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.

Moms Most Likely to Respond to Emails that Save Them Time and Money

Emaillabs and Lucid Marketing released a new study that found moms are most likely to respond to emails that save them time and money. The study also found that email subject lines citing actual discount prices were the most effective at getting consumers to open email. The study also found that the display of product pricing to be the most effective at getting recipients to click through to the retailer’s web site.

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

WhitePaper: Implementing an Email Preference Center

SilverPop published a new whitepaper, “Give Customers What They Want With Preferences”. The whitepaper goes over the do’s and don’ts when creating an email preference page. This whitepaper is very informative with a lot of good tips. Check it out!

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

Guide to Email Marketing Service Providers (ESP)

Chris Price, The Chris Price Blog on Online Marketing, posted a blog entry on the handbook he helped developed with Marketingprofs and Paul Broni. The “handbook guides marketers through the process of successfully choosing the ideal ISP”. Find out more about the Email Service Provider guide.

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

Tip: How to Skirt the Spam Filters

Jennifer LeClaire, E-Commerce Times, released an article that suggest some tips on how you can prevent your emails from being blocked by the spam filters.

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

Webinar: Tactics To Improve Email Campaign Performance

Jupiterwebinars is hosting a webinar, Effective E-mail Marketing: Tactics to Improve Campaign Performance, on July 13 at 2:00 pm EST. Here is what you will learn:

• The impact email testing has on marketing results
• The extent that segmentation increases response rates
• The effect frequency has on open and response rates
• How marketers can increase their campaign’s effectiveness

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

Webinar: Email is Dead…Long Live Email

This is an archived webinar that was presented by DoubleClick and Peppers & Rogers Group. The webinar provided actionable advice on how to maximize contribution from your email marketing initiatives. Here is a general overview of what the webinar discusses:

• Using email to create value from your scarcest resource: customers
• Return on Customer and creating tangible value from email marketing
• State of the industry
  o How is email performing today?
  o How are people feeling about permission email?
• Strategies for value creation
• Go from “campaign” to a “dialogue” mentality to excel.

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