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.