Wednesday, February 23, 2005

More Than Half of Users Deliberately Give Incorrect Email to Businesses

StoneShot Ltd. surveyed 100 people at this year’s Technology for Marketing Event and found that 58 percent admitted that they deliberately given the wrong email address to businesses that had requested it as part of their marketing and sales process. Eight percent of respondents said that they didn’t give their email address out if they thought it was going to be used for marketing or sales purposes. Only 34 percent said that they gave the correct email.

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

Friday, February 18, 2005

Gmail Sending More Invites Out

I had signed up for any announcements from Gmail acouple of months ago. I just received my first email from them in which they sent me an invitation to sign up. Is this another push from Google to increase the users of Gmail? Here is the actual copy of the email they sent me.


Hi there,
Thanks for signing up to be updated on the latest Gmail happenings. We hope it's been worth the wait, because we're excited to finally offer you an invitation to open a free Gmail account! Just click on this link to create your new account:

Since last April, we've been working hard to create the best email service possible. It already comes with 1,000 megabytes of free storage, powerful Google search technology to find any message you want instantly, and a new way of organizing email that saves you time and helps you make sense of all the information in your inbox.
And here are just some of the things that we've added in the last few months:
- Free POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline, access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports POP
- Gmail Notifier: Get new mail notifications and see the messages and their senders without having to open a browser
- Better contacts management: Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in just a few clicks. Add phone numbers, notes and more. Even use search to keep better track of it all.
We also wanted to thank you. For showing us your support and for being so patient. And to those who have already signed up for Gmail, thank you for giving it a try and for helping us make it better. Our users are what have made this product great. So whether you're just signing up for your account or you've been with us since the beginning, keep letting us know how we can build you the best email service around.
That's it for now. We hope you like Gmail and will share it with your friends. We've got lots of cool new stuff planned and we can't wait for you to see our work in your Gmail accounts! Stay tuned...
Thanks,
The Gmail Team

==
We sent you this message because you signed up to be updated on Gmail. If you do not wish to receive such updates in the future, you may opt-out of receiving Gmail updates by visiting:

(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043


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

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Are You Making a Lousy First Impression with Your Email?

Bill McCloskey, Media Post, wrote an article concerning his experiment on trying to sign up for 246 different brands emails in the apparel and accessories market sector. Here is Bill’s findings:

  • 71 of 246 Brands offered an email sign-up form
  • After seven days only 22 out of the 71 brands sent him an email
  • Only 10% of all brands examined provided an email list with a welcome letter attched to sign-up
  • Nearly all of the email welcome letters did nothing to advance the brand or further cement a relationship with the consumer.

Bill goes on to say a lot of these brands are missing the opportunity to communicate one-on-one with the customer and that these customers are more than likely to read that message since they just left your site.

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

Audio Conference: Taking Your E-mail Marketing to the Next Level

Jeanne S. Jennings, an email consultant, will be hosting an audio conference on email marketing on February 24 from 1:30 – 3:00pm EST. The topics that she will be covering:
  • 5 easy ways to get more people to opt-in to receive your emails
  • The latest tips for getting your opt-in email past spam filters
  • 10 rules for developing successful email and landing page creative
  • Which metrics you should be tracking but probably aren’t
  • Keys to creating a quantitative email marketing strategy for your organization

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Chris Pirillo States Email Marketing is Dead

In a recent article by Russell Shaw on imediaconnection.com quotes Chris Pirillo, a keynote speaker at the Blog Business Summit, as saying that email marketing is dead. Chris attributes this to email filters trapping too many legitimate emails. The article goes on to talk about how RSS will be replacing emails.

I believe that using email with RSS is the best approach to get your marketing message out there. Yes, it is true that RSS feeds do not have to deal with spam filters. But recently I have been seeing a lot of junk (advertisements) come through my RSS feeds. I even receive duplicated content being published from the same feed over and over (MoreOver). I wish I had a filter for my RSS reader to get only relevant content from these sites.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Email Marketing: The First 48 Hours Are Critical

MailerMailer.com release some findings from their Email Marketing Use and Trend Report: H1 200 on MarketingProfs.com. Here are some the interesting stats that they published.

  • 80% of those who would open your message will actually open it
  • 95% of people who read your message do so within six days of mailing
  • For all industries, the average bounce rate for customers’ first five mailings was 6.60%
  • For subsequent mailings, after bad addresses were removed, it went down to 3.59%
  • The average unique open rate for all industries was 26.65%
  • Emails sent on Mondays had the highest open rates, followed by emails sent on Tuesdays
  • The average click-through rate for all industries was 4.27%
  • Emails with personalized subject lines were opened more often (32.49%, compared with 26.65%) than emails with personalized messages only or no personalization.

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

PROfile Email Summit by BigFootInteractive

BigfootInteractive is hosting their second annual PROFile Email Summit on March 8 in an effort to educate reputable, permission-based marketers about critical issues such as emerging email authentication, accreditation and reputation systems, phishing prevention, legislative and regulatory developments, email/web analytics and more.

Speakers:
  • Jim Nail – Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
  • Meng Wong – Cofounder and CTO of Pobox.com
  • Craig Spiezle – Director of Strategy, Microsoft Corporation
  • Jerry Cerasale – SVP, Government Affairs, Direct Marketing Association
  • Emily Hackett – State Policy Director, Internet Alliance
  • Sridhar Chityala – Former JP Morgan Chase eBusiness Executive
  • Jared Blank – Senior Director Ecommerce Marketing, Tommy Hilfiger


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

Thursday, February 10, 2005

EmailSherpa – Email Marketing in the UK

EmailSherpa is branching out and giving us some interesting statistics on email marketing in the UK. They also provide a quick case study on British Sky Broadcasting Group. This article can be accessed for free until Feruary 20.

