RSS – The Email Marketing Killer

Derek Harding, clickz.com, released a new article, “RSS: The E-mail Marketing Killer?”. Derek explains how he is skeptical that RSS is an alternative to email for mass marketing.

I agree with him that RSS has not matured enough for mass marketing. But I definitely see that RSS can be used for niche marketing in its current form.

Derek also states, “It’s not useful or effective to take a quarterly newsletter or monthly promotional e-mail and publish it via RSS for the mass market.”

By no means would you want to stop emailing and only offer a RSS feed. You want to compliment your email marketing by putting RSS into your marketing mix. By publishing your newsletter via RSS you provide your users/customers another marketing channel to access your content.

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

Technorati Tags: RSS, email marketing, eINFO

comScore Top Five Web Email Clients

The Email Wars blog posted a comScore chart that provides the top five web email clients.

1. Yahoo! Mail
2. AOL E-mail
3. MSN Hotmail
4. Google Gmail
5. Comcast.net Webmail

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

Technorati Tags: top web email client, email marketing, eINFO

Webinar: Habeas - Drive Holiday Sales Through Email

Habeas along with Forrester Research’s Sucharita Mulpuru will be hosting a webinar on best practices to help boost your email program for the upcoming holiday season. The webinar will be held on Tuesday, August 15 at 2pm EST. You can register at http://habeas.com/en-US/reg/reg.php?s=ecommerce.

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

Technorati Tags: Habeas, Forrester, email best practices, holiday email, email marketing, eINFO

Microsoft Windows Live Email Offers a Universal Unsubscribe Button

DirectMag released an article, “E-mailers Call For AOL, Yahoo! to Follow Microsoft’s Lead”. The article notes that some users are noticing a universal unsubscribe link in their Windows Live Email.

Currently Yahoo! and AOL do not have any plans to follow Microsoft. I think this will be a wait and see how it works and then jump aboard. I think for all email marketers that this is definitely a step in the right direction to combat the “Report this is Spam” button.



Bill Nussey - Unsubscribe Button May Become a Reality

Mark Brownlow - You need another line in your header


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

Technorati Tags: Windows Live, Unsubscribe Button, Microsoft, email optimization, email marketing, eINFO

Webinar: Holiday Email Optimization with Eyetracking

ReturnPath is sponsoring a webinar, “How to Earn Higher Email Response This Holiday Season” on August 17th at 1pm EST. ReturnPath and Eyetools Research are providing an opportunity to publicly critique your email templates.

Eyetools Research: Email Optimization Webinar (and a chance to get your email template heatmapped for Free)

ReturnPath: FREE Webinar: How to Earn Higher Email Response This Holiday Season


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

Technorati Tags: ReturnPath, Eyetools, email heatmap, email optimization, email marketing, eINFO

eINFO: Blog Posts Now Available Via Email

I have added the ability for you to receive my feed via email courtesy of Feedburner. Go ahead and sign up on my homepage under the "Subscription" section. Enjoy!

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

Advertise on My Email Marketing Blog

I have just passed 3000 unique visitors to my email marketing blog. I have decided to place AdSense ads on my site. You now have an opportunity through AdWords to advertise on this site. I typically have about 30 visits a day with an average visit length of 2 minutes 11 seconds. Talk about the "Long Tail". Since this blog is on such a niche topic there is a highly qualified audience to target. Thanks to all the readers!

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

US Mobile Consumption of Email on the Rise

M:Metrics released their latest data on U.S. mobile subscriber monthly consumption of content and applications. The report saw an increase of 5% in the mobile activity of viewing personal email. The report also noted an increase of 6.4% in the mobile activity of viewing work emails.



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

Technorati: Mobile, Email Marketing, eINFO

Gmail Sees 93% Increase in Users

Charlene Li, Forrester, has a blog post talking about Google being a “one-trick-pony”. In the post she looked at some user data from Neilsen//NetRatings on Google services. The data noted that Gmail’s unique users have increased from 4.3MM to 8.3MM in the last 12 months.

