions and start building segments. The start talking to those segments they way they told you to talk to them. Be relevant and timely!

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Security Fears and Deliverability Woes Move Companies to Outsource Email

eMarketer released a snapshot of Radicati new report that looks at hosted email. Here are some findings:

• Radicati estimates there are currently 856 million hosted email accounts, and projects that the number will top 1.4 billion by 2009
• 69% of all email accounts around the world are outsourced.
• 64% of the “hosted business email” users are small businesses.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Three Email Tactics from J Jill

MarketingSherpa released a new article (open access until Sept 25, 2005) that takes a look at how J Jill uses the email marketing channel. The article goes through three email tactics J Jill uses:

• Segment, then target. Their email database is segmented so that each customer receives the emails that are most relevant to them.
• Test often and within campaigns.
• Coordinating with other departments.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Out Pulls Catalogs

DirectMag.com points to a survey by Decision Direct Research, the online research arm of direct marketing service provider Millard Group. The survey found:

• 81% of respondents reported that they were likely to visit a direct retailer’s Web site after receiving an email
• About 67% of participants said they read at least three out of four promotional emails they received from direct marketers.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Best Practices for Your Email Footer

Chief Marketer released an article that provided some helpful best practices when putting together your footer content. They mention beside the obvious CAN-SPAM legal information that one should try and highlight products on the horizon or secondary offers in the footer of the email. They also mention to try and include a phone number to add credibility to your email. The article goes on to provide several suggestions:

• Add an “about this newsletter” section.
• Add an :About the company” link
• Viral elements (refer-a-friend)
• Promotions for your other email newsletters
• Teaser copy about content in your next newsletter.
• Customer feedback link

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Quick Tips for Improving Email Deliverability

Chief Marketer, released an article in their latest newsletter that provides four quick for improving email deliverability.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Yahoo! Launches Web-based Email

Forrester’s Charlene Li has a nice write up on Yahoo! new Web-based email product that is currently in beta testing to a limited group of Yahoo! Mail users in the United States. Good read.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Declining Open Rates – A detailed analysis from DoubleClick

DoubleClick has released their Q2 2005 Email Trend Report. In this report, DoubleClick notes that the average open rate has declined for five straight quarters. They looked at several factors that could be attributed to this decline.

• Increased adoption of ISP technology developed to shield users from spam and questionable content has led to images being blocked by default. Since an one-pixel images needs to be rendered to track open rates, image blocking has had an impact on declining open rates.
• New addresses tend to outperform older addresses, so when new addresses become a smaller percentage of a marketer’s overall file it puts a natural downward pressure on open rates.
• Consumers are growing more selective in what they choose to open. This selective opening does not mean that email messages are not valued, but rather that consumers will respond when they are “in market” for a particular product or service offering.
  

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Append: Opt-In or Out?

Jeanne Jennings, clickz.com, latest article, E-mail Append: Opt-In or Out, compares using Opt-in versus Opt-Out appends.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Five Tips to Optimize Your Email Marketing Efforts

David Daniels, clickz.com, released his latest article, Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts. David provides five great tips to optimizing youe email marketing efforts.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Proper Way to Archive Youe Ezine Articles and Past Issues

Chris Knight, EmailUniverse.com, provides a great tip.

"If you have 2 or 3 articles in your ezine, you should have 2 or 3 web pages so that each and every single ezine article has its own web page."

Great SEO tactic!

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Understanding the Effects of List Churn and Fatigue

EmailLabs released a new article, What's Your Email List Hurdle Rate? - Understanding the Effects of List Churn and Fatigue. This article explains "email list hurdle rate" - it measures the loss rate from your list that you need to overcome to grow your list. The article also goes and talks about list fatigue and how your can overcome it.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Report: Target Emails Can Generate Nine Times More Revenue

JupiterResearch released a new study, The ROI of Email Relevance: Improving Campaign Results Through Targeting. In this report they cite that using targeted emails can generate nine times more revenue than broadcast mailings. The link provided will take you to abstract of this report with other emerging trends and tactics in email marketing.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Whitepaper: Checklist for InBox Delivery

Lyris has released a new whitepaper, The Opt-In Email Marketer's Checklist for Inbox Delivery. This whitepaper provides ten tips for inbox delivery. This whitepaper is linked through EmailUniverse.com. Chris Knight at EmailUniverse.com provides some additional comments about this whitepaper.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Best Practices: Email Lists

Helen Ching, Digital Connexxions Corp., released the first article in a series concerning email best practices. In her first article she provides email list best practices.

