Image-Based Spam On The Rise

IronPort released new industry research that points to increased level of “image-based spam”. IronPort noted that image-based spam accounted for 12% of all spam sent in June 2006. This is a 12X increase over last year. This represents 5 billion image-based spam messages sent per day.

Image-based spam - Contains little or no text and includes a .gif or .jpg file with an image. The image contains the spam message in the form of text and graphics.

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Technorati: spam, ironport, email

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

Lyris Finds InBox Delivery Rates Are Down

Lyris Technologies released Q1 2006 ISP Deliverability Report Card. The report found:

• U.S. ISPs and ESPs inbox delivery rate went down to 82%
• False-positive spam filtering also went higher in the U.S with a rate of 7.7% of valid messages being blocked

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Technorati: email deliverability, email marketing, Lyris, false-positive

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

How Critical is it to Personalize the Email Subject Line?

Melinda Krueger, The E-mail Diva over at Media Post, answers a question about how critical is it to personalize the email subject line. Melinda points to some testing that she has done concerning this topic. Melinda provides some interesting stats that back up the notion that personalizing the subject line affects open rates, click through rates and conversion rates. One reader of the Emial Insider blog ask how old the test results were. Melinda points out that the data was a year or more old.

I believe if your are not personalizing at least the subject line of your emails you are missing an opportunity to increase your open rates, click through rates and even your conversion rates.

One thing to remember, your data is only as good as the input. Watch out for the "fat fingers"!

Also, add the Email Insider Blog to your blogroll (requires free login)!


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Technorati: personalization, email marketing, e-mail diva, subject line testing


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

9 Ways to Increase Your Email Click Rate

MailerMailer released a new article, "9 Ways to Increase Your Click Rates" in their latest email newsletter edition. The article provides nine tips on how to get your audience to click through your email into your website.

1. Have a clear benefit assocaited with every link (i.e.: Get a money-saving coupon).
2. Use teasers to get your audience to click to keep on reading what is on the "other side" of the link. (i.e.: Learn what Dromophbia is.)
3. Provide a full URL versus an embedded link.
4. Make your URL short and to the point with clear benefits.(i.e.: www.YourDomain.com/MoneySavingCoupon)
5. Be clear in what the recipient can expect once they've clciked the link. (i.e.: Read a helpful article about how you can save time)
6. Have your links active up to six months after the newsletter has been published.
7. Use temporary links to help create urgency to get your audience reading today. (i.e.: Start saving 20% now. Offer good until July 4.)
8. Have the URL open into a new window so the recipient can easliy get back to your newsletter content. You will provide the opportunity for that person to click deeper into your website.
9. Until people are completely ready to buy, they will not be likely to click through to a sales page. You will have more success by providing links to more information on your site.

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Technorati: email ROI, email marketing, click through rate, mailermailer

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

Benefits of Managing Unsubscribes

Spencer Kollas, iMedia Connection, released an article, "The Benefit of Managing Unsubscribes". The article provide a couple of tips to help manage the unsubscribe process to help improve your marketing campaigns.

• Utilize bounce thresholds so you are not sending an large amount of invalid email addresses.
• Utilize a on-click unsubscribe.
• Use the feeback loop to process your complaints in a timely fashion.

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Technorati: email marketing, email subscription, CAN-SPAM, feedback loop

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

Publishing Email Marketing Content via RSS on the Rise

A new JupiterResearch report, “Feed Marketing: Use of RSS as an Alternative Messaging Medium” cites that more marketers are turning to RSS feeds to deliver their email content. Of those email marketers surveyed:

• 11% already publish email marketing content in RSS feeds
• 25% planned to publish email marketing content within a year

“Use of RSS rising among marketers, a Jupiter survey finds”, Internet Retailer


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Technorati: RSS, email marketing

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

Whitepaper: 10 Things To Know About Email Authentication

SubscriberMail released a new whitepaper, "Email Authentication: 10 things you should know". The whitepaper provides email marketers the basics about authentication, why you need to understand the concepts of authentication, and how it will shape the future of email marketing practices.