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

Technorati: Gmail, Email Marketing, eINFO

Top Social Bookmark Sites List

I was curious as to which social bookmarking sites were the most popular. I took the list of social bookmark sites from TopRank Social Bookmark Link Creator and plug them into Alexa Traffic Rank to see.

Digg - 100
Del.icio.us - 147
Technorati - 247
Reddit - 1411
Furl - 2357
BlinkList - 4002
Spurl - 9870
Magnolia - 11536
Blogmarks - 12538
Shadows - 15021
Simpy - 16669
Rawsugar - 22406
Onlywire - 23680
Wink - 29121
Connetea - 29538
Blinkbits - 30773
Netvouz - 30958
Gravee - 39647
Citeulike - 41924
Scuttle - 45341
Linkagogo - 49738
Feedmelinks - 54967
de.lirio.us - 63676
Tagtooga - 85897
Feedmarker - 86606
Linkroll - 89059
Buddymarks - 90605
Maple - 137907
Talkdigger - 155583
Igooi - 188825
Givealink - 435866
Lilisto - 445219
Yahoo MyWeb - 1 (Yahoo ranking)

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

Using Flash in Email Newsletters

In ChiefMarketers latest newsletter, E-Centric, they have a new article, “Tips for Dealing with Tough E-Zine Challenges”. The article had a good list of email marketing basics, until I got to the end. The last bullet point was:

“Only Outlook can accept a Flash e-mail, so do not use it across all e-mail clients.”

This bullet point peaked my interest because I just had a co-worker ask me about embedding Flash into an email. I did a little research on using Flash in email newsletters. I found a great resource at Campaign Monitor blog. They did a thorough test on the major PC, Mac and web-based email environments.

Campaign Monitor found that support for Flash was only found in Mac Mail. One blog comment noted that the ActiveX control needs to be enabled for Flash to work in Outlook and Outlook Express.

Bottom line…Do not use Flash in your email newsletter.

del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | ma.gnolia

Technorati tags: email marketing, flash email, email design

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

Stats: Email Usage 2003-2010

eMarketer released some interesting email usage stats for the United States. Are 3 year olds actually sending email??



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Technorati: email marketing

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

Email & Word-of-Mouth

eMarketer has released a new report, "E-mail & Word-of-Mouth: Connect with Your Best Customers". The report looks at whether using email in your word-of-mouth marketing strategy. If the offer is enticing enough the email becomes viral. But tread lightly, email messages that "were once welcomed can easily be seen as spam if the marketers press too hard, are too obvious or imagine that word-of-mouth can be direct-marketed".

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Technorati: word of mouth, email marketing

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

9 things to put in your list welcome messages

Mark Brownlow, Email Marketing Reports, released a new article, “9 things to put in your list welcome message.

I would probably add one more item to Mark’s list.

10. Place some copy to instruct the recipient how valuable it is to whitelist your “From” address. If your email program allows dynamic content, generate the whitelisting instructions based on the recipient’s email domain.

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Technorati tag: email marketing, welcome email, whitelist

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

Case Study: Liberty Travel Honeymoon Emails

MarketingSherpa released their latest case study, “Travel Marketing Online – Lead Generation & Email Campaign” (open access until Aug 11). The case studies takes a look at how Liberty Travel used a co-registration site, TheKnot.com (remember Trump’s Apprentice – one of the teams used this same email list for one of the competitions) to market to Honeymooners.

Liberty Travel noted that the first email, sent from TheKnot.com, produced an open rate of 42%. The follow up auto-responders, sent from Liberty Travel, produced an open rate of only in the mid-upper teens. The case study notes that it is unrelated to the “from” brand, but I would think that TheKnot has a higher brand presence than Libety Travel.

The study also noted that short copy ruled. The long copy was edited by the travel agents and produced a higher sales closing rate.

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Technorati tags: MarketingSherpa, email marketing, online travel, co-registration

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