Also Jeanniey Mullen, clickz.com, released an article along the same lines. Jeanniey provides some helpful tips to improve your opt-in registration process.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Four Tips to Email Branding

Over on Best Practices in B2B Email Marketing blog there is a post sharing four tips on email branding. Here is the blog post.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Individualized Lifecycle Marketing…What is it?

Here is a buzz word that you should be hearing a lot of in the next 12 months in the email marketing realm…Individual Lifecycle Marketing (ILM).

“ILM involves not only understanding what stages of the lifecycle customers are in, but also observing their unique life events and behaviors, such as online purchase or shopping cart activity, a request for information, or even a lapse in account activity. Throughout the lifecycle, every interaction between a company and an individual provides an opportunity to improve relevance of messages and the ROI of marketing campaigns.”

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Using SEM to Boost Your Email Subscription Rate

MailerMailer released an article that provides an interesting tip on how to increase your email newsletter subscribers…Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

• Use focused keywords…so that you are not capturing any unqualified leads.
• Pay-per-click (ppc) ads with the keywords in the headline and text are noted to receive a higher click-through-rate than those who don’t.
• Also make sure your ad’s copy encourages them to sign up for your newsletter by telling them the benefits.
• Have the link from the ppc ad go directly to your list sign-up page.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Integration of Data is Key

Matt Seeley, Experian’s CheetahMail, states that he is seeing a slow trend in increase use of personalization and data. He also remarks that marketers need to understand customers across channels as well as on- and offline.

If you have not seen it already there is a big push by some of the larger email service providers offering web analytics with their email products. Marketers need to realize that they need to achieve a 360 degree view of their customers to carry out a true one-to-one relationship.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Workers Spend 1-3 Hours Reading Emails

eMarketer released a report, E-mail Composition 101, that stated 65% of survey respondents claim that U.S. employees devote between one and three hours per day reading emails. Free access to article only available until August 12, 2005.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar: The Email Doctor Is In

Dr. E-mail at EchoMail will be hosting a free one-hour webinar that will teach you how to effectively manage your email correspondence and discover the hidden sales leads and opportunities that are in every message you receive (their sales copy…not mine).

Next webinar is October 11, 2005 at 2pm EST. Sign up here.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Top Ten Email Marketing Trends (Mid-Year Update)

ExactTarget released their updated Top Ten Email Marketing Trends.

• Relevance is king!
• Email is a retention tool, not an acquisition tool.
• Data appends can be used to enrich customer data
• Test and optimize your emails
• Controlling corporate spamming
• Leverage transactional emails
• Create one-to-one relationships
• Measure results with multi-channel analytics
• Integrate customer data
• Email only when you have something to say

This press release has not been posted on ExactTarget’s website as of posting… so no direct link.
eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Your Email Should Be Anticipated

Bill Nussey, SilverPop, released an article on iMedia which talks about how your emails should be so relevant that consumers look forward to them. Bill also mentions that consumer focus has shifted from the subject line to the from field, stating that studies show half of all users open email because of the sender. Good read!

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Metrics Troubleshooter

ChiefMarketer.com takes a look at some of the troubleshooting tactics provided in “Sign Me Up! A Marketer’s Guide to Creating E-mail Newsletters That Build Relationships and Boost Sales”. This article goes through ten problems on why your emails may not be performing up to par.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

FTC Releases CAN-SPAM Audit Study

FTC released a new study that looked at 100 e-tailers to determine if they complied with the CAN-SPAM act. The biggest finding is that 11% of e-tailers did not honor the opt-out request. Can you say busted? Read more.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Determining Email Frequency

Imakenews.com released an article, How Much Is Too Much (E-mail)?, that provides some tips to figure out just how much is too much or too little for your email campaigns.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

New Email Delivery Framework

Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald, clickz.com, released a new article that talks about some of the most important aspects to achieve 100 percent delivery rate with your email newsletter.

• Get permission before you start
• Comply with W3 standards
• Keep your list clean
• Establish relationships with major ISPs and corporate domains
• Prove your identity (SPF, SenderID)
• Manage your reputation
• Accreditation from third-party organizations (eTrust)
• Test and monitor all aspects of your email program

eINFO – a collection of article sand studies about email marketing.

