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.