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Technorati: email authentication, email deliverability

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

Yahoo Email Problems

CNET News.com is reporting that Yahoo! is having network issues preventing email from being delivered to Yahoo account users. I tried to login to my account this morning and it returned a “Network Error” message. Supposedly the issue had started on Tuesday and has yet to be resolved.

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Technorati: yahoo email, email deliverability

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

Sender ID Ineffective Against Spam

OnlyMy Email (www.onlymyemail.com) released some new research on the effectiveness of Sender ID as an anti-spam solution. The research found that emails sent by a domain without a published SPF record are actually slightly less likely to be spam than those sent by domains that publish Sender ID information in their DNS record. The study inferred that 1 out of 6 emails that “pass” Sender ID verification will actually be spam. The research goes on to note that spammers are publishing the SPF records for their “throw-away” domains to increase spam delivery.

Research Determines Sender ID Ineffective Against Spam, Fixing Email Weblog

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Technorati: email deliverability, spam, sender id

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

Slow Tail of Email Newsletters

With the average person maintaining 3.1 email accounts, Jacob Nielsen points to the "slow tail" of email newsletters in his latest email newsletter usabilty study. Some users will be checking these additional accounts sporadically and will be clicking and ordering from the not-so-fresh email newsletter. Nielsen points out that you should ensure that your links and special offers do not expire too soon.

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

Scanning Text, Skipping Intro

Jacob Nielsen released his latest email newsletter usability study, Email Newsletter: Surviving InBox Congestion. Here are some of the findings from the email newsletter usability study.

• Average time allocated to an email newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds.
• Participants in the usability study fully read only 19% of email newsletters.
• 35% of the participants only skimmed a small part of the email newsletter or glanced at the content.
• 67% of participants had zero fixation within the email mewsletter introduction.

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

Impact of Increased Email Frequency

Krill and Loren, EmailLabs, released an article, Calculating the Cost of Increased Email Frequency. The article takes a look at a company who increased their sending frequency from 5 emails a month to 12 emails a month. Here are some of the potential impacts from increasing your frequency.

• Additional unsubscribes (unsubscribe rate increased 140% for this company)
• Increase in spam complaint rates (spam rate increased sixfold for this company)
• Increased list shrinkage (Potential loss of 41.3% of list over 12 month period for this company)
• Potential damage to brand and email reputation
• Increased cost not covering revenue.

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

Case Study: Emails Targeted to Gay Community

Bill McCloskey, Email Insider, wrote an article appropriately titled, Brokeback Email, that provided a couple examples of how companies are segmenting their list to target a specific demographic audience. In the examples Bill provides, the audience in the gay community.

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

Single Offer Emails Bring Higher Conversion

Marketing Experiments found that when emails focus on just one service they significantly outperformed the email which tried to describe and pre-sell four separate services. You may want to test sending out a single offer email versus a multi-offer email.

The only problem I have is that if a company has multiple product lines, the notion of frequency comes into play. Do I really want to annoy my subscribers by sending multiple single offer emails?

Testing Emails Offering Services, iMedia Connection

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

Study: Email Marketing Trends Q1 2006 VerticalResponse

VerticalResponse released their Trend Watch Q1 2006 report. Trend Watch establishes benchmarks for companies not only on the basis of industry category, but according to their sizeas well. Here are some of thier findings.

• Offers that appeal to recipients' expressed interested experience better results than non-targeted emails.
• Companies with operations that lend themselves to intimacy, such as galleries, restraurants and wineries generally performed better than companies in more impersonal industries or with a strict online retail presence.
• Only a small number of small businesses reached the "10,000-member mark".

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

Case Study: Cirque du Soleil

MarketingSherpa released their new case study, How Cirque du Soleil Uses Email to Sell Out Shows at Local Cities (open access unitl June 11). The case study includes details on copywriting, design, and how to gather more double opt-ins.


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

AOL Email Glitch Affects Delivery

AOL was experiencing email service problems due to a software glitch. Many AOL users were unable to send or receive new emails since 11:00am EST. The issue has been resolved and AOL is asking mailers to begin mailing after 3am EST, Friday June 2. The Email Experience Council also released an email news release on this as well that you can check out.

Email Experience Council - newsletter

Yahoo News - AOL email service delayed over software problem


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