Whoo Hooo My 200th Post

Just reached amilestone with my 200th Post! Enjoy.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Driving Web Traffic With Email

Christopher Knight, EmailUniverse, released an article titled, “Send At 8AM ET For Your Ezine? New Insider Email Report From AWeber Communications”. Christopher goes over the stats provided by AWeber Communications in this article. What I found interesting is Christopher’s own statement on when he tends to send out his own ezine.

“Lately I’ve been testing driving my list hard on the days when people naturally visit my sites rather than trying to lure them on off-days. I think I was wrong to try to bring them to visit on days when it was not natural for them to have time or want to make time to visit. Monday’s, Thursday’s and Tuesdays are my heaviest web traffic days and thus the bulk of my ezine go out on those days.”

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Campaign Flow Hinges On List Creation and Email Deliverability

Rob Thrasher, New Millennium Minds, released an article on DMNews that takes a look at how email marketers think of the email marketing cycle. Rob provides some insight to provoke email marketers to rethink how this cycle works. Read more on DMNews.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tip: Six Tips For Your Welcome Message Email

Jeanne Jennings, clickz.com, recently released an article that provide six tips to help you make your welcome message live up to its full potential. Here they are:

• Welcome message should consistent in the look, feel, and tone of your other emails
• Remind subscribers why they signed up
• Focus on the actions you want the recipient to do and give them the opportunity to do it
• Include a special offer, coupon, or gift
• Include a co-registration opportunity
• Remind new subscribers to add your email address to their address book or to whitelist your domain.
• Test, Test, Test

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tip: CSS in HTML Emails

Mark Wyner authors an article on the Campaign Monitor Blog that takes a look at how best to optimize your CSS in HTML emails for several leading email clients.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Five Ways to Speed Up Newsletter Production

In Constant Contact’s latest enewsletter, Email Marketing Hints & Tips v11 i5, Janet Attard provides five useful tips to make it easy to write, edit and email your newsletter on a regular basis.

• Invite guest experts to write for you.
• Ask your readers to contribute articles.
• Check out article distribution sites (Search web for “Free Web Content”, “Free Articles” or “Ezine articles”).
• Hire a freelance writer.
• Hire a freelance editor or virtual assistant to produce the newsletter (Resources).

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

7 Email Best Practice Rules For Campaign Quality Control

MarketingSherpa released a new case study, How to Collect More Email Opt-Ins From Your Ecommerce Site: -- B-to-B versus B-to-C Test Results” (Open access until Aug 7, 2005). This case study reveals seven email best practices for campaign quality control:

• Require double opt-in
• Go far beyond the usual unsubscribe link…put an unsubscribe link at the top
• Useful metrics reports
• Segment by customer behavior
• Feature key benefits and offer statements in Welcome message
• Test, Test, Test

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Is For Old People

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new study, Teens and Technology, which takes a look at how teens are using technology. Here is a great excerpt from this study:

“Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view email as something you use to talk to ‘old people’,…”

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Study: eROI Releases 2Q05 Email Data

eROI has released their latest email study. Here are some of the key findings:
• Quarterly response rates have declined year over year.
• Midweek seems a safe time to send out email campaigns, with response rates better than on Monday and Friday
• Wednesday has the highest number of clicks (4.1%)
• B2C email has higher read rates on Saturday and Sunday, but uplift in response comes Friday and Saturday

You may want to checked out eROI’s email blog, Email Wars.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar: The ROI of Email Relevance

Jupiterwebcasts will be hosting a webinar, “The ROI of Email Relevance: Improving Campaign Results Through Targeting”, on August 17, 2005 at 2pm EST. The topics being covered are:

• What spurs consumers to purchase from email?
• How will the adoption of increasingly relevant targeting tactics impact the email marketing industry?
• Which types of targeting tactics and email campaigns drive the greatest improvements in revenue and net profit?
• Has the ability to efficiently use Web site clickstream data as a targeting attribute finally arrived?
• Which lessons can be learned from early adopters of advanced targeting tactics?

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Four Things to Check Before Sending Email

In ReturnPath’s latest Email Survival Guide enewsletter they talk about four things to check before sending every email campaign. Here are they are:

1. Check for Problematic HTML
2. Verify all links and images appear correctly
3. Check for spam-like content and spam filter data
4. View email in popular client readers.