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

Back to E-mail Basics

Al DiGuido wrote an article for Clickz about some of the basic thing marketers are missing from their emails. Al talks about the use of a “Welcome” message, viral messaging, use of personalization, the use of surveys, and the “Thank You” message.

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

New Deliverability Challenges Ahead

Jordan Cohen, Bigfoot Interactive, wrote an article for the DMNews.com talking about some predictions on ISP deliverability. Interesting article and I know deliverability is a big issue going into 2005.

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

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Tip of the Day - Opt-in Where Ever They Seek It

Try placing a subscription form on every page. Not all traffic comes in from the Home page. Try checking your web logs and see what other pages are getting the most traffic. Don’t hide the fact that you have a newsletter.

eINFO - a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Email Becoming Databases?

Joia Shillingford, BBC News, released an article on how email is becoming the new database. The article points out how more and more people are using web-based email services to store data and photos so they can retrieve them from anywhere.

Why buy a bigger hard-drive for your personal computer when you have 1000 MB of storage at your finger tips with Gmail? There has been a long rumor that Google is planning to have a virtual PC where all you need is an Internet connection to access all of your files. Are we there yet?

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Monday, February 07, 2005

Tip of the Day – Style Sheets

Some e-mail applications will strip out the HTML code between the head tags. To format your e-mail, use inline style-sheets and the font tag.

Here is a site that I found that has some relevant information about the use of style sheets within a HTML email.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Gmail Going Live?

Cnet News.com points out that Gmail has up it’s number of invitations to 50. I looked at mine own account and I have 50 invitations to give out. Is Gmail getting ready to go live?

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

Friday, February 04, 2005

Tip of the Day - Sign Up Page

When providing a sign up page try keeping the form as simple as possible by asking for minimal information. Try only gathering demographic data that you really need. Provide links to example newsletters so the person can get a sense of what they are going to receive. Send an automated “Thank You” message after a user signs up for your newsletter. This will reinforce what will be sent in the future.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

MarketingSherpa – Lessons From USAToday.com

MarketingSherpa released an article (free access untile Feb. 13) talking about email practices from USAToday.com. The article talks about how USAToday.com buys quality co-registration opt-ins, how they use co-branded sweepstakes to increase their email lists, how they measure opt-in name quality, and they talk about their use of RSS feeds.

One great tip they talk about is involuntary unsubscribing. They remove anyone who has not opened and/or clicked in the past 120 days. They then send a follow up letter explaining that the recipient has been unsubscribed and offer to put them back on the list.

The one thing marketers should know is that you can’t rely on just the “HTML Open” statistics. You should look at if the recipient has clicked on a link in the last 30, 60, 90 days before unsubscribing them from your lists. Most of the case studies that I have seen that talk about this method usually use 120 days as their cutoff point. Someone not clicking on a link in the last three months is a good indication that your newsletter is no longer relevant to them.

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

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Tip of the Day - From Address

Use a clear and consistent “From” address. Put some copy in your e-mail asking the recipient to add your “From” address to their address book to ensure delivery.

Here are a couple of websites that I have run across that give specific instructions on how to add the companies “From” address to the recipient’s address book for some of the top email applications.
http://dellemails.kolartools.com/help.html
http://www.catcosmetics.com/mail.aspx
http://www.wakeboarder.com/other/whitelisting.phtml
http://www.yesmail.com/downloads/AddressBook.html

ReturnPath also published a whitepaper on getting your recipients to add your “From” address called, “The Secret Role of the Email Address Book… and what it means for you email delivery”.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

“No man is an iland” Blog Analysis

Mark Brownlow, who writes the No man is an iland blog, recently released an analysis of his articles as it relates to email marketing trends. Through his analysis, Can-Spam and Deliverability were the two biggest trends talked about. Here are his results:
Can-Spam and related legislation: 17.9%
Other spam issues: 12.4%
Deliverability: 12.1%
Email address providers: 9.6%
Strategy/tactics: 9.2%
Case studies: 6.1%
RSS: 5.8%
Surveys/trends: 5.5%
Events: 5.2%
State of industry: 3.5%
Other issues: 3.5%
List management: 3.2%
E-newsletters: 3.2%
Format/design: 2.9%

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

Tip of the Day – Use of Graphics

Some e-mail applications turn graphics off by default. Try viewing your e-mail with the graphics turned off to see if your e-mail is easily understood. Stay away from using too many graphics and limit the number of animated images.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email markeing

Is Your Email Being Delivered?

JupiterResearch found that more than half, or 54%, of email marketers do not use an email delivery auditing tool to proactively improve results. The rate increases to 65% for those marketers who use in-house systems as oppose to email service providers. The report says that many marketers rely on post-campaign methods to identify delivery problems. JupiterResearch executive interviews revealed that investing in delivery services/solutions can improve email delivery by 10 to 20 percent.

Another recent report, Delivery Auditing Tools: Justifying the Investment, made a conservative estimate that marketers using an email delivery service will reduce their costs for delivered mail by two to 10 percent, in addition to increasing revenue by delivering more mail successfully to the inbox.

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Tip of the Day – Email Length

When sending out an e-mail, try to keep your communication between 20 and 60K in file size. Also remember many people do not scroll. Put your best offers “above the fold”. For long e-mails, consider inserting a hyperlinked Table of Contents or Index at the top so recipients can quickly click and jump to where they want to go. Also try to keep the width of your newsletter to 500-600 pixels. Any bigger and you may cut off relevant information.

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