Well apparently ReturnPath did not follow rule 1 and 4. Here is a screen shot of their latest enewsletter from my Gmail inbox. As you see the entire content of the enewsletter is rendering all the way to the right. Nice!


Not an example...actual email sent by ReturnPath.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar: Email Marketing Boot Camp…Preparing for Q4

ReturnPath is hosting a webinar, “Email Marketing Boot Camp Webinar – Preparing for Q4” on August 17, 2005 at 2pm EST. Key topics covered:

• Get your email program into shape
• Learn about how to grow a large, responsive list
• Engage with subscribers from the first impression
• Define “relevance” to break through the inbox clutter
• Identify and solve common deliverability problems
• Learn how to improve your email reputation

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

“We Don’t Spam” Email Privacy Seal

Truste has started the first certification program that assures consumers that marketers will not spam them when they submit their email addresses online. Learn more about the email privacy seal.



eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

RSS Metrics for eNewsletter Publishers

If you have hopped onto the RSS bandwagon by releasing your eNewsletter via RSS there is something interesting RSS statistics being provided by Pheedo. Pheedo just released their first look at RSS readership patterns. Here are some of the findings to note:

• Tuesday is the most active, with Saturday the least active in RSS readership
• Tuesday is the most active day for RSS viewership, feed retrieval and click-throughs.
• “Morning scanners” view the most content; late-night readers click through more
• CTR fluctuates from 7 to 11 percent depending on the hour of day.
• CTR peaks in the late night hours and also in the late afternoon.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Whitepaper: Email Authentication, Accreditation & Reputation

The DMA and BigfootInteractive released a whitepaper, “Authentication,Accreditation & Reputation – for Marketers”. This whitepaper gives an overview of the different authentication, accreditation, and reputation solutions that are out there.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Advertising’s Impact on Wal-Mart vs JC Penny Customers

BIG research released a study that looks at email advertising’s impact on Wal-Mart men’s clothing shoppers compared to JC Penny customers.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Heatmaps

Jeanniey Mullen, clickz.com, released an article that takes a look at how heatmaps can help you improve your ROI in your emails. Jeanniey goes on to give a couple of “learnings” from her past heatmapping tests.

Jeanniey cites a company called EyeTools. If you have not heard of this company before you need to check out their site. They have plenty of research that provides a lot of insight regarding design and layout. Check it out.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Mobile Subscribers Consuming More Email

M:Metrics released their latest benchmark survey on U.S. mobile subscribers. The survey states that 10.97% of U.S. mobile subscribers use personal email. This is an increase of 14.2% from their last study.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

11% Are Purchasing Products/Services From SPAM Emails

eMarketer cites a report from Mirapoint and the Radicati Group that reported that 11% of users purchased products and services from spam emails – even though 9% users have lost money to email scammers. (Available free until July 26)

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Creative Checklist

Jeanne Jennings, Clickz.com, released a new article that talk about working with email creative teams. Jeanne gives some helpful pointers on what to look for in an email creative team. She also goes into a couple of basic practices for the creative side of email marketing.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar: Tactics to Improve Email Campaign Performance

The latest webinar, “Effective E-mail Marketing: Tactics to Improve Campaign Performance”, has been posted in Jupiterwebinars archive section.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Marketing Best Practice Guide

CFM Direct, a direct marketing ad agency, has released an
email marketing best practices guide.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tip: Seven Critical Tips to Make Your Contact Us Work Harder

MarketingSherpa released a new article, “How to Collect More Email Opt-Ins from Your Contact Us Form – 7 Tactics”. This article goes over seven critical tactics to improve your Contact Us page to acquire better leads and to generate more email opt-ins. This article is free to access up to July 24.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Case Study: No Email Marketing Lead Left Behind

Karen Gendney, Clickz.com, released an article that takes a look how Sonic Software identified leads that represented genuine opportunities through a three-part series of emails. This is just another example of how effective triggered messaging is to your email marketing campaign.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Case Study: Using Email Messages for the Recovery of Abandoned Shopping Carts

MarketingExperiments.com released a new case study that looks at how to effectively use email to recover abandoned shopping carts (not the ones rolling around in the Publix parking lots!). They give example copies of the emails as well as some additional resources on the topic. Worth checking out! Free registration required to view report.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

WhitePaper: 10 Tips to Minimize Email Marketing Mistakes

Connect Direct, released a new whitepaper, “Top 10 High-Tech E-mail Marketing Mistakes”. The whitepaper goes over ten ways your email marketing message may have failed.

• You forgot the offer
• You asked too much of the reader
• Your call to action appears too far down the page
• Your copy was too short (The long vs. short copy debate!)
• You used a cheap list
• You targeted the wrong audience
• Your subject line was too long
• Your subject line was a Yes/No question
• You only offered online fulfillment
• Your landing page was weak

At the end of the whitepaper they give you a few tips top help minimize the risk of email marketing failure.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Lyris Q2 2005 ISP Deliverability Report

Lyris noted in their latest email deliverability report that inappropriate spam filtering among U.S domains fell by 1.9% to 1.4% in Q2. They found that Hotmail was the only domain that showed an increased in false positives. Lyris noted that this study was prior to the Sender ID Framework implementation.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Lyris “Broken Email” Study

Lyris just released a new study, Broken Email, asking the participants to identify which emails appeared the most suspicious/untrustworthy. They presented ten email messages (7 – well known brands with properly-rendering HTML and text messages, 1 – Major brand that had rendered improperly, 2 – phishing scams) to each participant. Here are the findings:

• 72% Identified the improperly rendered email from a major brand as the most suspicious
• 11% Identified text emails from legitimate brands as the most suspicious
• 10% Correctly identified phishing messages as the most suspicious
• 7% Were not sure which messages were the most suspicious

Lyris did not provide the example emails with this study.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Case Study: Increase Email Conversion with Geographic Targeting

MailerMailer has a case study on The Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC).The case study takes a look at how GYC geographically targets emails to inform subscribers located in specific areas about up-to-the minute legislative actions, wildlife conferences, or local events. GYC has found through geo-targeting that they have gained more subscribers and better conversion rates.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

DomainKeys Gone Live

Bill Nussey, The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing, notes that Yahoo! has quietly turned on DomainKey checking the other day. Read Bill’s blog posting, DomainKeys Gone Live.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Email Marketing Glossary

Constant Contact has a good reference site that provides a glossary to some of the most used email marketing terms. This is a good resource for those marketers who are new to email marketing lingo.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Study: Bluestreak Email Benchmarks Q3 2005

Bluestreak released their latest benchmark study. You can find the study here.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

4 Steps to getting More Email to the Inbox

In ReturnPath’s latest installment of their newsletter, Email Survival Guide, George Biby talks about some steps to help you get your email message to the inbox.

• Comprehensive Pre-Campaign and Campaign Monitoring
• Program Analysis and ISP Relations
• Diagnose Causes of Delivery Problems
• Accreditation Programs.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar: How to Improve Email Marketing ROI Slides and Audio

If you missed Silverpop and eMarketer’s “Email Marketing: How to Improve ROI” webinar, here is the presentation slides and audio from it.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Are You Checking Your Work Email While On Vacation? You Are Not Alone…

A survey sponsored by Travelocity and reported by eMarketer found that half of U.S. adult online travelers age 35-45 say they check their work email while on vacation. The survey also found that 1 in 3 people actually find it more stressful not to be plugged in.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tips to Help You in Your Permission-Based Email Marketing

Brandon Milford, Director of Marketing of Broadwick Corporation, shares some email marketing best practices and email marketing tips in his article on WebProNews.com.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

DoubleClick Q1 2005 Email Trend Report

DoubleClick released in Q1 2005 Email Trend Report recently. Here are some of their key findings:

• Average bounce rate fell to an all-time low of 8.3%
• Average open rate (30.2%) declined 26.5% from Q1 (38.2%)
• Average click-through-rate (7.9%) decreased 6.3% from Q1 2004 (8.4%)
• Average click-to-purchase rate (4.1%) increased 24.2% from Q1 2004 (3.3%)
• Average orders-per-email-delivered rate reached an all-time high of 0.26%, up 18.2% from Q1 2004 (0.22%) 34.6% from Q4 2003 (0.26%)

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

1 in 10 Potential Customer’s Emails are Ignored

Gord Hotchkiss, MediaPost’s Search Insider (free registration required), goes into a story about him trying to receive some additional information on a product. Gord states after the initial email inquiry and several phone calls he still had not heard from the company.

Any way, Gord, cites a study by Benchmark Portals that took a look at how small- and medium enterprise-level businesses ignored emails from potential customers. Here are some the findings:

• 51% of the 147 North American small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) ignored emails from potential customers.
• 41% of enterprise-level businesses ignored emails from potential customers.
• Of the responses from SMBs, 70% took longer than 24 hours.
• Of the responses from enterprise-level businesses, 61% took longer than 24 hours.
• Of the responses from SMBs, 79% responded with inaccurate or incomplete information.
• Of the responses from enterprise-level businesses, 83% responded with inaccurate or incomplete information.

So there you have it 1 in 10 potential customers will get a prompt, accurate response.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

How Do Recipients Perceive Your Emails?

Return Path hopes to help email marketers in determining how recipients perceive their emails. Return Path is beta testing a reputation management system, called Sender Score. Sender Score aggregates 60 different data points with information from more than 40 million email boxes and merges that into a score. Return Path expects a full release in August.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Study: Email Marketing Increased Retailer’s Sales by up to 50%

Constant Contact released some findings from their latest survey of 250 retailers. Some of the findings from this study:

• 80% of respondents had seen sales increases attributed to email marketing
• Of that number, 20% reported email marketing improved sales by up to 50%, while 60% reported sales increases of up to 25%
• 68% of retailers plan to increase email marketing usage in the next 12 months

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

WhitePaper: Email Marketing Tune-Up

SubscriberMail released a new whitepaper, “Email Marketing Tune-Up”. This whitepaper is a short checklist to see where you may need to “tune-up” your email marketing. Review your last six months and take a look at your campaigns and marketing tactics and determine what you need to modify for the remainder of the year.

SubscriberMail offers several email marketing whitepapers on their site in addition to “Email Marketing Tune-Up”. You will have to provide your name and email address to receive these email marketing whitepapers.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

MSN Hotmail to Implement Sender ID Warnings

Bigfoot Interactive notes that MSN Hotmail will "activate visual
warnings in the MSN Hotmail User Interface (UI) on email in which the
Sender ID Framework (SIDF) cannot verify authentication".

Bigfoot Interactive goes on to say, "It is important to note that next
week's implementation will apply to email senders that published SPF
records which fail the SIDF check, due to a lack of matching between
the IP address and domain or due to an SPF record publishing error.
Email that fails the SIDF check will receive a UI warning and/or may
be placed in the junk folder or blocked altogether based on the
sender's reputation and other anti-spam and anti-phishing heuristics.
In addition, it is anticipated that by year-end, Microsoft plans to
expand the visual UI warning to email that does not have a published
record at all. Finally, we expect that "failed" SIDF checks and email
without SPF records will face further scrutiny at MSN Hotmail.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Optimizing Your Recipient’s Email Viewing Experience

Derek Harding released an article, “When E-mail Images Don’t Load”, on ClickZ. With more and more email clients disabling HTML images, Derek explains two tactics that you should implement to combat this. Those two tactics are, optimizing your email message without images and getting added to the recipient’s address book.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Event: eMarketing Excellence Summit - 18 City Tour

ExactTarget and the Business Marketing Association are hosting an 18 city tour called eMarketing Excellent Summit. The summit will discuss how to use permission-based email to convert leads, drive sales and keep customers connected to the brand. They will also provide examples and best practices from local companies. Here is a list of cities they will be showing up at:

• Indianapolis, June 23
• Chicago, June 30
• Boston, July 7
• Washington, DC, July 12
• Philadelphia, July 19
• New York, July 21
• Columbus, July 26
• Atlanta, July 28
• Hollywood, FL, August 2
• Dallas, August 4
• Kansas City, August 9
• Minneapolis, August 12
• Phoenix, August 18
• San Diego, August 23
• Los Angles, August 26
• San Francisco, August 30
• Seattle, September 1
• Denver, September 8

I did not see any pricing information??

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Case Study: Slight Email Creative/Delivery Change Can Increase Site Traffic

Bill McCloskey, Email Data Source Inc., contributed an article on MediaPost Publications that talks about how some slight changes in creative and/or email delivery can radically alter the typical Web site patterns (requires free registration). Bill goes into an example with a mailing from Eddie Bauer.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Study: False Positives Impact Email Deliverability

Pivotal Veracity (PV) released a report on MarketingSherpa looking at how false positives impact email deliverability. PV opted into 100 company emails using a MSN-Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail account. During their six week study they received false positives from 54% of the companies. This number far exceeds previously reported number of 20% from Deliverability Service Providers (DSP).

Here is a link to a recent JupiterResearch report that ranks several top tier DSPs.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

12 Tips and Best Practices for Email Newsletters and Campaigns

MailerMailer released 12 quick tips and best practices for successful email newsletters and campaigns.

• Never purchase, trade, or borrow an email list
• Making signing up and unsubscribing easy and visible
• Use double opt-in registration
• Link to your privacy policy
• Send a “welcome” message
• Keep accurate sign-up records
• Ask your customers to opt-in again if you are using an older list
• Remind people that they subscribed
• Avoid certain terms in your subject line and message text
• Include your physical address and phone number
• Send your mailings regularly
• Reply promptly to each inquiry or spam complaint

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Webinar- Email Marketing: How to Improve ROI

Bill Nussey, CEO of SilverPop, and David Hallerman, Senior Analyst with eMarketer, are presenting a teleseminar on eMarketer’s new research report, E-Mail Marketing: How to Improve ROI. The event will take place on Tuesday, June 28 from 1 – 2 p.m. EST. Register at http://www.quietrevolutioninemail.com/teleseminar/index.html.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Yahoo and Sprint Team Up to Offer Wireless Email

Yahoo and Sprint have announced a joint initiative to make accessing email easier for users of wireless devices. Unlike Blackberry, user can opt in to receive a text notification that they have a new email and then connect through the service to download them. As you can see the mobile email market is growing and will continue to grow.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tip: Writing a Better Unsubscribe for your eNewsletter

Pivotal Verocity shares a tip concerning writing a better unsubscribe for your enewsletter. This is straight forward tip that gives some examples of creative and how they score in some of the spam filters.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Study: The Impact of SPAM on Email

MarketingExperiments.com released a new study that looks at the impact of spam on emails. The research brief answers the following questions:

• How much are you risking when you send a marketing email?
• How much does spam impact the productivity of businesses?
• What are the laws on spam and how can you be compliant?
• How can you improve your email marketing and avoid sending spam to your customer base?

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Taking Advantage of Refer-A-Friend Marketing

Liza Virissimo, Acceleration, explains in her recent article on iMedia Connection about how refer-a-friend (RAF) marketing can provide astounding results by taking advantage of your customer’s network. Liza goes through a couple of suggestions on how to target the right people for RAF.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Best Practices To Stand Out From the Email Spam Crowd

Loren McDonald from EmailLabs released an article, Make Your Email Stand Out in the Crowd, that gives some best practices to make sure your emails stand out from the spam in your recipient’s inbox.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Tip: Avoid Pre-checking the Newsletter Opt-In Box

In the latest Intevation Report newsletter, EmailLabs recommends that marketers do not pre-check the newsletter opt-in permission box on your web registration. CAN-SPAM does not explicitly outlaw pre-checked boxes, but this truly is not affirmative consent.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

AOL Free Email Account Out of Beta

AOL’s AIM Mail is out of beta testing. Aim Mail is AOL’s free email account that offers 2GB of storage. These new accounts will have the aim.com domain.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

130 Million Outlook Users to Access Email on Their Mobile Devices

Microsoft announced that Outlook users will have the ability to access their email on their own mobile devices via a free upgrade to MS Exchange Server and Windows Mobile 5.0. This will open up the mobile email market up to 130 million Outlook users, eclipsing the 2 million Blackberry users.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Study: Checking Your Email in the Bathroom

Reachon.com released a new email study. Here are some of the findings:

• 15% stated they checked their email via PDA in the bathroom.
• 45% stated that the first thing they did in the morning was check email
• 35% of individuals stated that they spent the entire day reviewing their emails via cellphones, on an average of 5 minutes
• 80% stated upon returning from lunch the first thing they did after going back to work was to check emails before checking voicemails.
• 85% preferred communicating via email then via phone, main reason was the ability to be straight to the point

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.

Why Does Less Email Content and Increased Email Volume Pay Increase Dividends?

Christopher Knight, EmailUniverse.com, published an ezine tip suggesting that if you publish 2 or more articles per newsletter, to try testing an increase in frequency and a reduction in the number of articles per issue. Chris also throws in a couple of SEO tips in the article as well. Check out the ezine tip.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.